Chapter XIII

Anthropogenesis and the Anthropological Construction of Reality

World Openness and the Unfinished Nature of Homo saipiens

by Hugh M. Lewis

Biological transmission of information alone is not sufficient for human survival. Humans have become culturally dependent creatures. Thus, they depend on the cultural transmission of information as much or more for their continuing survival than they depend upon genetic transmission. And cultural transmission of information is basically non-genetic. Though many forms of analogy or homology have been established between the two systems, they remain fundamentally independent systems except in one important sense, and that has to do with the organization and functioning of the human brain.

The system of the cultural transmission of human information, largely symbolic in form, describes an historical patterning of human cultural development that has taken place at least over the last two million years.

As far as we know it, human systems are fairly unique in the known universe, because they are essentially intelligent systems, being something more than just self-organizing informational systems. They imply active, purposive, problem-solving intelligence that involves, among other characteristics, sentience, self-reflective awareness, deliberation, intentionality, planning, rationality, etc.

It is not unlikely that other equally or higher intelligence life forms exist somewhere in the far-flung corners of the universe, but the likelihood of our coming into contact remains remote.

Ultimately, we must take into clear and succinct account Human systems theory, because we ultimately cannot completely exclude ourselves as the principle subject-knowers of any of our our objective formulations or scientific models of the world.

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The primary unit of analysis, and frame of reference, for understanding human systems theory comprehensively, is the individual human being. This individual human being must always be construed in a context that is fundamentally social and cultural in character.

This construct is essentially anthropological, and this has been why I have chosen anthropology as the name for this area of natural systems theory, and also why I have also chosen anthropology as my main area of intellectual endeavor over the past twenty years. Many years ago, I sought to define this kind of construct as "humanological" to distinguish it from some of the prejudices and practices that inform the anthropological community, but I no longer think this is necessary or fitting.

All human and social science disciplines like to posture themselves as the first, foremost and most scientific of the wide field of contenders. Economists certainly believe their models are as comprehensive, infallible and indestructible and as scientifically objective as any atomic theory. Psychologists would be hard-pressed not to see Freud on a footing and stature comparable to Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein. Sociologists have had their Weber and Durkheim.

Indeed, it is perhaps only in Anthropology itself that, though there have been some brilliant and original thinkers like Bateson, Barthes, Malinowski, Benedict, Levi-Strauss or Sapir, early explorers like Tyler and Frasier, founding fathers like Boas and Kroeber, and great leaders like Mead or Harris, and many other would-be greats, there as in a sense been as yet no central defining figure who stands above the rest. I think only Margaret Mead approached this stature in the field, but she left no unifying theoretical framework behind.

Of course, all of us who have aspired to anthropological profession-hood secretly desire this kind of status, else why would we put ourselves through so many privations and frustrations in some ritualistic self-sacrifice. Part of the issue in anthropology has been its basic fragmentation of disciplinary orientation to begin with, one that encompasses often different and sometimes incompatible lines of inquiry in biology, archaeology, culture and language.

Of all the areas of the social sciences, each having its own merits and shortcomings, it is only in anthropology, in spite of its inherent fragmentation, that can be found the holism, empiricism, and comparativism relating to all of humanity that is necessary for a founding of a complete human science.

Anthropology has borrowed heavily from the other sciences, and has in turn given greatly to these other sciences. If Freudian or Piagetian models or constructs are proposed as the bottom line in socialization and personality, it is usually Anthropologists who have taken these ideas to the field to test out in cross-cultural contexts where they can really be shown for what they are worth.

The minimal construct of human systems theory, whatever we want to call it, is the individual human being bound within the social and cultural context of his or her life-world. This context itself is bound within a larger set of contexts that includes history, language, other societies and cultures, nature, biology and ecology at several important levels. We can look internally into the human being, at our own biology, our feelings, our psychology, our own biographies and our patterns of development and growth. Our understanding is also importantly bound within other contexts that are created by the observer/scientists own background within these same areas, and include importantly worldviews, ideologies, philosophies, values, common sense and common knowledge.

Thus, many concepts and pre-understandings we bring to bear upon the objective scientific problem of the human being in relation to the total world are framed within that world and take on a multiplicity of implications and hidden "subjectivities" that serve to relativise our understanding. Ultimately these cannot be clearly separated. This is common place in cross-cultural research when it is hard to define and escape our own cultural prejudices and biases in the understanding of alternative cultural patterns. I can wax lyrical and in myriad detailed form over these issues, but it is to the central theoretical construct of human systems theory that we must direct our gaze.

We must understand at the outset that the minimal figure-ground construct, the human being in its total context, on some fundamental level, applies equally to all human beings, at least in a contemporary sense. The human species is a single species, inclusive of all 6 plus billion of us. In a biological sense, whatever our clinal or "racial" inclinations, every male human on earth is potentially reproductive with any female human. The species of modern Homo saipiens saipiens is alone among the hominids, and we have emerged as a single line of lone-surviving species. Our closest biological relatives are the Great Apes and the primates, mostly the Chimpanzees, or genus Pan, and the Gorillas and Orangutans.

The record of our origins is dominated by a biological mode of thinking, and indeed we arose naturally and spontaneously out of the natural fields of biology. Models of anthropogenesis are hotly debated in esoteric anthropological circles, but there is some general consensus about the basic evidence concerning the main hominid line.

Our precursors arose in the central and southern regions of Africa four to five million years ago. A variety of early Australopithecines had some remarkable physical characteristics of modern humans. They had central and lower skeletal anatomy strikingly similar to our own, were bipedal, and probably had great manual dexterity, in spite of what we would now consider their small "Chimpanzee" sized brains. A baby Chimp skull looks surprisingly like the Taung child, the prototype skull of an early gracile Australopithecine. In many ways they would almost be identical, except for tell-tale details of dentition. And Lucy strikes us very much as a young woman capable of bearing her own children.

