INTRODUCTION

Chapter Nineteen

Human Evolutionary Systems

The challenge of understanding Homo sapiens in evolutionary context is the explanation for the rise of the distinctively human trait complex in terms that can be accounted for by means of some consistent pattern of natural selection and possibly, gene-culture coevolutionary development, as biological adaptations that promoted adaptive and reproductive success in a kind of positive feedback loop resulting in bigger brains and an exceptional capacity for cultural acquisition and culturation.

This model is referred to as anthropogenesis, and refers to the evolutionary development of the hominid line, from our earliest precursors, until today.

The fossil record belies a past that seems to have witnessed a long lineage of small widely scattered band of different kinds of hominids, eeking a living off an often harsh landscape. In other words, the success of hominids appears to be relative to the kinds of environmental conditions and extremes that early human populations had to deal with. We are not talking of a primordial garden of eden in which large populations of humans simply picked fruit of loaded trees, but of homind ape-like ancestors going solo or in small groups, with an average life-expectancy well below the third decade, where risks had small rewards, and the smartest, the best able to cooperate and communicate, lasted long enough to raise a small family.

We find with humans an extreme K-type pattern based not on specialization, but upon adaptive generalization that can be interpreted as a broadening of eco-trophic niche profile to encompass a range of alternative roles in natural ecosystems, possbily extending across a range of ecosystems. This K-type pattern of generalization is unusual and is found in only a few other animal species on earth, for instance, Bears, or Ursus, that seem to be competitive with hominid populations. Other great Apes, especially Chimpanzees, or Pan, exhibit similar characteristics of generalization. Omnivory is one characteristic of such generalization. It appears as well as that such creatures depend upon some kind of trans-humant pattern and relative isolation or effective separation from one another. In deep evolutionary context, it is difficult to picture early hominid populations in large densities or as organized in very large groupings above that of the small band or extended family clan.

Fossil evidence also suggests that where hominid offshoots or branches, as for instance, robust Australopithecines, specialized in given low competition niches, probably some form of herbivory, then these branches invariably died out and became extinct, with rates of reproduction not being able to keep up with mortality rates. Evidence also suggests that earlier forms, possibly Gigantopithecus, that probably also specialized along similar lines, may have ran into niche competition with some forms of bear, or possibly Pandas, in regions that demanded large and sparsely populated habitat zones.

Evidence suggests that selection was continuous and continuously relentless with hominid populations, allowing little opportunity for niche expansion or radiation and niche diversification through specialization, which would have been evident in multiple sympatric hominid fossil types. Human populations went lean and mean for most of their first four million years of evolutionary development. Long term selection regimes obviously favored groups that could stay together and that could provide the necessary environment for delayed development and opportunities for learning to be maximized. In other words, selection was probably for a K-generationalization, albeit under continuously stressful circumstances. One must inquire how much a basic pattern of primitive warfare did not serve to keep hominid groups spread apart acros the landscape.

Gene-Culture Co-evolution

Socio-biology and Cultural Selection in the Human Biotic Climax

Human beings constitute a biological presence on the earth today that has been unprecedented in either natural or human history. Human biomass, as a single animal species, is probably the greatest biomass ever achieved by any single species on earth. That a single species could achieve such reproductive success and eco-systemic dominance over all other life forms in the biosphere is in one sense miraculous, and in another sense a function of the structure of the evolutionary patterning of the long run. To ignore or deny this human biological presence on earth today is to commit a fatal error of scientific judgment. It has come to constitute its own unique system of informational patterning, one that is both a part of biological information patterning in which it is rooted, and one that is separate by virtue of some fundamental and synergistic cultural differences.

Of course, the ultimate questions to be answered in this regard are what the prospects are both for long-term human survival and for the continuance of life on earth. To ask this question is not to be a fatalistic dooms-day crier or end of the world cultist. But neither is it to feign a naive and in many senses evil kind of scientific positivism that blindly believes that human beings can always work out of their own predicaments. Of course, it is a central contention of this entire work that it is entirely possible that we can work ourselves out of our own dilemmas if and when we have collectively chosen to do so. But it is also a point to be made in this chapter that we are not only the products of our nature and culture, but we are also its victims. The same natural drives and biological foundations that have made us what we are today have put us into the very predicament that we must now work ourselves out of. It appears that we must accomplish this feat not so much because of ourselves, but in spite of ourselves. This makes it rather improbable that in the long run we will be able to work it out in a satisfactory manner.

The object of this initial chapter on human information systems is to treat the special case of human biology and human evolution in order to revisit the question of the impact of human biology upon natural biological systems. Sociobiology as this is applied in anthropology would like to construe all relevant human information patterning as but an elaborate extension of evolutionary and biological theory, and therefore as a subclass of this larger theory. There is a great rage for order in doing this, in borrowing the synthetic comprehensiveness found in the biological sciences and applying it to the human social sciences where there seems to be only theoretical chaos of thought and method.

There is a sense that human beings are natural biological creatures, from which nature originates many of their basic drives, impulses, and behaviors. There is a critical sense also that to submit all our understanding of human nature and behavior to a biological model, especially in social contexts, is to be over-reductionist in our conceptioning, and to commit an error of misplaced concretization about what it is we are talking about.

It is not necessary to overrate the great danger that this kind of reductionist thinking entails for social ideologies that are based on genetic arguments. It is easy to point to instances that such arguments were used as scientific evidence to justify policies that result in racial and class discrimination against out-groups. It is easy to misappropriate "scientism" in the name of ideology, when it has been based on the over extension of reference and reductionism. But this also highlights the sensitivity and critical importance these issues play in the background of our lives.

Human beings are of course social animals. They are by nature both sexual and competitive creatures. They have an innate aggressiveness and attachment to kin-groups that leads often to violence and warfare. They have an innate drive to adapt and to survive, and there is a marked characteristic that they in general have responded predictably in equilibrium theory to maximize their reproductive rates until they have saturated the entire earth to its carrying capacity. And, in deed, in consideration of the special case of human biology, this is exactly the point.

