INTRODUCTION

Recent advances in research in non-human forms of intelligence have served to puncture the bubble of our intellectual superiority or uniqueness in the world, perhaps to dethrone humankind as the only intelligent species on earth. But the question of the possible uniqueness of a distinctively human form of intelligence remains to be answered. We can compare up to a point the intelligence of a chimpanzee and a three-year-old child. But a chimp who has only learned a vocabulary of a few hundred rudimentary terms over years of instruction is difficult to compare to a small child who acquires gradual control a few thousand terms over a few months or years. There is a sense that the basic form of cognition of the small infant is fundamentally distinct and humanlike in quality, almost from the very beginning of human awareness. To compare this to the mental functioning of a primate or a dolphin would indeed be like mixing apples and oranges and bananas.

There are several facets which serve to mark out basic human intelligence as unique. First is the central importance of linguistic acquisition to organization of human awareness, especially of the basic word-symbol that eventually becomes something more than the immediate referent of the sign. Secondly, are the cognitive-affective evocations to stimuli which are also basically symbolic in reference and gestalt in organization. Third, is the very early modeling capability of the child, to learn naturally by imitation and presence of models. Fourth is the very early evidence of the child to evince goal-directed behavior that can lead to solving ever more complex problems in the obtaining of ever less immediate goals. Fifth, is the natural curiosity towards symbolic stimuli, a symbolic playfulness (toys, dolls, clothing, etc.) and an intrinsic interest in human made symbols (letters, words, signs, pictures) which the human shows toward learning and acquisition of knowledge. The child actively explores and thus enlarges the effective environment, and in this regard cannot long be frustrated.

It is my argument that these distinctions of innate human intelligence cannot be understood just as a matter of degree of neural development or sophistication, but as a qualitative difference of a basic kind which points to an entire different kind of neural organization of the brain. Finally, this development appears to be situated within and tied to an "effective" environment that is culturally defined--the prolonged latency and dependency period of the much slower growth and development of the human child is in stark contrast to the parallel development periods of any other species--including gorillas and chimpanzees. This suggests that whatever is happening to the human brain, it normally requires a prolonged and sequential series of stages to occur before maturation is reached and adulthood is reached. That this process is tied to evolutionary development and is a pan-human, species wide phenomena is evident in the prolonged infancy and delayed sexual maturation of the humans compared to any other species. The growing size of the brain phylogenically and the delayed period of childhood required for its development suggests that brains and culture that provides the context of human mental development have coexisted evolutionarily for a long time. Both necessitated and made possible more elaborate and extensive cultural developments, which in turn promoted bigger brains. Once humankind happened upon the discovery of brains-and-culture combination, its advantages for the small group in terms of beating the odds in natural selection became immediately apparent.

The small human grouping was distinctive. It was not a school of fish or a flock of geese or scavenging fowl, neither was it an instinctually driven and organized wolf pack. It probably resembled more a primate troop that exhibited some form of sexual-age based hierarchy and stratification. What marked it out as different was that symbolic forms as controlling and mediative information devices came to increasingly supplant and take the place of instincts, those impulse based drives which gradually became repressed, sublimated, creative and constitutive of a more sophisticated form of response. Such sublimation of instinctual constraints resulted in an increasing world openness of the human species which enabled its groups to begin the process of the cultural construction and development of a new human-made reality--reality of Gods, spirits, weapons, and fire. The rise to consciousness of a genuinely symbolic form allowed the gradual displacement and subordination of those basic biological and instinctual drives, and the creative implementation and manipulation of the symbolic control which such mediation made increasingly possible.

This form of mediation of basic libidinal drives and their channeling or molding into other forms of response is referred to as symbolic displacement and represents a basic process underlying human evolutionary development.

It is evident that selection favored the survival of individuals who had larger brains and who were slower to develop, hence more dependent upon the small group. How these individual's gained a survival advantage is in the enlarged scope of planning and social coordination which symbolic displacement enabled. It allowed these people to learn in a more sophisticated manner the patterns presented to them in the natural world, to increasingly carry over the lessons from one behavioral setting to apply them to another. Deliberate tool use, and especially the generalization of tool function, represents this level of pre-cultural development. The tool, consciously manipulated, became the mediative agent of deferred gratification.