Of course, these gracile precursors were much shorter on average than ourselves, not much larger than the Pan paniscus. But they walked upright and probably liked to carry things in their hands. We also have a sense in the footprints they left behind that already they had formed pair-bonding and small family units. Some characteristics of sexual dimorphism and sexual exaggeration of features and aspects of social-sexual agonism suggest communities in which some alpha male predominated. We would come to expect this based on observations of ape communities. But females also played important roles, and sexual access was probably never exclusive to one male. Humans couldn't have afforded this, as they probably had very long periods of neo-natal and ontogenetic development.

By about 2.5 to 3 million years, the Australopithecines appear to be replaced by a new group, called Homo habilis, or "handy man" based on conjectural evidence of crude stone tools found in association. They had a larger brain, and were a little taller than the Australopithecines. Their skeletal anatomy, the little that has been recovered, comes to resemble an intermediate transition to a more stable and widespread form that appeared to soon follow by about 2 million B.P., and this was Homo erectus. She was taller yet, and had even a bigger brain, which evolutionary development can now be put on a curve of increasing cranial capacity. Her dentition was strikingly human, and they appeared to have fanned out across the entire Old World in tiny groupings that probably included an extended family of three generations (if they lived so long). They appear to have been a very successful and long-lived species, lasting probably more than two million years in a very stable form.

They definitely had stone and bone tools that became quite sophisticated, especially as these were found in the latter half of their period in the European and African regions. They appear to have been a very stable and "robust" species, thick boned and lean. They may have even made crude shelters and clothing for themselves, and definitely preferred the security of large caves. By about 500,000 B.P. they have mastered fire and have activities that focus around crude hearths. Their brains reach a capacity more than intermediate between that of the Australopithecines and later hominids like Neanderthalensus and archaic Homo saipiens.

By the end of their time, there is a paucity of evidence that shows a clear transition from Homo erectus to these more modern varieties which represent our direct precursors. The picture between east and west is confusing and becomes very controversial, as usually happens when there is a lack of evidence. Without a doubt this was another period of transition, between one and three hundred thousand B.P., that represented the disappearance of this earlier form, and their replacement by several new forms. The relational status of these new forms is also controversial. Without a doubt there are classical Neanderthal types in the European regions, but there is some clinal variation in North Africa and in West Asia which suggests intermediate varieties and some "miscegenation" with archaic Homo saipiens.

What is evident with these new groups at least in the last 100,000 B.P., is the rise of language, some sense of symbolic culture expressed in ritual practice, in art, and in some conception of death and a symbolic universe. We conjecture that the human brain has been in a sense fully developed during this time, having reached its maximum capacity range. We find at this stage well organized tribal groupings, sometimes perhaps quite large. In the later period, from 50,000 on, we have evidence of sophisticated technologies in fishing, boating, hunting. In this time frame, the peopling of the New World and the Australian continent began.

This pattern of clear anthropological cultural development begins to accelerate especially in the last twenty thousand years. It led to an intermediary neolithic period that culiminates in the domestication of plants and animals and the rise of sedentism that fosters larger structural patterns of social organization leading to the rise of state civilizations by about 6,000 B.P. With the rise of structural organization of large groups of people, an obvious clue of human evolutionary success, we have the emergence of systems of writing associated with record keeping, and with this, the birth of literate civilization. All else is history and archaeology.

There are many details and variables of this general picture of anthropogenesis. Many "just so" models of primitive social organization and human patterning have been constructed to explain the causes of human development. These focus particularly upon the rise of our big brain, our patterns of sexuality, our bipedalism, our delayed patterns of infant development and prolonged nurturance associated with extended learning, our sophisticated tongues and manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination. We became tool makers, language users, culture bearers, and most importantly perhaps, transmitters of knowledge.

There is more than a grain of truth to most "just so" stories except some of the more violent and least substantively validated. Humans were scavengers, hunters and gatherers. They probably did run and climb trees, and hunt as groups, and have sexual escapades, etc. They were promising and lying at the same time, and both are a mark of both intellect and ethical development. There are in the anthropogenesis model a handful of basic constructs that constitute a basic system that I believe, anthropologically speaking, was in place from the earliest rise of the hominid line, and that was intimately associated with unusual intelligence and sensitivity to an environment.

Inherent conservative Paleontological reconstructions resist the notion of blessing our earliest precursors with too much humanlike intelligence and sensitivity. But such conservatism also tends to downplay the extent to which cultural adaptationism, even in very primitive and rudimentary ways, played a role in shaping not only our selves, but our environments as well. It is evident that the clearest differences separating Neanderthals from ourselves, or even Homo Erectus from ourselves, are not so much our brains or native abilities, but rather the force of cultural context and tradition that we have differentially inherited.

Chances are that if a modern child were raised in a Neanderthal context, they would be behaviorally and cognitively very similar, or even identical, to their Neanderthaloid contemporaries. This is the role environment has come to play in our lives, and in our genetic development. Thus, we must assume in our models of anthropogenesis a fairly early and critical influence of cultural, anthropological selectionism that shaped both our environments, and in the process, ourselves, in a kind of feedback system.

I will outline a basic model of the most important and incontrovertible aspects of this early anthropogenesis model:

The model I present above provides a relatively complex "just so" story of anthropogenesis. These I take to be the minimal number of factors requisite to understanding this model as a feedback system between the prototypical human and the environment. Most of the upper level components of this model were there from the earliest rise of Australopithecus. In general, higher level components tended to precede lower level ones. Some things are known to have occurred before others, that bipedalism preceded cranial development and probably occurred in conjunction with increased hand-eye coordination and migration patterns. Australopithecus is found in a fairly wide radius of adaptation that spanned multiple niches.

Other things followed in time, such as the active use and reliance of manufactured tools, the rise of language, and eventually the development of the hearth about a central area of activity, probably protected from the elements. This appears to have occurred during the time of Homo Erectus especially. Some form of humanlike language and communication was undoubtedly a part of this process, as the most distinctive aspect of human intelligence is that it is primarily organized and expressed in a linguistic manner.