In writing the chapters on biological information systems, I cannot but help apply as an anthropologist these same models and many of their implications to human populations that can be expected to behave in very similar ways as any other mammalian population. We have a natural instinct for survival and, I would say, an instinct to procreate and reproduce that goes beyond mere sexual impulse. These basic drives have been critically shaped by cultural patterns and institutions but in their essential and original sense they remain the products of our shared nature. I can even see a great deal of modern human motivational structure, the drive for success, the need for status, dominance, sociability, even the need for affection and human touch, as elaborated and perverted as it may often become, as being essentially rooted in the same biological drives that served our primordial predecessors in their quest for survival in the heartland of the African continent. Much that is cultural derives its strength of emotional attachment, feeling, and even "sense" from this same biological imperative.

We can also refer to human social fitness in society, and differential trait configurations of various individuals that lead to alternate forms of social selection. We might say that taller, healthier and better looking, more aggressive and selfish types approximate alpha individuals and therefore have greater reproductive advantage. "Sex" symbols are culturally fashioned and shaped in all kinds of ways, but at the basis of their attraction and allure is a very basic and crude sense of id that remains the same for all people.

It is worthwhile to attempt to understand what constitute the foundations of a genuine and non-ideological socio-biology of humankind. Applying models adopted from the study of insect societies to the issues of human societies, without taking into account, either biologically or culturally, the vast disparity between such organisms, is to commit a error of critical judgment.

At the heart of the question of fundamental and panhuman nature is the nature-nurture type of argument that has long been a central issue in many philosophies and social sciences. At our stage of evolutionary development, it is virtually impossible to clearly separate where nature begins and culture takes over. The two sets of patterns have been blended together and amalgamated in the human being such that to separate one from the other is to fundamentally destroy what it means to be human. Thus it is to state the case correctly that we cannot define what are purely natural facets of human identity or behavior that has not been molded to some degree by cultural influences. It is impossible as well to construe almost any cultural institution or pattern in any scientific way that has not some fundamental basis in human biology.

From the standpoint of evolutionary theory, we are rooted to biology by our being and our reproductive continuation. To get at a genuine sociobiology is to understand the impact that basic and universal drives for human adaptation, physical survival and reproductive success have entailed for the patterning of our history, our social organization, and our civilization.

Perhaps sociobiology is an unfortunate compound, and it might be more appropriate to simply talk of human biology. It is also, I believe, imperative that we get at the biological substrate of a general symbolic mechanism that has appeared to have critically shaped our cultural patterning and given dynamic expression to our natural behaviors for at least the last 50,000 years or more. Through such a mechanism we have accomplished a basic transformation of expression and operation of our natural character in every way. This is especially important to the extent that it has influenced distinctive patterns of expression in social and cultural life.

To tend to the basic biological drives and mechanisms that underlie human nature is to have a reformed sense of sociobiology that remains on a human plane of understanding and does not reduce everything to a level of insect ethics. I would assert that cultural and social patterning can be found rooted to the human elaboration of basic patterns of feeding and breeding that beget adaptive and reproductive fitness and positive selective success. On a very basic and primary level these patterns are transmitted lineally through kin structures, but the principle mode of this transmission is no longer simply hereditary, but necessarily by means of basic culture as well. Thus, loaded counter-evidence of rare twin studies to the contrary, it is common and easy to find numerous examples of children being adopted and raised by non-hereditary parents and who achieve success in life within the parameters basically defined by the fictive parents.

That cultural and social institutions have developed around feeding and breeding patterns in human societies that are so culturally divergent and variable is indication that these patterns are not directly linked in any causal manner to heredity or genetic information patterning. If they were more directly tied to hereditary structure, we would expect a great deal more uniformity of patterning and sense of regularity than we actually find. That true human universals have proven so elusive and rare to discover and generalize in our social sciences is a clear indication of the extent to which culture and nature have become inextricably and inexplicable tied together in our basic identity as human beings. But in this case, once again, it is a matter of mistaking effect for cause and chaotic patterning from the underlying principles of order that define that pattern. A genuine "sociobiology" must seek to get at this underlying sense of order.

Even with the Great Apes, we can find significant patterns of differential social organization between species and sub-species, for instance between Highland and lowland Gorillas, or between Pan paniscus and Pan troglodytes. This suggests that adaptive variation of social structure is widely divergent even in spite of being explained in terms of hereditary structures and trait differentials alone. If we take any of the Great Apes, and put them as infants into the care and custody of human beings, they become basically humanized to such a degree that they cannot simply rejoin their feral cousins.

For human beings at least, we are to understand basic drives underlying feeding and breeding patterns as being manipulatable through symbolic transformation of character into any number of alternative socio-cultural patterns, within "limits" that define the basic constraints of such systems as cultural and biological systems. The limits of such systems are that they lead both to adaptive and reproductive success, or at least avoid failure.

It is possible to construe warfare and even genocide between two competing societies in terms of natural"competitive exclusion in the most basic of senses. Obviously, the Carthraginians presented a permanent threat to the early Roman Republic bent as it was even then on empire building, that it could not simply ignore with impunity. That the Romans were set on a course of imperial expansionism might be interpreted in a vague way as a pattern of socio-cultural organization that begat great reproductive and adaptive success, even if this is symbolically interpreted in terms that were characteristically Roman civilization.

If they turned much of the rest of humanity within its sphere of power and control into human cattle and beasts of burden and they then adopted the ethnocentric terms to justify this to themselves and the rest of the world, it can be seen as a form of natural competition that leads to parasitism and predation of one group upon another. This is really not too different from what modern people do today with real cattle, and even indirectly, with other human beings.

It is also the case that if the Romans were feeling pressure from the proximity of the Carthraginians, this form of "pressure" was not strictly speaking population or selection in models found with almost any other species on earth. It is doubtful that the Mediterranean world that they both contemporaneously occupied was "saturated" in any sense that we understand it in evolutionary theory or that it had reached "carrying-capacity."