What was evolutionarily more intelligent was whatever it was that traded off brains for brawn--the cunning of wisdom, experience and planning, which eventually won the day over brute force and physical strength.

An evolutionary aegis favoring larger brains and prolongation of development also entailed the need for the group to find for itself a natural habitus or domestic arrangement that protected them from the adversities of the natural world and provided a safe haven for the nurturance of the child. This included the defensive participation of males and their contribution to the common pool. Demands and responsibilities for nurturance of the child favored those mothers and fathers who could shoulder such responsibility and who showed an empathetic capacity for the peculiar needs of the child. It also favored those individuals who could cooperate enough with one another to make a small group setting worthwhile. Ethnographic evidence also suggests that it may have favored promotion of a particular leaderships style that combined effectively the elements of force and persuasion in gaining, manipulating and sustaining, the cooperation of the group. Though domination may have been achieved through the domination of an alpha-male, at least in the earliest phases, it is evident that this form of leadership must have at some point given way to more indirect, and indirectly more effective forms. The apparent egalitarianism of contemporary small bands of hunter-gatherers suggest that male dominance may not have necessarily been a part of the original picture. Evidence of the social patterning of the pygmy Chimpanzees shows how women can gain and manipulate control of groups through the use of a well developed sexuality. Humans are unique for their year-round sexual receptivity and their well developed sexual characteristics. A great many transitions of the onset of a more adult-like form of symbolic awareness and cognitive sophistication appear to be correlated with and contemporaneous with the onset of sexual maturation during adolescences. It is at this time that the group begins sorting itself out socially.

The development and use of sexuality as a form of group management may be tied to the reproductive female's capacity to attract and keep male mates over the long term, who would be active contributors to the protection, production and reproduction of the small group. The growing exchange of sons between such groups would foster the foundation of a local, inter-group solidarity and identity. Males might alternately splinter off to form their own male-solidarity groups.

We can imagine any number of evolutionary scenarios, but at this point, with a lack of solid evidence, can prove none of them. It is likely that in the long course of human evolution, many different kinds of social patterns occurred--some more successful than others. But whatever patterns it was that did occur, it was those which favored bigger brains, marked sexuality, group solidarity and prolonged infant dependency which in the long run won out over alternative courses of development.

The purpose of these essays are not the evolutionary reconstruction of human phylogenic or cultural development, but rather the elaboration of a fairly specific theory address the central worldview problem more specifically the connections between culture, cognition and language, which I hold to be more precisely symbolic in form and function. These are questions which have been given a renewed importance in light of recent advances in cognitive sciences (that have so far excluded any real anthropological dialogue or contribution) and the understanding of human cognition. It appears that in light of recent biological and computer achievements, the question and relevance of culture in an analytical or scientific sense has been eclipsed and laid to rest--forgotten in the dust of rapid scientific progress in other fields. And yet the realities and problems of culture remain even more glaringly apparent and relevant to our modern world as they had been during any previous period. Thus, we cannot afford to continue to ignore the question of cultural realities and their consequences upon our world, or the contributions which such a science might make toward our understanding and organization of the world.

This work advances a relatively general theory about worldview that is rooted in an understanding of the patterning of human symbolic representation as basic to the processes of human cognition, comprehension and construction of the world, its development in both the individual and society, and its theoretical representation. It is claimed that human cognition is basically symbolic, and in its rudimentary form this is emblematic in organization. From the emblematic organization at a basic level of perception, linguistically index cognitive categories are created and organized into a system of reference and inference. This categorical conceptualization of the world is propositionally organized, and the propositional organization of human worldview accounts for the capacity to make inferences and judgments about the ontological status human reality. These processes are critically conditioned within a cultural context, and this context works symbolically in relatively specific ways to constrain and shape human thought and worldview. The result is a culturally situated system of informational patterning which occurs analytically at several discrete levels, which can be empirically evaluated at these levels via means of certain kinds of symbolic framing tasks, and that lends itself to a computer representation of a cultural system that is rule-based and organized upon the basis of the theory.

That human culture is basic to our sense of reality in the world, and was somehow important to the evolutionary, phylogenic development of humankind, should go without question in our understanding of our world. That it continues to be of consequence to our development needs to be reemphasized and examined more thoroughly.