Of course, the consequence was the selection for bigger brains and greater intelligence. Humans were basically problem solving animals that could work themselves out of a broad range of problematic situations. Survivorship required skill, cunning and wisdom to learn from mistakes. It encouraged as well strong mother-child bonds and the centrality of the role of prolonged infant development, a characteristic of humans, as well as the role of human sexuality, especially of female sexuality, in leading to reproductive success.

The driving mechanism in this feedback model of the evolutionary anthropogenesis of humanity is the development of larger brains that is tied to increasingly long periods of child development, which becomes biologically expressed by slower rates of ontogenetic maturation. Other factors may have played important roles in this process as well. It implies some manner of sexual stratification in social organization, but this was possibly variable and depended on situational contexts.

Most aspects of this model served as feedback mechanisms and essentially worked both ways in the causal arrows. Hence, freed hands led to tool use and carrying that in turn lead to increased hand-eye coordination, and a development of brains that allowed this capacity. Making tools meant weapons to defend and fight with, and led to shifting roles of both males and females. Shifting roles of males and females would have resulted in shifting social relations, possibility leading to conflict and aggression, hence the need for more tools and weapons.

This kind of model represents a basic paradigm of anthropogenesis. To reduce such a model to prime mover or unicausal explanations is to be over-reductionist and to oversimplify the fundamental complexity of human informational patterning. Bipedalism and hand-eye coordination undoubtedly played significant early roles in this development, but it could not have happened outside the context of other things going on simultaneously, such as mother-child pair bonding and primary and secondary group relations and migration patterns and food-getting strategies.

Also, by itself, it couldn't have accounted for the rise of big-brains unless tools and other things came into play along the way, and we cannot account for big brains unless we account for the ability of the mother to nurture and help the child during its development. Hence, indirectly it calls for some sense of stability of males in the primary group to defend and foster this relationship. Female sexuality would have arisen in its marked forms to help to keep successful males close to the pair bond.

This paradigm essentially circumscribes a general three-step process, in which a stable pattern of tool-use and social organization arose out of basic patterns of bipedality, migration and food-getting, and led to greater intelligence, symbolism, language, and the refinement of living in shelters with hearths, and adorning oneself. We may simplify this process as follows:

The purpose of this digression is not to add one more "just so" story to our thinking about anthropogenesis, but to derive a theoretical construct of what can be considered a basic anthropological model defining the basic human in relation to a minimal naturalistic context. This basic model can in theory be adapted to fit and help us explain people in a broad range of basic contexts. From this model, we should be able to derive on other levels a systematic understanding of more elaborate human systems.

I will not argue further the human fossil record. We are likely never to know when or exactly how language arose, or other critical aspects of culture, like symbolic thinking. It is likely to have been a steady and cumulative process. If we look at ontogenetic development of cognitive abilities in children, we understand that a great deal of semantic association precedes syntactic productivity. If we look at the evolution of writing systems, we see the advancement from very crude and massive pictographic systems that were contextually dependent, through various syllabic systems, to extremely streamlined alphabetic systems separating the sign from the value. And we realize that these advances were not forthcoming in the context of old systems, but in the framework where old systems had to be adapted to new contexts. It is in this way that we must approach our understanding of the development of human language and other symbolic functions of human behavior.

Obviously, creatures who were intelligent enough to carefully and skillfully knap blades off cores and haft these to the ends of straight sticks, also probably had the understanding to mention their world in passing and the desire to do so to their loved ones. I am not sure that on some primitive level, even a dog may have a form of limited symbolic understanding, associated with feeling and response, even though it may lack the words to express itself with. And I have no doubt that when I look into the eyes of an ape, that I see their human-like intelligence behind a mute facade. But this kind of anthropological insight takes the anthropogenesis of the modern Homo saipiens saipiens back at least one or two million years, if not much more.

The enduring characteristic of human systems are, I believe, that they are symbolic, they are social, and they express themselves behaviorally, materially and physically in the human relationship with its environment. Furthermore, this symbolic and social aspect of human systems appears to be unique from the standpoint that they allow the possibility of apperceptive and reflexive self-awareness in the world. They form the basis for a kind of sentient intelligence about life that knows itself, and can contemplate not only the world, but also its own existence in the world. Finally, this sentience has the possibility of being rationally ordered in some way that makes metaphysical and abstract, or non-concrete, sense.

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The starting point of human systems theory is the understanding of the so-called anthropological construction of reality. By construction of reality is meant the natural and normal process by which human beings make their worlds, and in so doing, come to impose their own wills upon the world. This construction process is known fundamentally as "culturation" and cultural construction of reality. The world that human's create is a cultural world. The human world is thus "constructed" by human-made designs and this is something fundamentally different than the biological design that nature has given to us. Therefore, in some fundamental sense, the cultural world that human beings have created is fundamentally different in informational design than the natural world from which it arises.

It is of course true that underlying the process of human culturation is a biological substrate that made this culturation possible in the first place. Undoubtedly, this biological substrate defines parameters of design within which culturational processes must take place, and that tend to shape these processes in defining and predictable ways.

The paradox of this relationship between human culture and human nature is that it has fostered a kind of inherent interdependency of the two forms of informational patterning, such that neither is complete or independent of the other. Nature cannot gain expression but through human culture, so embedded is the cultural imperative in human survival, and at the same time, culture is never freed of the constraints that nature places upon it.

Human beings, made by evolution, emerged from the evolutionary process as largely self made creatures, as beings of their own making. Human beings face a fundamental dilemma of world openness just like all other forms of life face a dilemma of world closure. While the dilemma of other forms of life is that it is an almost closed world, the dilemma of humans is that it is a not completely open world.

This fundamental dilemma becomes expressed in human reality as a fundamental sense of incompleteness, of unfinished business. It creates a fundamental "angst" that comes from knowing our own fate and seeing our selves in some reflexive sense as separate and independent beings. In life and death, a dog has a fundamental complacency about its own reality that human beings can come to envy. Even under circumstances of extreme cruelty or deprivation, a dog does not but accept its fate as given and unquestioned. It leads to a sense of social loyalty that a dog exhibits that goes far beyond what its human counterparts can manage. A dog cannot deceive, and cannot lie.