A case can be made that if it was any kind of pressure at all, it was that rooted in basic competitive orientations of the two cultures that was symbolically translated into the need for action. It had little directly to do with the reproductive and adaptational success of either the Romans or the Carthraginians as simply human beings. Both groups would have been much better off in the long run if they had remained to till the fertile lands at home than to adventure abroad with arms if it had simply been a matter of biological success.

Obviously, each posed a kind of threat to the other that was primarily symbolic and had little directly to do with their respective control over their own biotic regimes. This threat was to be seen at a rarefied level of the state that in fact had little directly to do with the daily concerns of any individual in feeding or breeding. But undoubtedly the symbolic sense of threat could be made to seem real enough and "natural" enough to the citizens of both states, that war between them became a foregone conclusion, and for both it became, de facto, a struggle for survival.

Thus, it is important to attempt to understand how basic drives tied to patterns of feeding and breeding success in the daily lives of individuals and families within the context of a common population, become symbolically translated and transformed in those people's lives. This symbolic transformation gains expression and action in indirect ways that have little to do with the actual biological predicaments of those individuals, but with the same force and power as if they were fundamental biological predicaments. And in such contexts, symbolically shaped actions and behavior patterns come to assume the aspect of being natural and as if a matter of survival, and lead to similar results.

We therefore cannot attempt to explain the transformation of breeding and feeding patterns in human society or history on the basis of genetic endowment and their phenotypic expression without invoking the basic sense of their symbolic transformation, or what I would call "culturation" of human nature. To attempt to explain such symbolic patterns purely in terms of genetic informational transmission and the trait configurations derivable from these is to miss the entire point altogether.

Of course, the symbolic transformation of these innate patterns is itself on some level innate as well, and this begs explanation that will be more fully taken up in the third part on human systems theory. The natural evolution of human culture and symbolic capacity is a very important subject and involves an entire suite of trait complexes that serve to characterize the human species as unique on earth. The dilemma of this related question is that it is hard to step outside of the circle of our own symbolic reasoning to be able to construe it in itself in a scientifically objective manner. This leads us back to the hen and egg problem as the nature versus nurture dilemma. Any synthesis of human nature must generally transcend this dilemma in such a way as to take both nature and nurture in interaction into account.

I would say therefore that basic drives related to feeding and breeding especially and the basic symbolic transformations that accompany these patterns constitute the genuine socio-biological primes for understanding human patterning in terms relatable to natural evolution. But at every point, the mechanism of symbolic transformation of these drives and patterns must be taken up as central to their resulting expression in human life and social patterning.

A typical example of the ideological misappropriation of sociobiological thinking is the interpretation of complex social patterns characteristic of some endemically poor populations that link "cads" with patterns of r-selection and "dads" with patterns of K-selection. Analogically this makes sense, and that poor people experience higher rates of infant mortality, higher rates of mortality generally, and higher birth rates, are well known facts. That they are more r-selected genetically than the rich who are show greater K-fitness is a kind of socio-biological suggestion that leaves much to be desired.

We can say that in a social and mostly symbolic sense, the rich people are inclined to follow a more "K-like" pattern than the poor because it is to their best advantage to do so, not because it directly enhances their biological survivorship or genetic reproducibility, which is probably about the same as for other "r-like" people, but because it is the symbolically defined way of achieving social success. It may have achieved the same impetus that natural selection and fitness entails for organisms and populations, but it is symbolically defined, not naturally expressed. We can compare this K-patterning to the poor people who are more inclined towards an "r-type" pattern, but this has nothing to do with their genetic profiles and everything to do with their socio-structural positioning in a larger society. The real danger is to take the next step, because if we correlate being black with being poor, we are liable to come out with a genetic-based racial argument that does not favor being black in the world.

What is critically missing from such arguments is an understanding of the basic linkages of the mother to the child in the transmission of cultural and symbolic patterning, and how these can be disrupted on a very basic level. Also important to construe is the role that father can play in that patterning, especially in industrial based societies. We do not then talk so much about "r-selected" poor people who cannot hold down jobs, are prone to drugs and promiscuous relationships, and make cads rather than dads. Instead we can talk more realistically about "unfulfilled" human beings who have suffered socio-cultural deprivation on very basic levels of their identity and being, especially in complex class stratified state societies. We can extend this kind of argument to claims made about alcoholism, mental illness, and homosexuality. In fact, almost any kind of social deviance can be explained away in terms of socio-biological ideology that conflates and confuses genes and culture.

To take the other end of this kind of problem, we can consider the social patterning of "K-selected" rich people. Such people usually set the standards for symbolic legitimization in their societies. They set standards for beauty, for success, for achievement and adaptation, and for fashion. These are by and large fictive symbolic and sumptuary standards that lead to the channeling of basic natural drives in their society. They are the standards by which all poor people must define themselves by as participants within the larger society.

It is a common pattern among rich people to erect symbolic barriers between themselves and others. This can be understood in terms of attempting to retain and monopolize exclusive control of social resources to their own private advantage, even at the expense of the society as a whole or of other members within it. This comes to bear especially on the problems of marriagability, occupational specialization and control, and inheritance (not strictly speaking biological inheritance, but inheritance of movable wealth and fixed assets tied to land ownership and territoriality patterns.)

That such retention and control of resources comes to focus on issues of marriage, occupational monopolization and inheritance has a great deal to do with social ideologies of innate superiority and natural fitness. It has much to do with structural patternings of the society in which they occur, for instance with the problem of hoarding wealth, both of which tie back to symbolic translation of basic patterns of breeding and feeding. But they in fact have little directly to do with actual issues of biological evolutionary success.

The richest people appear to naturally seek class closure about their own kind such that they can set themselves apart as a separate caste not unlike the queen bees of a beehive. Of course, traditional societies can be found that link the redistribution of wealth to status in a society, making such hoarding patterns inimical. And this is the trick, as the rich are not hoarding wealth and power and control because it confers greater reproductive advantage of biological fitness, but because it confers greater symbolic status in society. It is not hard to find numerous examples of inbred European royalty who would have been selected out in any natural cut of the deck, but by virtue of their privileged status enjoyed the best their worlds had to offer as long as they lived.

