[Xmca-l] Re: Laws of evolution and laws of history

Wed Jan 14 11:38:14 PST 2015

Ok Andy, y see your point.

2015-01-14 16:06 GMT-03:00 Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com>:

> And there's this:
>
> https://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/201102/roads.of.arabia.htm
>
> This is a gorgeous exhibit, if it comes near you. For the text about
> writing 2000-1500 BCE, scroll about half way down. The exhibit has stones,
> set side by side, with different ancient scripts.
>
> Helena Worthen
> helenaworthen@gmail.com
>
> On Jan 13, 2015, at 7:16 PM, Peg Griffin wrote:
>
> > Here's a little side track:  There's a web trace of a 2010 well-curated
> museum exhibit on writing from the U of Chicago Oriental Institute.
> > http://oi.uchicago.edu/museum/special/writing/
> >
> > And here are a few little outtakes:
> >               "four instances and places in human history when writing
> was invented from scratch — in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica —
> without previous exposure to or knowledge of writing. It appears likely
> that all other writing systems evolved from the four systems we have in our
> exhibition."
> >               "the earliest cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia (today's
> Iraq), dating to about 3200 BC,"
> >               " early Egyptian writing that includes tags and labels
> from the tombs of the first kings (about 3320 BC) as well as hieroglyphic
> writing and other scripts from the Nile Valley."
> >               " Chinese writing, which emerged about 1200 BC, will be
> shown on oracle bones"
> >               " Mayan hieroglyphs from the 7th century AD will show how
> early Mesoamericans wrote."
> >               " Long believed to have been invented in Phoenicia in
> about 1000 BC, the earliest alphabetic texts are now those found in the
> Sinai. This earliest alphabet was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs as
> early as 1800 BC, well over five hundred years earlier than had been known."
> > There are some lovely little animations about the development of
> cuneiform and one animation about a hieroglyph changing and eventually
> appropriated for a Greek letter.
> >
> > I love this little site and fear the day I try to open it and find U of
> Chicago has abandoned it…
> > Peg
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmca-l-bounces+peg.griffin=att.net@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:
> xmca-l-bounces+peg.griffin=att.net@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Andy
> Blunden
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 9:24 PM
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> > Cc: Mikhail Munipov
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Laws of evolution and laws of history
> >
> > Actually, I think that "the more that human beings become removed from
> animals in the narrower sense of the word, the more they make their own
> history consciously" is near as dammit what you are looking for.
> >
> > Engels of course lacked good information. Even in his day Vygotsky had
> poor information. In "Ape, Primitive Man and Child", "primitive" is taken
> to mean "non-literate", as it was for Luria in his Central Asian
> expedition, and a great deal of emphasis is put on the origins and
> development of *writing*. But writing only appears in Egypt c. 2,000 BCE I
> think, in any case, in evolutionary time scales 5 minutes ago. The
> development of writing is nothing to do with evolution of the species.
> > Vygotsky defines primitive man as follows:
> >
> >    “This term is commonly used, admittedly as a conventional label, to
> >    designate certain peoples of the uncivilized world, situated at the
> >    lower levels of cultural development. It is not entirely right to
> >    call these peoples primitive, as a greater or lesser degree of
> >    civilization can unquestionably be observed in all of them. All of
> >    them have already emerged from the prehistoric phase of human
> >    existence. Some of them have very ancient traditions. Some of them
> >    have been influenced by remote and powerful cultures, while the
> >    cultural development of others has become degraded.
> >    “/Primitive man, in the true sense of the term, does not exist
> >    anywhere at the present time, /and the human type, as represented
> >    among these primeval peoples, can only be called “relatively
> >    primitive.” Primitiveness in this sense is a lower level, and the
> >    starting point for the historical development of human behaviour.
> >    Material for the psychology of primitive man is provided by data
> >    concerning prehistoric man, the peoples situated at the lower levels
> >    of cultural development and the comparative psychology of peoples of
> >    different cultures.”(Preface, 1930, Italics in the original)
> >
> > And from the start, this chapter is framed as "cultural development" as
> distinct from "evolutionary development." Chapter 1 on primates focuses on
> the limited use of tools possible for apes, with the implication that the
> cultural development around the emergence of labour, i.e., the production
> of tools, was part of evolutionary development, prior and leading up to the
> formation of homo sapiens sapiens. There is no chapter covering the period
> between 2 million years ago and say `00,000 years ago, where cultural and
> biological formation are interacting.
> >
> > According to Engels and others including Dewey, speech emerges
> simultaneously with tools. Dewey makes the point that a tool is not a tool
> until its use is institutionalised, linking social, symbolic and tool-using
> activity together.
> >
> > Andy
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > *Andy Blunden*
> > http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> >
> >
> > mike cole wrote:
> >> So perhaps its just my bad memory, Andy. the issues remain central.
> >> THANKS for the appropriate links!
> >> mike
> >>
> >> On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 4:51 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
> >> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
> >>
> >>    There can only be two sources of this idea: Engels' "Part Played
> >>    by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" (1876)
> >>
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/index.htm
> >>    and the Introduction to "Dialectics of Nature" (1883)
> >>    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch01.htm
> >>
> >>    In the latter work, after explaining how freeing the hands by
> >>    adopting an erect gait, led to the use of tools, meaning labour,
> >>    and this led to the expansion of the brain, language and sundry
> >>    other changes, and thus eventualy the emergence of human beings as
> >>    a species. Then he says:
> >>
> >>       "With men we enter /history/."
> >>
> >>    In the earlier document, he says: "Labour begins with the making
> >>    of tools" which Engels claims happened before the formation of
> >>    modern homo sapiens, contributing to that formation rather than
> >>    being a product of the formation of modern humans, and he narrates
> >>    a story which continues from this point up to socialist revolution
> >>    as if it were one continuous story, blurring over the distinction
> >>    between evolution of the species and historical development of
> >>    culture.
> >>    The nerest we come to your quote is: "the more that human beings
> >>    become removed from animals in the narrower sense of the word, the
> >>    more they make their own history consciously." The "narrower
> >>    sense" I presume means biological differentiation. So this could
> >>    count for what you are looking for, Mike.
> >>
> >>    Andy
> >>
> >>
> >>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>    *Andy Blunden*
> >>    http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> >>    <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>    mike cole wrote:
> >>
> >>        Dear Colleagues--
> >>
> >>        I seem to recall reading an idea, that I recall being
> >>        attributed to Engels,
> >>        that (rooughly) "more and more the laws of evolution are being
> >>        replaced by
> >>        the laws of history."
> >>
> >>        Can anyone enlighten me either as to the source of this
> >>        "quotation" or as
> >>        to the source of my own confusion in this regard?
> >>
> >>        mike
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science as an
> >> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
> >>
> >>
>
>
>

-- 
Juan