For human beings, an unfinished world, that is a not quite open world, is one in which, because of intelligence, it becomes possible to deceive and to construe the world in other terms that what is perceptually apprehended as such. The possibility for prevarication creates the possibility not only for willful self-determination, but also for violation.

World openness that comes through the culturation of human reality allows human beings to behave in self-motivated ways, and to channel their own basic motivations in alternative and indirect ways, that nature would not otherwise allow. World openness creates the possibility for the human construction of cultural realities that stand in place of or substitute for an unfinished natural human world.

The argument has been put forward that world openness can be explained on the basis of the loosening of human instinctual patterns, or at least, loosening the hold on human nature instincts should otherwise have had. I do not complete accept this argument as a realistic one. It is not clear to me that all animals with big brains are so totally bound by their instincts that they do not have some substantial measure of judgment and choice in their everyday behavior. This range of choice I believe is usually very circumscribed and concrete. Going back to domestic pets, it is evident that dogs exhibit personality traits that are quite variable. It is probably more accurate to say that such creatures are more bound by impulsive response patterns than they are by instinct alone. Impulsive response patterns can be described psychologically as behaviors that are directed or motivated at a primary level of organic response, implying feeling and basic biological need, and lack the sublimation of being channeled or controlled by greater cerebral patterning. Animals like dogs are as much constrained therefore by a very rudimentary calculus, a concrete calculus of stimulus and response, than they are by a rational calculus of logic and reason.

By implication, therefore, human beings are inherently more "cerebral" in their motivational control mechanisms than almost any other form of animal. But it must be remembered that humans are rarely so controlled and so rational in their behavior that much of the time even the rationality they adopt is fundamentally managed by impulse. By being characterized as world open creatures, human beings are not thereby free of their instinctual motivations and impulses. These things still exist to confuse us and drive us, but they appear to become embedded in our being on subconscious levels that are at times very difficult to directly identify. Indeed, the whole process of embedding, or internalization, of our basic nature, has been accomplished by the superimposition of culturational constructs within a cerebral system. The evolution of the human brain was the evolution of human culturational capacity that permitted the cerebral embedding and sublimation of natural response patterning.

The cerebral character of this kind of control over our basic natures is nowhere complete nor so perfectly rational as we might like to presume it is. We have reached a stage in our evolutionary development that we cannot fully express our basic human nature, unless this kind of control structure is in place.

In this sense, human nature is innately cultural, and without the context of cultural patterning to be internalized in early human development, humans are incomplete in any form or fashion. They become unfinished monsters, not chimpanzees. Cerebration itself is culturally conditioned and defined from the beginning of neonatal development. The mechanism itself is basically the same for all human beings. There appear to be many basic hereditary differences in this patterning. This kind of variability is to be expected in an evolutionary model of human development. This variability is probably as remarkable as the degree of variability of beak pattern of Darwin's finches, as it appears to be almost at the level of the individual. There is variability of nerve structure stemming from the brain, and there appears to be substantial organic variability of the organization of the brain itself.

At the same time, in terms of the ontogenetic development of cerebral structures of the brain, it is nearly impossible to tell where genotypic predeterminations leave off and phenotypic plasticities take over. Many factors appear to be able to influence subsequent cerebral development of the brain, and these factors are part of the basic trait-complex of world openness characteristic of human nature.

Human nature requires prolonged periods of post-natal development and maturation in order to achieve its realization. Arguments can be made that cerebral development might never stop until advanced age leads to senility. It is evident that in the early years of this development, there are critical periods of this development process that are variable within limits, and yet which are necessary to occur. Humans in a sense must learn to walk and to talk, and if they have been genetically preprogrammed to do both things, but if they miss the period at which they are supposed to accomplish these transitions, their subsequent development becomes retarded.

This suggests that Lucy and the early Australopithecines, had already accomplished a basic cultural achievement in their acquisition of bipedality. It is probably the case that they would have had delayed infant development as a result of this. This period may have been fundamentally shorter than it is for modern Homo saipiens, which is from about 8 to 12 months, but the close morphological similarities of human and australopithecine bipedality suggest that our own bipedality was derivative of theirs. It is not difficult to imagine that bipedalism may have come for Australopithecines between the third and sixth month, or even later, and that therefore there was a prolonged period of infant dependency which can be considered a latency period for cerebral development.

By this model, that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, we can see that human speech comes about a year after human walking. It suggests that the fundamental capacity and patterning for speech probably started in a rudimentary form fairly early in human evolution, even possibly with the Australopithecines themselves.

The point of this digression is to emphasize the requirement of human nature for prolonged post-natal development, which is inherently timed to the cerebral development of the brain. This can be defined clearly as the culturational period, or the period in which cultural patterning is internalized into the human being, and without which the human being cannot become fully realized either as a person or as an animal.

To what extent this culturational patterning may come before this period, in prenatal or even genetic development, is a legitimate question to ask. What is evident is the timing and scheduling of this development that is genetically predetermined, and possibly to a lesser extent, the ordering of the patterning of this development in the brain structure itself. It is evident that cerebral structures of human beings are not always in the exact same place, or take the exact same form. Less plausible is the idea that humans may inherent entire explicit knowledge structures, like Beethoven's symphony, or even the genetic-mimetic structure of concepts or ideas. This sounds too Lamarkian in a sense. Culture is continuously chopping off the proverbial human tail with its conceptual scalpuls, but we should not expect that, just because of this continuous action of post-natal culturation, its effects should be genetically incorporated into the human organism.

What appears to have occurred is the cultural selectionism for bigger brains and for specific cerebral trait complexes, but also for greater plasticity and variability of cerebral structure itself. Brain structures were selected for, to the extent that they allowed prolonged scheduling of important critical developmental stages of the human intellect. What was obviously inherited, differentially, was the human capacity for culturation, but not the culturational context itself. Some enduring environmental framework existed in the context of our evolutionary precursors that played the part of culture. This was the natural context itself, symbolically construed through the human mind.