We can see patterns of caste-like closure of the rich as a form of competitive exclusion of all other elements of society. As such it is a kind of endgame, a logical outcome of the fact of competitive survival in human society in the first place. But it is a game that has been symbolic transformed in its fundamental primes, and does not happen without the fact of its symbolic transformation. It has all the force and power of natural selection, and frequently takes on naturalized symbolic meanings and frames of reference, but it remains fundamentally symbolic in its derivation and form. We might find that eating Chitlins and collard greens is healthier on average than dining on fine wine and humming bird tongues, and in a strictly biological model this should confer greater adaptive and reproductive fitness to the former feeding patterns compared to the latter. But we might be hard pressed to convince either the poor or the rich of this notion.

This digression does little to help us explicate the primes of a more genuine science of socio-biology, or more appropriately, of human biology in society, except that it does point the way beyond the fallacies of misplaced concretization, overemphasis and reductionism that our socio-biological ideologies are prone to.

I will state the following principles:

1. Human biology is exactly like any other form of biology in that it is evolutionarily concerned primarily with the issues of adaptive and reproductive success. These constitute basic drives in human existence, in the same way as it constitutes the biological and evolutionary imperatives for any other organism or population. Human genes, like all genes, are selfish.

2. These drives come to express themselves socially especially in terms of feeding and breeding patterns that occur within the society.

3. These drives and their resulting patterns are fundamentally transformed through basic and innate mechanisms of human symbolization that are socially and culturally shaped, such that there is no pure instance of natural human evolutionary drives that are not symbolically transformed by the society that they occur within.

4. Because human societies have achieved evolutionary success in basic ways of survival and reproduction, generally speaking social interactions and relations between human beings tend to occur in saturated systems where populations tend toward an endemic equilibrium. In such conditions, social competition can be expected to characterize most social interactions in a way that is symbolically organized and expressed, and comes to take on patterned forms of selection and fitness that are homologous to natural evolutionary patterns. Even social organizations and examples of inclusive fitness must be construed from the standpoint of potentially innate competitive relations, especially in external, inter-social and out-group contexts.

5. Patterns of social organization, interaction and competition often has the character of being natural, but this is due to the symbolic appropriation of innate drives and to their symbolic internalization as if natural.

6. Human beings are therefore socially prone or predisposed in their character to behave in ways that are symbolically justified as being "natural" but are not necessarily connected to the actual circumstances of adaptive survival and reproductive success of the individual beings involved. This can be called cultural displacement as a result of symbolic displacement.

7. Whereas all other forms of life known to us have no choice but to follow the biological and evolutionary imperatives set down for them genetically, the symbolic transformation of human biological drives and mechanisms of their social expression has given us a choice. We do not "have" to behave in ways that nature originally constrained us to behave in.

8. Nevertheless, the innate foundations of our character dispositions and drives and even of our symbolic mechanisms entails that probably we will choose by habit to behave in ways that are most naturalized. We will seek the maximization of our own symbolic sense of social fitness and social selection in the world.

9. Therefore, human beings as social animals are prone to repeat certain patterns of competitive behavior that emphasize exclusive fitness at most levels of society and that lead logically to competitive exclusion that takes expression, among other things, in forms of human violence and conflict. Even acts of altruism, as for example blind patriotism in war or fanaticism to a religious dogma, must be construed by way of contrast to excluded and alternate orientations with which people must compete as members of some social group.

10. Our symbolic systems, including our sciences, will tend to take forms of rationalization that serve to ideologically legitimize and justify our actions as if these were natural, and that serve to integrate our subjective experience with our collectively shared worldview and common basis of knowledge of the world.

Whereas almost every other form of life behaves in ways dictated by their nature, out of the necessity of achieving biological success, only humans are capable and prone to behaving in ways that are symbolically naturalized. Human behavior is never necessarily natural as being dictated by their fundamental nature, except of course and paradoxically, in as much as symbolization is a part of their nature. Thus, most of what humans do, beyond the most basic of reflexes and natural needs like defecation or breathing, is in a fundamental sense symbolically arbitrary and therefore also naturally unnecessary.

With these postulates in mind, it is to be seen that a revised and genuinely scientific and human sociobiology is upon a human creature with a fundamentally unfinished and therefore different nature than those described in unrevised ideologies that implicitly justify Hitlerian policies of genocide in the world. This is not merely an unfortunate rhetorical claim. It is an accurate and objective statement and estimate of the ideological and rational status of an unreflexive sociobiology as a system of natural information theory.

It does leave room for sociobiology as a meaningful scientific contribution to the understanding of human nature and humankind in our world. We are prone to being competitive creatures by our nature, and this competitiveness frequently leads us to very unnatural forms of violence being perpetrated in our shared history as if this were natural. Much of this violence takes a homologous patterning to that of "natural selection" in life. We must seek to objectively understand this endemic patterning of violence that seems to be such an innate part of our character if we are to discover or invent means of controlling its expression in our common future. And this is the role that sociobiology can serve for us in the world, or fail. And it should serve as a warning to all those who would adopt an uncritical and naive faith in sociobiologism as the ultimate explanation for human behavior.

At the heart therefore of a revised sociobiology would be what I call the social competition hypothesis, which in its basic form was outlined above. I am not claiming that social competition explains human evolution, but human evolution eventuated in patterns of endemic human social competition. Neither would I say that long term patterns of social competition among human beings has resulted in any significant patterns of human biological evolution or even in patterns of social selection leading to greater human biological fitness. If anything, I think, it has mitigated against this kind of thing, unless we can use a kind of competition hypothesis to explain the apparent relations between Homo saipiens and Homo Neanderthalensus.

