I was wondering if the evolution stuff would bring out a discussion on
religion or not...You raise a good point about how the artifacts we use over
thousands of years will have an impact on our evolution as a species. What
is most interesting to me about Deacon's work is he comes from an
evolutionist's and neuroscientist's perspective, and he embeds sociocultural
theory and semiotics theory within that framework. I hadn't seen this before
-- maybe other xmca'ers have, but it was news to me. Good news.
Also what interests me in this work is that it seems to be an attempt to
cross over the great cultural divide between what psychologists and
sociologists do and what "hard scientists" in neuroscience do. We're all
studying the same species from different perspectives, but I think these
various perspectives could inform one another better than they currently do.
Finally, I have to confess that my current belief system privileges
evolutionary theory over creation theory. While creation theory provides
psychological comfort on some primal levels, I think that taking an
evolutionary view of the human species is a very useful and powerful
analytical cultural artifact -- one that enables us to see the problem of
"how we got to be the way we are" in a new light. But I don't think that
going with evolution theory means that we look at the human species as a
physical "animal" specimen torn out of its social and cultural context. To
the contrary, I think the evolutionary perspective is one that specifically
takes into account environmental factors (including the social and the
cultural ones) that lead to favor the selection of one mutation over another
in a particular species.
Louise
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So where does that leave us? Do we need to rewrite a few million years
worth of human evolution to properly incorporate the cultural-historical
paradigm? If we don't, how can we appeal to notions of evolution when
trying to understand human development in our mediated world?