The fact of human culturation has had important implications in human development, because it has placed a critical period or set of critical periods of human ontogenetic development clearly outside of the womb. Unlike horses that get up and beginning walking and running within minutes of their partuition, humans remain in a very underdeveloped state. This is not uncommon among many forms of animal life. Many insects must advance through stages of pupal development before becoming adults. If we look at dogs and cats, they are generally born quite blind and helpless, not unlike human beings. They too cannot walk immediately upon birth, but must crawl and root much as newborn human infants do.

What is fundamentally remarkable about human culturational development, is not just the prolonged developmental timing that is involved, but its utter sophistication from the purely cerebral-behavioral point of view. Within a year of a child's first audible words, the child's vocabulary increases exponentially and at a steady rate to some upper limit, at which time it tapers off in a sigmoidal pattern. This vocabulary increases not only in the extent of new words added, but in the functional sophistication that the words take on in the life-world of the child. At three years of age, the average human infant is far more linguistically adept than the best-trained primate that's had many more years of training. This is not to say that the primate is necessarily any dumber than the human infant, but from a linguistic standpoint they clearly lack the evolutionary structures anything comparable to what is normally available to human beings. The linguistic skill the three-year-old child is fundamentally different and more advanced than that of the primate. The child begins using language in a symbolic manner that is characterized by its productivity and its abstract generalizability. Words begin doing double service at an early age, not just as mechanical signals of meaning and intent, but as symbolic metaphors of meaning and intention itself.

There is a sense that if culturational processes fundamentally open the world of human nature, or open human nature to the world so to speak, at the same time it imposes its own cultural constraints back upon that human nature. These serve to close the door back upon the human, albeit in a fundamentally different way. Culturational capacities depend upon a fundamental openness of human nature to new inputs, but they themselves come to depend upon an externalized context that is culturally defined and defining.

Therefore, if we are freed from the world of nature to some extent by our capacity for culture, we are in another sense just as "bound" back to a cultural world of our own making. And in this process of re-closing an open door on nature, culture as it becomes internalized and embedded in our beings, takes on the form of human nature, and comes to have much of its same strengths and weakness and characteristics of pattern.

In this sense, we can speak of a fundamental human dilemma of nature versus nurture. We can speak of the person as a biological being in terms of what we are born with. At the same time, we can refer to people as cultural beings, as being the product of what we are born into. We cannot clearly separate this dichotomy, and like so many other similar dichotomies, we realize that it describes just the extremes of a single feedback system.

This process must be understood in two ways. Internalization of cultural patterning requires foremost an external context in which it can develop and find its form for development. A cultural context of some minimal kind must pre-exist in the life-world of the newborn infant. It must be sufficient to the task of culturational development.

If we are to look at genuine models of anthropogenesis, then really we are searching for that minimal proto-cultural context that nature provided in the evolutionary development of the human capacity for culture. It had to have been a context, or set of contexts, which were stable and steady enough to allow our ancestors the time required for this development to take place. I doubt it was an instantaneous biocultural miracle, but it may have had periods of rapid evolutionary transformation that permitted fundamental gradation developments of the brain. Significant cranial development is found throughout the human fossil record, beginning with the Australopithecines.

Obviously, our hominid ancestors developed a stable evolutionary trait complex that permitted this to happen. Largely, I believe, early "proto" culture was transportable and generally adaptable. It was carried around and made to fit a broad range of alternative niches allowing for human biological adaptation and reproductive success. Tools and their earliest precursors are the most obvious candidates for this proto-cultural context. But calls and signs, especially hand signs that used the fingers like tools, must have also been an important early part. Furthermore, this early proto-cultural context had to have been, by definition, social.

Internalization of the human cultural contexts has as its requirement therefore some minimal form of external, materialized context, which can be internalized. This externalized context provides the template patterning of environmental information and encoding which gets fed into the human brain and incorporated as if it were genetic. In a rudimentary manner, it is not difficult to find cultural patterning even among many animal forms. All animals are born into some kind of socially defined life world.

What is apparently unique about the human life-world that we describe as cultural, is that this world is basically symbolic in character. The critical difference between the culture of a herd of gazelles or a pack of wolves and that of human beings, is not necessarily the instinctual natures of the former creatures, so much as it is the symbolic structure of the latter forms.

The external cultural context of the human being, in whatever shape or form it takes, is by definition an inherently symbolic context. As such, the external material forms and relations that embody it in the external world have symbolic resonances and structural patternings that are characteristically human. These patterns on a structural level assume prototypical anthropological form. The external vessels of symbolization become mechanical devices that resonate in the minds of people. Anything can be a symbol, or can become symbolic or symbolized, but it can only be done so if:

1. That thing is fit into some kind of part-whole relationship within a structured cultural framework of meaning.

And,

2. That thing is internalized as a symbolic construct, such that its position in the external world has a correlate representational position in the internal world of the human mind.

Thus, a comprehensive theory of human informational patterning must necessarily be a theory about human symbolic process that is at the center of human culturation. Symbolization in anthropomorphic patterns is the basis of understanding human systems theory as a scientific, comprehensive and general construct about human reality.

But symbols are not just static systems. They do something that makes them important to humankind, that promote their biological success and allows them to achieve a form and degree of control and mastery that other life forms do not otherwise possess.

Human consciousness, and indeed, human cerebral functioning, is by definition symbolic in character. As such it takes on typical basic structural patterning regardless of the shape that cultural processes and contexts bends it into.

The dynamic and significant aspect of symbolic process is two-fold.

First, the function of symbolism in shaping the human world is its transformational character. It essentially allows human beings to create new and alternative worlds. Symbolic process is therefore inherently creative, as it can produce new patterns of meaning from old.

Second, the function of symbolism is to tie the world together, to provide a sense of order and integration of the world, what can be called the symbolic integration of human reality. The human world is by definition symbolically integrated. This is structurally inherent to its symbolic patterning. This has certain entailments, like a need for some sense order, and for avoidance of symbolic discontinuity.