I would claim that most human historical and many archaeological patterns can be understood and explained in terms of this basic hypothesis, and this pattern of human social competition has driven the rise and development of human civilization as a trans-culturative process. Indirectly, this has resulted in tremendous evolutionary success for the human species in terms of simple adaptive and reproductive success, in spite of a lot of blood loss and surfeit of love lost along the way.

In the model of social competition, I would not invoke selection mechanisms like "kin-selection" as anything naturally meaningful, as for instance in its application to insect societies. Human symbolic altruism is not equitable or reducible to hypothetical genetic altruism used to explain patterns of inclusive fitness found in nature, unless it is an example of a mother jumping in a fire or a lake to save her children. It is easy enough to point to cases of young mothers abandoning or even killing their offspring as counter-examples to any such natural instinct.

Human social competition best characterizes the general predicament of human beings, as biological organisms, in the symbolic framework of their societies that are almost by historical definition saturated to their biological carrying capacity through human adaptive and reproductive success. It tends to situations where human social organization has generally resulted in periodic surpluses and shortages, especially of food, that result in cycles of feast or famine.

The history of traditional China as the great agrarian state is the perfect laboratory test case for the competition hypothesis. Warfare was endemic to such a state, and rarely has the state known an extended period of either domestic tranquility or of successful imperialistic expansionism beyond its own natural geo-physical realm. This has been in spite of the fact that it has greatly influenced the societies around it both by trans-culturational processes and by means of natural human immigration. But also characteristic of the history of the Chinese state have been periodic 15 to 25 year cycles of endemic famine, that has led to recurrence of human starvation, mass death and even endemic forms of cannibalism. This would suggest a breaking down of even very basic constraints concerning human social relations and "inclusive fitness." We can account for these cycles by the agrarian character of this civilization that leads to local overpopulation with each generation.

In the competition hypothesis, the appropriation of surplus created by a state organization or a society must be given great importance as a material mechanism that has great symbolic implication. Surplus wealth or exclusive access to resources translates into enhanced adaptive-reproductive success, not only for the individual, but for the kin-group of which the individual is a part, and by extension, to the population as a whole.

It has underlaid materialist theories of human history and cultural patterning. In general, where there are expectations of future failure, which can be considered to be endemic to all human societies, and that can be linked to a chronic insecurity of death and reproductive failure, there is great symbolic attachment placed on the accumulation and control of surplus wealth (i.e., the products of work). Material surplus and control of wealth comes to acquire tremendous symbolic status and importance in human society.

Related to this symbolic valuation of material surplus is a notion derivative of an emphasis upon human competition in social interaction and organization. It is the notion that the expectation of future success or failure will only be achieved as the result of other people's relative gain or loss. In other words, a competitive framework of human social relations inherently fosters a worldview and model of limited good that is a reflection of the competitive saturation that characterizes most human societies. This conception of limited good drives social relations even when in fact there is a net surplus. It is a symbolic sense that surplus can only be achieved by means of competition in a framework of limited good.

Thus, the notions of surplus and limited good form a kind of symbolic feedback system by which human society comes to organize itself in ways that on one hand retains internal equilibrium within a structured manner of human social relations. On the other hand, it would govern the course of relations between different societies. For instance, understanding of human exploitation recurrent in human interactions is logically forthcoming from such a model, as it follows that surplus gained by means of others would be a rational expectation of such a model to working relationships, one that can be symbolically justified in many ways.

It is not my purpose at this point to fully elaborate a model of competitive dynamics in human social evolution. I will leave this project for another work. Suffice it to state here that we can see competitive dynamics recurrent throughout human history in most social contexts that we can observe.

Elaboration of human competition theory relates it to competition theory as this has so far been explicated in evolutionary biology. In particular, it is the use of this model of competitive dynamics to explain processes of cultural differentiation and diffusion that appear to be a natural long-term process of extended histories of cultural development. In traditional cultural settings, cultural patternings appear to split off and differentiate in a divergent pattern much as species do. The process of cultural divergence appears to be much more rapid than that of biological divergence, and appears to be basically independent of the later form of divergence.

In other words, a culture can evolve in a sympatric manner in relation to other cultures in a phyletic manner without necessarily invoking the genetic development of the population involved. Also, historically speaking, while evolutionary divergence is a one way process, and convergence in evolution is only superficial and apparent similarities of phenotypic traits disguising basic morphological incongruities, there is ample evidence of "back borrowing," cultural loss and re-convergence in human history that suggests cultural transmission processes are much more dynamic and fluid than normal human genetic processes.

Related to this issue of cultural divergence is a notion of the process of cultural integration, internal differentiation and stratification that is quit common in human societies, and reflects a pattern that is homologous with the iso-clinal stratification and trophic-taxonomic stratification of natural eco-systems. Subgroups particularly isolate themselves within societies, usually based on differential patterns of resource allocation, such that there are thresholds and boundaries to crossing and passing into and out of such groups. These groups serve to maintain a separate functional and symbolic identity compared to other groups or the society as a whole.

How cultural divergence and cultural differentiation and integration can be explained in terms of a social competition hypothesis is to be taken up later. It is important to emphasize that these kinds of patterns appear to be very analogous, or homologous to natural patterns governing speciation and intra-specific variations within genetic populations.

The common sociobiological framework for understanding these similarities of pattern is two-fold:

First, they arise from the same biological source that is the dynamics of reproductive and adaptive survival in saturated social contexts.

Secondly, they follow the same competitive patterns in areal distribution and social organization by creatures that are both social and natural at the same time.

Thus they are behaving naturally to similar basic contexts as any social animal might be expected to behave. And many of the outcomes are essentially the same in both contexts.

At the same time, the basic differences between purely biological social systems and human social systems must be understood clearly and concisely. Human social systems are symbolically and culturally organized. Other animal social systems are naturally organized by evolution. If lions prey upon cattle, they do so primarily for food. If people hunt game, they are doing the same, unless it is done for sport. When one human preys on another, even if it is rapacious or cannibalistic, it is not so much for food or even agonistic sexual advantage, as it is for other symbolic reasons. Whereas processes of natural selection underlie the latter forms of pattern, processes of cultural selection underlie the former and distinguish it. The concept of cultural selection will be taken up shortly. Suffice it to say here that these processes are synergistic patterns that have been the outcome of special trait-configurations of human evolution, and are unique to the human species. They therefore cannot be sufficiently explained in general terms of natural selection and human genetics alone.

