[Xmca-l] Re: human etc

[David Kellogg]

Anthony--

It's a good question, and of course I am very flattered that you think my
clear yes or no would be as more interesting than that of Vygotsky (clear
yes) or Mike Cole (clear no). Actually, I had the same response when I
looked at the Year Million stuff you posted--I couldn't tell if they were
saying that human phylogenesis comes to an end or if it continues
indefinitely, or somehow both happen simultaneously.

Here's what I think. There are two answers because there are really two
questions.

a) Does HUMAN phylogenesis come to an end--because at some point humans are
no longer really humans in the sense we use the word today? The answer here
has to be yes: all phylogenesis at some point comes to an end, either
through extinction (by far the most likely outcome) or through qualitative
changes that make it impossible to call the descendents the con-specifics
of the ancestors (homo sapiens are not conspecifics of homo habilis or homo
erectus).

b) Does human PHYLOgenesis come to an end--because at some point it is no
longer relevant to the way we adapt to our environment? The answer here
(for me) has to be no: phylogenetic adaptation is continued as
sociogenesis, but human society is not an artificial kingdom within a
natural kingdom, like the Jewish community that Spinoza belonged to in
Amsterdam within the Christian one. Sociogenesis is just the specifically
human way in which the human species has "turned the tables" on the
environment by constructing its own environment (just as ant colonies are
the way that ants carry out their adaptations). The latest proof that the
laws of phylogenesis are still absolutely aplicable to that supposedly
'artificial' cultural environment is the challenge to it presented by Covid
19.

How's that?

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!Uq9_VvUwhhrXbwSBUJrI5v-vnz-yxneh-6Ny4GqptktCPRa7Eb1zRJL8of8K2RXOFXHmmw$ 
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological
Works* *Volume
One: Foundations of Pedology*"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!Uq9_VvUwhhrXbwSBUJrI5v-vnz-yxneh-6Ny4GqptktCPRa7Eb1zRJL8of8K2RWSDPIezg$ 


On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 4:52 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Very interesting, David - thanks.   So is that a No or a Yes?  I kind of
> can't tell.
>
> Anthony
>
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 5:11 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Mike Cole has criticized Vygotsky on exactly this point: in "The
>> Socialist Alteration of Man" (and in other texts), he seems to think that
>> phylogenesis doesn't exactly stop but it is carried on by artificial means,
>> as if development were kind of shunted from a slow track to a much faster
>> one, e.g. by socialist eugenics. It's certainly true that the Soviets
>> believed in a phylogenesis by intelligent design, although they attributed
>> that design to the socialist future and not to the Creationist past. It is
>> also true that their distinction between phylogenetic development and
>> sociogenetic development is a little too sharp for anything but rhetorical
>> accuracy (it is partly developed in opposition to Social Darwinism). But I
>> think that the main theatre for intelligent design was supposed to be
>> political economy, and not biology. In that field, the Soviets were
>> over-optimistic, or perhaps they simply didn't or couldn't understand the
>> part of Capital where Marx reminds us of the difference between a sloppy
>> architect and a really talented honeybee: the former, but not the latter,
>> has mastered language and can raise his structure in imagination and in
>> words before blundering on into steel and concrete.
>>
>> One of the things you learn drawing the human figure in art school is
>> that the medievals didn't know how to draw children: Giotto's pictures of
>> Christ show him as a shrunken adult. It really isn't until the Renaissance
>> that painters figure out that an adult is about seven heads tall and a
>> child is only about four heads tall. We sometimes think of the Renaissance
>> as being a "return to the Greeks", but in fact it was Giotto and his
>> colleagues who were slavishly following Aristotle. The Greeks had
>> apparently written that the ideal height of a person was seven times the
>> distance from the bottom of the chin to the top of skull and fashioned
>> their gods accordingly. But if you dig up skeletons from that time,
>> particularly those of the slave class, you find that they are only five or
>> six heads tall. So the gods that people had in mind back then were actually
>> idealized versions of the slave-owning class--putting flesh on the skeleton
>> of your boss. Or, if you prefer, they were doing their own version of
>> science fiction, because today we are on the average the stature of a Greek
>> god (which is why we think that their fantastic versions of human height
>> are actually 'realistic').
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>>
>> New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
>> Outlines, Spring 2020
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!Uq9_VvUwhhrXbwSBUJrI5v-vnz-yxneh-6Ny4GqptktCPRa7Eb1zRJL8of8K2RXOFXHmmw$ 
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!TuLHcPCurn3Tt7a-dwWNUjD96PkWT_X-aGLLq2cVMX068SIKfKA88_DDQLgPFR4glb6neA$>
>> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works* *Volume
>> One: Foundations of Pedology*"
>>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!Uq9_VvUwhhrXbwSBUJrI5v-vnz-yxneh-6Ny4GqptktCPRa7Eb1zRJL8of8K2RWSDPIezg$ 
>>
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!TuLHcPCurn3Tt7a-dwWNUjD96PkWT_X-aGLLq2cVMX068SIKfKA88_DDQLgPFR43nyNT3w$>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 10, 2020 at 3:04 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Does human phylogenesis end?  Like, is there a dividing line or
>>> stop-point between human development and whatever version or branch comes
>>> next?
>>>
>>> I was going to look this up but figured I'm better off just posing the
>>> question here. (A favor to anyone who answers: try to talk to me like I'm
>>> ignorant here -- because that would be correct!)
>>>
>>> Related: here's a fun and very interesting show that plays around with
>>> future (and not-so-future) possibilities of human development:
>>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Million__;!!Mih3wA!Uq9_VvUwhhrXbwSBUJrI5v-vnz-yxneh-6Ny4GqptktCPRa7Eb1zRJL8of8K2RVxL5eYCA$ 
>>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Million__;!!Mih3wA!S6RpUe7tKXHgEfQnhGveZQV1LbA1OhhVvxCcLctUKHrBssGuvvKrFmGHo0VrzlmuKZy1Ug$>
>>>
>>>
>>> Thank you,
>>>
>>> Anthony
>>>
>>
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