We can say that in a symbolically unified world, there is no room for discontinuity of experience. Discontinuity of experience arises as the result of apparent symbolic contradiction--something cannot be both true and not true at the same time, as these kinds of antinomial things cannot be reconciled. The possibility for contradiction is inherent in the entire symbolic process itself that allows for the coexistence of alternative realities. Symbolization therefore fosters its own sense of discontinuity and contradiction, inherent to its patterning that it must then attempt to resolve.

Symbols as a part of a larger system have to cohere together in a culturally defined way. If things appear out of place or incongruent without our expectations, then we experience what is referred to as cultural shock or a form of symbolic disease.

There are two caveats to these principles about human symbolism. These are the following:

If human symbolization allows humans to creatively transform the world, then they also allow humans to destroy it. Humans have both the capacity for creation and destruction, and they take similar symbolic forms.

If human symbolization makes necessary the symbolic integration of the world, and all experience within it in some minimally coherent way, then it also sets up the possibility for its disintegration and for the occurrence of "disorder" that is a form of noise in cultural systems.

It has been emphasized that the ultimate form of symbolic discontinuity we can experience is that of death, which is referred to as the ultimately "marginalizing" experience. Death as a symbolic destroyer of life, especially of human life, is the ultimate expression of our own incompleteness in life.

In understanding the central role that symbolization plays in the structuring of human information systems, an important characteristic of this patterning relating to the processes of internalization and externalization of cultural pattern, is that this process is symbolically mediated.

Internalization and externalization processes of cultural patterning are made possible through symbolization, and symbolization is the main form of mediation of these processes. Thus, these processes take typical form that can be described as symbolic. Furthermore, they lead us into a conflation of meaning between natural and cultural states. What is intrinsic to our selves, as what is internalized to our selves, is what is construed symbolically as being natural. What is externalized to our selves is defined as being natural as well. In other words, symbolization in its mediation of internal and external worlds, creates the necessary fiction of reality, that what is human made is understood to be natural and innate to that world. Vice versa, it also happens that what is innate and natural about our selves in some deeper sense, is projected in cultural form upon the world.

The process of making the constructed seem natural is part of the inherent function of symbolization that can tolerate no sense of fundamental discontinuity in the world. This is a principle about symbolic equivalence and displacement, such that symbolic constructs that are approximately equivalent but fundamentally different, cannot coexist within the same symbolic system, without some form of displacement or revision occur.

Human symbolization therefore creates a kind of noetic landscape of the mind where ideas and conceptual constructs take on a real life and have an internalized form as if they were real. Within this landscape there is continuous competition between different kinds of ideas and constructs. The ideas and constructs arise and are attached to the material world. The competition comes from the fact of possible displacement of similar kinds of symbols. It becomes a direct analogy of the external physical world that it becomes attached to. This is a part of its integrative function. We cannot entertain the symbols of two different national flags with the same status in our symbolic worlds if these different flags are attached in the real world to different and especially contraposed realities, like two enemy nations. If we are to elevate to different national flags side-by-side in our minds, then we are to see that the realities they represent are in some way coexisting in a manner that is side-by-side and non-conflicting.

The concept of symbolic integration of reality and non-contradiction that it implies, as well as the world of the mind, or what we would call the worldview that symbolization creates, suggests that the human brain is functionally organized just for this purpose, and this purpose primarily.

Cerebral development of the brain that allows for development of culturational capacity, must be development that permits the brain to function in a symbolic manner. The human brain is a symbolic machine, and this was the critical gradational step human beings made in evolutionary history, compared to all other forms of life. The symbolic functioning of the human brain appears to take on a definite pattern that is distinctive and universal in human reality, and it allows people to symbolically integrate their worlds, and to create a cultural world of their own choosing. It also allows them to change and even destroy the worlds they have made, and the possibility of deceiving themselves about the world in fundamental ways.

Going back to our hominid precursor, we can see that the stone tool that was "manuported" from place to place, if valued, could just as easily have been discarded, if there was an expectation that some other stone tool could easily be found and created. The stone at that point becomes a basic symbol of something that can do something, even a number of different things depending on one's skill, and that was not too difficult to make, again depending upon one's skill. The stone tool may have been too heavy to carry long distances. But being a basic symbol, the tool itself, as an external object, may not have been as valuable as the symbolic model or construct of the tool in the mind of the toolmaker.

The idea could be easily carried very long distances, and almost into any kind of context, and result in the approximate replication of its original form that was left behind at the previous place visited. Maybe one or two kinds of tools are nothing exceptional--any Chimpanzee might be able to do this. But to be able to carry an entire tool kit in one's mind, each with its own specialized uses and each with its own required skills for making and using, required that the "tool bearer" had to have been fairly intelligent. The more tools, the better the adjustment. Of course all tools were not necessarily made out of stone, or even bone or wood. The ability of figuring out how to use different kinds of objects in the world, whether of plant or mineral origin, are important kinds of concepts to add to one's growing list. Surely, the early australopithecines had to have had some expertise in faunal and flora identification and utilization, which taught them which kinds of things to use and which to leave alone. And when the idea was carried, but the material form of the idea discarded, there was the possibility both for the replication of the original concept in a second thing, but also for the modification and refinement of the concept into a number of different forms.

Thus we can speak of the cultural evolution of symbols that work in the world in some definite or general way, as being very similar to the evolution of genetic information that also accomplishes a certain kind of work. General forms of tools adapted to a wide variety of uses give way to newer more specialized forms that are more effective for a narrower range of purposes. The general form of a tool, as a kind of species, may eventually give way and be replaced by an entirely new kind of tool, made from some different technique, and perhaps more generally effective in an important range.

We can also legitimately refer to the cultural transmission of symbolisms and symbols as the principal form of cultural transmission that is achieved. Culture does not strictly transmit itself in genetic information, because, frankly, it does not need to. It has its own system of information transmission that is much more efficient and effective than it would be in purely genetic terms.

The transmission aspects of cultural symbolization are inherent to the definition of human symbolism. This is an intrinsic part of the symbolic process, as the internalization and externalization of symbolic mediation processes can only be accomplished through some communicative mechanism, which serves both to mediate and integrate the symbolic connection between inner and outer worlds.