The most useful and insightful aspects of conventional sociobiological thinking do not involve ideas of altruistic genes or twin studies and bell curves of intelligence or one-to-one genetic personality traits or even gene-meme models. Rather it concerns gene-culture coevolutionary models of cultural transmission as these are held to be closely linked to models of biological transmission. The greatest elaboration of this has been by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza.

A good case can be made that for major part of human evolution, cultural patterning was held tightly to the ground and was close to human evolution itself. Indeed, so close were these that we cannot explain culture derived from language, big-brains, manual dexterity, and long human developmental cycles, and all the rest, unless we invoke genetic and evolutionary models of natural selection. At the same time, it is probably the case that we are relatively so hairless because we have evolved trait-configurations that favor wearing garments. The ability to make and use well fine tools may have proven to be a self-selective kind of mechanism that helped to promote bigger brains, hand-eye coordination, manual dexterity, etc. Thus, nature is deeply implicated in all of human culture, and culture has from the beginning implicated itself in the evolution of human nature. This is the central biological paradox of being human in a natural world.

As long as we can hypothesize a close linkage between biological lineage structure and the traditional cultural contexts in which these are found, and also a kind of cultural and trait orientation that would have permitted some place for natural selection to operate on human fitness values and differential trait-configurations, we can claim some degree of linkage between cultural and genetic transmission.

To the extent that we can find patterns of warfare and institutions like slavery, where individuals are removed forcibly from their own lineage structures and transplanted to other frameworks, we must accept that the cultural-genetic linkage began diverging somewhat in its patterning.

The foundation for understanding both the linkages and divergence of gene-culture co-evolutionary structures of information patterning is to understand that they are inherently and by design complementary structures, but not isomorphic. In general, they co-occur in a manner of indirect correlation, but it is virtually impossible to pin down direct causal relationships especially in a point by point manner of direct gene trait-cultural trait correspondence.

Culture is by definition exclusively environmental and phenotypic in expression, even though the human capacity for culture has been the product of innate evolutionary development. Thus, to strictly apply genetic arguments to cultural transmission is like applying Larmarckian solutions to genetic transmission.

The co-evolutionary character of gene-culture development has been an intrinsic feedback process between the conditioning of the human environment which has favored certain trait-configurations, in resonance with the internal trait configuration and genetic patterning of the human species, such that it has resulted in its own unique resonance patterning.

So closely tied in fact are gene-culture development process that if a human being is born bereft of a cultural context, it is not complete as a human being. Rare examples of feral children and common examples of extreme cultural deprivation illustrate the results of a "half-baked" human being shorn of any "naturalistic" cultural contexts for development. By the same token, cultural development has required the evolution of genetic trait-complexes that are uniquely and characteristically human. These have little to do with homosexuality and alcoholism, but a great deal to do with big brains, deft fingers and long-term post-natal development periods. Human nature has evolved to make culture possible, and we cannot simply substitute a Chimpanzee or monkey and raise it in a human world and have it turn out exactly like a human being. A humanized monkey is almost as half-baked as a primatized human being.

Again, it is not the point of this chapter to fully elucidate the aspects of human anthropogenesis in our natural history. The point is to emphasize the degree and special character of the complementary and interdependent relationship between human culture and human nature. We cannot fully understand the one without the other, and both are necessary for a complete human being.

This relationship evolved in the framework of a naturalistic cultural context, one that was fundamentally social in character. It makes sense to speak of the externalization of human biology and nature as culture and the internalization of culture as if it were natural. Humans obviously came to devise for themselves some minimal habitat that served as the basic cultural context driving subsequent human evolutionary development. The general features of this context are vaguely identifiable in outline, though the exact character of the determinations it involved remain a mystery.

The externalization of human nature had the consequence of loosening the bonds that genetic and natural processes had upon human behavior and subsequent selection. To some extent, it led to the substitution of human cultural traits, and a dependency upon these traits, for an exclusive dependency upon genetically determined traits. The clearest example of this is to distinguish the strict limitations that instinct imposes on most animals, compared to the lack of obvious instinctual patterns among human beings. This is not a clear-cut issue, as cultural patterning and some post-natal learning is evident in many animals, albeit in a very restricted and ungeneralized ways.

The resonance patterning between human nature and culture therefore is a very basic and important system that must be understood as a dynamic mechanism underlying gene-culture co-evolutionary development. It is the basis for what I would call the anthropological dialectic that has resulted in the long-term synthesis of human civilization. It was an achievement of humankind that did not come over night in a single act of creation. It was hard won over millions of years of evolutionary development, trial and error, and chance discoveries like that of fire and tool making and clothing.

At the heart of gene-culture co-evolution rests several concepts about culture that from an ecosystemic and larger evolutionary perspective, must be elucidated out of context to a discussion of human information systems. Cultural patterning constitutes a kind of coherent informational system on several levels and this has been elucidated by several anthropologists through the years. The point here is to emphasize the remarkable degree to which this patterning is homologous with and in many instances has similar consequences as does the evolutionary patterning of species and ecosystems. Functionally there is convergence in the two patterns, as much as one has substituted for the other in human evolutionary development, one has come to serve the same set of purposes as the other. The aspects of divergence and differentiation of cultural groupings has already been mentioned.

At this point, I would like to mention as well the internalized coherence and symbolic integration of any cultural patterning that is based on its material and adaptive functioning and survival in the world, as well as upon its reproductive continuation through time.