The communication mechanism that allows the symbolic transmission, mediation and integration of human cultural reality is of course human language. The issue of human language will be taken up in greater detail in a later chapter. Here there is one set of points to make. Human language is basically symbolic in its structural patterning, as this is its principal function in our lives. It follows that symbolic integration cannot take place without the mediation of Language. Therefore, language is intrinsic to the organic patterning and organization of the human brain, and makes cultural patterning possible in the first place. We cannot imagine human culture if there is not some kind of language that is central to its symbolic articulation. That this language does not strictly have to be oral is demonstrated by the fact of numerous varieties of sign language, which lends credence to a kind of call signing hypothesis of the origin of human language.

Cultural mediation, communication and transmission of symbols is also inherently a social process. It occurs within the social context of people interacting with one another, usually within some larger set of group contexts. Thus, symbolisms accomplish not only the integration of reality between the outer and inner worlds of the individual, but also of the worlds between people. Symbolisms bridge the world of people and unite that world into a coherent and integrated system. Symbolisms are therefore shared between people, and they are shared primarily through communication. They unite not only the external world into a common, shared context, but, even more importantly, they unite the inner worlds of different people together, again based on sharing of cultural constructs and their relations, such that people can act and behave in coordinated ways.

So important is this relation, indeed, that when we speak of culture generally, we conventionally imply a grouping of people who share similar cultural affinities in a common context. While we can more technically say that culture is what is actually shared by a common grouping of people in common contexts, rather than the social grouping itself, this remains a common confusion and conflation of terms such that we refer to socio-cultural anthropology to cover all our bases.

It can be seen therefore that cultural symbolisms that are shared serve to unite people together into a common sense of reality, a reality that is shared in both external and internal senses. These social unities are enduring and stable, and normally take on appearances as if people were genetically differentiated as separate species of a common genus. So marked and divergent are common cultural characteristics, even in such mannerisms as facial expression, body language and posture, much less in body decoration, costume and other behaviors, that they are imputed with being natural differences between people. Culture comes to take on a great shaping force in human reality, equal to biology itself.

It can be said, categorically, that all human beings today are of one single species, Homo saipiens saipiens. Even though this species has a great deal of trait variability, it is a relatively homogeneous reproductive population. The significant disparities occurring between different people in the world today are not genetic, but cultural in origin. This is in terms of language, symbolism, behavior and social organization. It therefore follows that very little if anything that has been culturally created by people has been genetically determined or predetermined in any necessary or preclusive way.

Not only do people share symbolic realities that define social groupings that endure as separate social systems through time, but the fact of these social relations and social systems are in themselves symbolically mediated and defined in symbolic terms. The cultural grouping itself comes to take on symbolic significance that is at once a part of the individual member of the group and at the same time, separate from it.

Thus it can be seen that social organization is itself symbolically mediated and a cultural construction of reality. To impute any direct genetic or instinctual causes to social organization is to misplace the symbolic nature of its articulation back upon a genetic patterning of life. This is not to say that society does not give expression to human impulse and basic human drives rooted deeply in an instinctual nature. But society accomplishes its normal organization by controlling and channeling and shaping these drives to suit its own requirements, that of symbolic order. It is not thereby shaped by the patterns of these drives. In this way we can understand the role of so much ritual process in social life--ritual process provides the channels for the conduction of such drives and impulses in ways that are cultural consonant and socially constrained.

The notion of cultural transmission of symbols, and the symbolic transmission of culture, brings up a centrally important concept about our understanding of cultural information systems. Ultimately, these systems serve the purpose for which they were originally intended, and that is the purpose of adaptive human survival and reproductive success. Culture does not exist, and would not have arisen evolutionarily, if it were not founded upon a basic and distinctive human trait-complex that permitted humans to achieve evolutionary success as a species.

Thus cultural transmission processes and cultural patterning take on aspects as if the cultural grouping were like a living species, reproducing itself from generation to generation. The notion of the cultural imperative of humankind, that of success and survival of the group, is rooted to the biological and evolutionary imperatives of all of life.

I will describe therefore the basic anthropological imperative of all human beings as being centrally tied to their cultural identity and its perpetuity of pattern among its biological descendants. In this sense cultural patterns all have a sense of tradition and this tradition entails that cultural systems tend to be closely tied to kinship and heredity, and to be conservative and to put a premium upon tradition that is transmitted cross-generationally.

The anthropological imperative of each cultural grouping is its successful adaptation as such and its reproduction in the next generation as a successful system. It accomplishes this through processes of symbolic transmission and reinforcement in its members, and its reconstruction in each generation.

Cultural systems as symbolic systems shared by coherent groups of a common origin are not immutable systems. They do change to the extent that new symbols are incorporated into them, and sometimes lead to the displacement or revision of older symbolisms. As such cultural systems not only change, they develop and evolve in many ways that are analogous to speciation and biological evolution. Frequently, changes in cultural groupings tend to be quite revolutionary and sweeping.

In fact, their patterning of change is much more rapid, on average, than that of biological evolution, and it is another indication that cultural patterning cannot be directly tied or linked in a deterministic way to genetic patterning.

The issue of the anthropological imperative, that ties culture close to home, and tends to keep it there, brings us back to the question of the fundamental relationship between nature and culture. It brings us to the issue of gene-culture co-evolution that was dealt with in the previous chapter, and will be readdressed in the next.

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Human systems theory leads naturally to the question of the cultural integration of reality. This pattern of information is regarded to be essentially symbolic in its self-organizational patterning. Even intentionality structures that we can attribute to it and to our behavior can be described as symbolically self-organized. Thus, we may always want to do what we do, and do what we want, but what we want is always bound within a symbolic universe that was culturally constructed in the first place.

We can regard the issue of cultural integration on several levels, just as we can regard the issues of the biological organization of populations within ecosystems. Cultural integration shares a great deal in fact with such eco-systemic models. Culture must accomplish some of the same challenges that are confronted by biological populations. It must meet these challenges in some very similar ways. Culture must transmit itself generationally through time, and if possible, spread itself spatially. We can talk about adaptive "niches" that cultures come to occupy in larger frameworks. Cultures must adaptively succeed and survive as well. Thus we can speak of cultural integration as a systemic feedback process, as one largely involving internalization and externalization of symbolic constructs in the behavioral and material organization of society and the environment.

Culture integration defines the distinctive style patterning of cultures in virtually every aspect and facet of a person's life. Cultural integration permits and facilitates the social functioning of a coherent grouping of people, and a replication of its social structure over time, and a reinforcement of its structuration in each member of the group. Cultural integration is nowhere very perfect or complete, and whereas the biological world is one that is almost closed, it appears as if the cultural world is one that is almost always open to a much greater extent than its biological counterpart and substrate.

Cultural integration is largely achieved by sharing. We can speak of relative cultural consonance and coherence of pattern, as measured by the extent and level at which its members share similar kinds of patterns of thought, speech and behavior. Methodologically, the principle of cultural sharing is quite a powerful instrument in a grouping. Sharing is as much implicit as it is deliberate. It therefore is the basis of both direct and indirect constraints that normally operate within cultural contexts to define rules regarding appropriate and deviant behavior. At this level, cultural integration can be seen to be an implicitly rule-based system.

The rules governing cultural integration are shared and to some extent determine patterns of sharing also. But if cultural patterning is a rule-based system, it is also an underdetermined system in the sense that in normal life, rules were always made with numerous exceptions. These permit a wide range of tolerance for variation of pattern and that allows the culture to adapt to new situations in relatively flexible ways.

Rules governing and regulating cultural integration are therefore rarely inviolable, except for some strong taboos, as for instance incest taboo. Cultural rule patterns are largely symbolic in their nature, and therefore exhibit the intrinsic non-specificity of value and meaning as do all forms of human symbolization. But rule patterns in cultural life can also be quite explicit, as for instance in describing customary behavior in marriage or in other ritual processes, or for describing the appropriate and expected roles and relations between different people or different categories of people.

The notion of cultural integration brings to bear the related idea of cultural equilibrium as a sense of adaptive stasis of a cultural pattern that endures through time. Equilibrium describes a kind of balance sustained within a stable cultural patterning. We can also therefore speak of this equilibrium as being to some extent dynamic, indeed inherently more dynamic than its biological counterpart. Traditional cultures are by definition conservative, and all cultures tend to be intrinsically conservative in their patterning and perpetuation. All cultures have some tolerance limits by which it can incorporate change.

This sense of cultural equilibrium is to a large measure defined by the environmental relationships able to be maintained by such a cultural grouping of people, and these environmental relationships almost always involve other people of other cultural groupings. Rarely are cultural groupings so isolated that they are not in contact with other groupings by which they gain some measure of relativized contrast with their own cultural patterning.

If cultures can sustain some sense of conservative equilibrium of pattern, then they are even more frequently susceptible to disequilibrium that is the consequence of change introduced from without, either environmentally or socially. Cultural disequilibrium is destabilizing and disruptive for a grouping, leading to greater cultural dissonance and incoherence of pattern within the group.

This is often indicated by strong symbolic and behavioral contradictions within the cultural system. In such a context, many implicit rules that determine the functional integration of the system become violated in one way or another. The violation of these rules entails, among other things, an increasing incoherence and disconsonance of functioning in interrelationships between people. This disconsonance can come to be expressed in terms of acts of violence. It entails that the degree of sharing between people in culture will be less, and, as a result, the average cultural "competence" of the individual will also be a less than otherwise. A lack of sharing implies a lack of agreement that also tends to imply a lack of detailed knowledge and expertise.

Cultural competence can be defined as the cultural equivalent of fitness. It entails the knowledge and symbolic organization an individual needs to have for his or her effective functioning and adaptation in their culturally constructed life world.

A cultural grouping cannot live well or for very long in a state of strong cultural disequilibrium. Thus, a group must come to redefine for itself new rules and norms upon which to base its adaptation and survival or else it must face extinction as a group. Extinction of a culture does not necessarily equate with the biological extinction of the population it subsumes. Often as not, it means dissolution of the grouping as such and the drift or dispersion or migration of its members into other cultural groupings.

It is in this sense that we can construe a great deal of conflict in human history as being essentially cross-cultural conflict between "competing" cultural patterns. Cultural integration establishes a boundary about the grouping that becomes a threshold to passing in or out of the group. It is in this sense the cultural relativism was conventionally construed and all encompassing and totalizing in the life world of the individual. Culture was in this framework deterministic and even construed as coercive and even tyrannical in its constraining force. The presence of competitive cultural patterns indicates that out-groups present a culture with disconsonance, contradiction and relativization of its own pattern, which results in a sense of disintegration of its pattern. The appearance therefore of a different and alien culture at the border of a cultural grouping cannot but be seen as a "threat" to the normal order of pattern embodied in the culture. In this sense, intercultural relations, or acculturation, are often destructive in their consequences, and frequently result in patterns of warfare and conflict between groups.

Cultural groupings have a great investment in the pattern, tradition and adaptation of their shared culture. Such systems are working systems, in the sense that they involve real energy transfers and exchanges, and they often consume a great deal of work in order to continuously reinforce and maintain the overall integrity of the system. Thus members of cultural groupings invest a great deal of time and energy in the reiteration of culturally patterned behaviors, material expressions and institutions that are reflective of, and reinforce, the overall cultural pattern.

The cultural pattern itself largely takes on secondary symbolic forms, forms that are institutionally embedded in the structural patterning of the society and in terms of belief systems, values and collective representations maintained by the group. These institutions have invariably an ideological and religious component to them that relate them directly back to the symbolic life of the mind. These secondary symbolic systems in culture serve to make sense and integrate cultural reality on another level of meaning and signification, and tie together the subjective and inter-subjective in belief and behavior.

It goes without saying that a great deal of human conflict has been over relatively minor doctrinal issues, such as one what end to crack an egg.

Natural Systems

2001