Comparable to natural ecosystems, cultural systems exhibit a certain kind of equilibrium and stability in their patterning that usually renders them quite conservative and yet adaptive to change. This sense of dynamic and homeostatic equilibrium of cultural patterning confers a sense of direction, momentum, inertia and resistance to cultural development and patterning that maintains its stability over the long term. Just as with populations and gene flow, individuals and sub-groupings may regularly pass between cultural boundaries. These populations bring not only new genetic information into the framework of a culture, but new ideas, information, "memes" and "cultural traits" that can influence and be adopted by the recipient culture. Each culture exacts its own price of admission from the individual. This price is usually one of alternation and reform of the individual to the symbolic framework of the host culture.

Just as two sets of inter-specifically DNA are fundamentally incompatible, and lead to zygotic reproductive isolation, so also symbolic systems of integration of one culture are generally incompatible with the integration of another, especially radically divergent or distant cultural orientation. The two symbolic cultural orientations will clash and cause dissonance between them, resulting in either displacement, annihilation or some form of amalgamation between them.

People in general have strong ethnocentric commitments to their parent cultural system, and it provides a degree of symbolic coherence and stability in their lives and worlds that they do not easily forsake. While cultural orientations can tolerate a wide range of deviance of patterning within them, this range is usually strictly bounded by sets of constraints operating on many levels.

The point of this digression is to emphasize the degree of correspondence existing between cultural and genetic systems, as informational systems, such that many of the principles applied to the understanding of ecosystems and evolutionary systems, can be applied as well, albeit in modified form, to cultural systems. This is in part due to the fact that in both systems, the central agency is the human being, and in both cases, the principal purpose of each system is the reproductive survival and well being of the individual human being as a biological organism. This is more than coincidence, as it implies both homology of identity of basic structures underlying each system, and it implies a common origin and fundamental interdependency of both systems.

The argument here, unlike that found in most sociobiological theories, is that the principal of equilibrium of cultural systems is not genetic, at least not directly. It is more the mechanism of symbolic integration of reality that achieves a transformation of genetic-based trait configurations and their related functions to a higher level of productive and problem-solving information patterning. Symbolic integration of cultural reality is in terms of cultural development an achievement that did not come overnight. As stated previously, it was worked out from years of evolutionary experience and natural experimentation.

At the heart of understanding the mechanism of symbolic integration underlying cultural equilibrium is the ability of symbolisms not only to provide a sense of certainty and unity about human reality and worldview, but to give concerted and organized direction to human action, such that human beings can behave in rational and purposively deliberate ways. It allows people to behave in ways not fully governed by their instincts, but often with the same strength and power that instinctual action patterns appear to exhibit in nature. Of course this action is usually directed towards the issues of adaptive survival of the group, and within the framework of the group some form of a concept of inclusive fitness of its members will be articulated in symbolic form.

I would say that symbolisms in culture not only provide a passive call and framework for action, but they are in themselves a form of action, and by their presence as transformational operators, make action necessary and even naturally compulsive. In other words, they come to take the place of instinct in human behavior patterning, and we cannot easily violate their implicit sanctions and constraints for our behavior even if we wanted to. They thus can be seen to serve as intrinsic, embodied or internalized mechanisms that channel our behavior on subconscious levels and over which we have only partial control. Thus, they have a powerful hold on human nature, and conformity to their mandate in our lives for most people appears quite normal and even natural.

We therefore behave in ways that are transparent to ourselves and invisible in our daily lives. We do things not because we say to ourselves, "this is what I want to do" but because even our wants and needs are symbolically circumscribed and channeled by our culture. Thus such a statement as "I want to" becomes after the fact a tautology, a rationalization, and the beginning of a course of action that was already set in motion.

Of course, just as genetic predetermination appears as incomplete in human behavior, so also is symbolic transformation basically an underdetermined system. It has been a system evolved by evolution, and it has been remarkably successful in permitting human adaptation. But because, I believe, it is a system built upon biological informational patterning, deriving much of its force from it, it remains essentially incomplete and partial. This entails that it can and does change, in a form of cultural speciation and selectionism that is remarkably similar in form and even function to natural speciation and selection, but it also is both very flexible and susceptible to failure. Cultural systems do suffer loss and extermination.

The incompleteness of this system accounts for what I believe to be the fundamental insecurity or antinomality of human nature, a sublime sense of being unfinished, that plagues people to their graves. There is a sense that a herd of bison does not greatly suffer the loss of one of their numbers, and that a bison does not question greatly its place in the natural scheme of things. If one bison slips beneath the ice into a freezing river of death, the other bison look on, not only helpless, but without fundamental concern. Human beings for the most part do not have this luxury of being well within the lap of nature. Human nature is an eternally unhappy thing. One of the results is the ever present and tragic possibility of our own deliberate suicide.

The materialism implicit to a competition hypothesis presents the other side of the coin of the symbolic mechanism. Not only does it allow the internalization of symbolic constructs in the life of the individual, such that these take the force of human nature, but it also permits simultaneously, and necessarily, the externalization of these same feelings, emotions and sense of nature upon a physical and material world. Thus human beings become, by means of their cultural symbolisms, context bound to a world of their own making.

The world of external relations and interactions that they do develop, especially in a social sense, comes to assume the character of a naturalized order. This sense of externalized order also tends to exhibit patterns that are characteristically genetic, not just because they are symbolically naturalized. It is also because they serve the same purposes as genetic patterning in human adaptation and survival as these are exhibited in structural-functional ways in social organization and patterning of behavior of the human social animal.

The close linkage between gene-culture co-evolution arises from the deep origins of anthropogenesis. Through most of human natural history, there has been an essential complementariness and unity of pattern between human biological organization as a population and human cultural organization. This has come to express itself especially in patterns of human heredity and kinship, migration and eco-systemic adaptation. For the most part, the same mechanisms of transmission of genetic information have also served as the primary mechanisms for the transmission of cultural information. This has been tied to lineage structure and kinship, and the regulation of reproduction through marriage institutions. For most of natural human history, genes and cultural pattern have been closely bound to one another at the level of the family, and most traditional cultural orientations, indeed, all cultures, incorporate some model of a family at its core.

The form of human genetic transmission is always considered to be generationally vertical in that genes must always be passed from parent to child. A case can be made that migration that introduces new genes to a population is a form of "diagonal" transmission, but strictly speaking, sexual union or coitus and reproduction must take place before transmission can be achieved. The transmission of cultural information on a very basic level, in terms of the early development of children, is mostly always vertical as well, achieved principally by the mother or primary care giver of an infant. That there is near complete gene-culture isomorphism of identity at this early stage is given. The only difference is in the case of fictitious relations of adoption of young infants by surrogate parents that represent a true form of diagonal cultural transmission.

A large part of the essential conservatism of culture and its resistance to change comes from the fact of this primary unity of gene-culture at the early stages. It entails that basic culture is deeply ingrained in our character, and that it is isomorphic for the most part with our genetic identity within a lineage structure. A great deal about secondary cultural institutions represent an investment of limited and critical resources to the symbolic and behavioral elaboration, reinforcement and protection of this central core at the heart of culture.

Gene-culture co-evolution splits apart after the early stages, and the fundamental differences between the two forms of development become more apparent when it is considered that culture can be transmitted, not in tact, but in part, unlike genetic transmission which is always intrinsically whole. Culture can be transmitted by means that are fundamentally horizontal and diagonal as well as being vertical. This means that other care-givers and society in general begins increasingly to play a part in the symbolic socialization of the infant and in the redirection of the basic drives of the infant, even before the first day of birth. It also means that when migration takes place, and a person enters a different society, that individual carries symbolisms, ideas, habits, knowledge and even feelings, that can be transferred in part to the host society without genetic transmission being required.

In formal and formulaic models of gene-culture transmission, diagonal transmission is recognized as the degree of cultural transmission achieved cross-generationally by means other than through the parents and principal lineage structure. It is accomplished through the intervention of other care-givers in the life and development of the child, and continues throughout the life of the individual, in effect and secondary reinforcement. Schooling and the instruction of age cohorts and classes by teachers is effectively a form of diagonal transmission. In general, diagonal transmission is a much more rapid process than vertical transmission, and can effect therefore much more rapid rates of symbolic transformation, but it does not reach as deeply into the nature of the human being as does purely vertical transmission.

Horizontal transmission is even more rapid and at times instantaneous than diagonal transmission, as broadcast transmission can reach very wide mass audiences at the same time. Horizontal transmission is effectively the transmission of cultural information intra-generationally but also, in a sense, it transcends all generational boundaries. It can be the source of greatest change and mobilization of socio-cultural resources, and, at the same time, it can have the most disruptive consequences upon a society. It can lead to changes so rapid, that the traditional modes of vertical and diagonal transmission are effectively abnegated or reversed in their consequences. In such contexts of revolutionary change, as noted by Margaret Mead, it is often the children who teach the parents.

Thus cultural systems are fundamentally more open than genetic systems, which means, among other things, that they tend to change at rates much more rapid than genetic systems even if only vertical transmission is achieved or predominant and the culture is extremely isolated and conservative. Cultural drift is much more marked and dramatic in its effects than genetic drift. It also entails systemically that cultures can undergo periodic oscillatory cycles, much as evolutionary ecosystems do, in much more rapid and dramatic ways.

Unlike patterns of speciation that are always divergent, cultural systems can be convergent as well. While in genetic theory we talk about gene flow and migration, in cultural theory we can also talk about cultural diffusion and acculturation. Thus, processes of acculturation and transculturation of information, people and material resources, recurs frequently across cultural boundaries, both ways at once, and can result in the rapid emergence of new systems from the amalgamation and integration of old ones, even within a single generation.

A consequence of this in part is that the larger historical patterning across cultural groupings exhibits some disparity with that of purely genetic populations, such that the wider the area and longer the time in question, the greater the gulf and magnitude of disparity between gene-culture co-evolution. One important kind of disparity is that intercultural systems of information transmission can often be as destabilizing and a potent agency for change as they are a source of integration. In genetic systems, gene flow across population boundaries is usually considered a great homogenizing force unless there is relative isolation and the gene flow is intermittent and one-way.

Also unlike patterns of genetic transmission, which is always a one-way process and always historically irreversible, patterns of cultural transmission are always two-way and reversible. Thus cultural transmission can have an inherent historical resonance affect that is absent for genetic transmission systems. Again, this form of resonance leads to a more dynamic and inherently less stable system.

Comparison of patterns of cultural and genetic transmission leads to a critical understanding of the principle mechanism of transmission of culture. This mechanism of cultural transmission is different than the mechanism of genetic transmission. Cultural transmission as a two-way process leads to the understanding of such information systems as communication. It is my contention that this mechanism is essentially that of language and its structural patterning is essentially linguistic. We can say that in anthropogenesis, the mother "coo-cooing" the young infant was probable the single biggest and most important agency of gene-culture co-evolution.

We cannot safely consider culture as an information system without recognizing the mechanism of language as the central vehicle and medium of this system and its dynamic articulation. It is again beyond the purview of this digression, which is about human sociobiology, to fully explicate the linguistic aspects of human evolutionary development. Suffice it to say that we cannot properly consider the evolution of human culture without imposing some form of language as at the core of this development. Proto-language may have not only been aural-oral, but may have included hand-signing and even body language and posturing.

From a theoretical standpoint, if language is a the principle medium of culture, then language as linguistics must be construed from the standpoint of the role it plays in the symbolic transformation of the human organism from an unfinished feral state of nature to an equally unfinished domestic state of civilization. I make the case for a full-fledged symbolic linguistics, but this must wait its own work.

There has been a great deal of speculation upon a language acquisition device and a language bio-gram hypothesis. Without a doubt, the development of the natural capacity for language was the single greatest accomplishment of human evolution. I would say that human intelligence, seen in the conventional problem-solving manner, and even the developmental organization of the modern human brain itself, cannot be understood apart from the central role it has played in the articulation and use of language. At the same time, if we are to seek a symbolic structure of language, we must also look to a linguistic structure of human symbolization. Thus, if we are to consider the universal design principles of a true system of language, we must also consider their relationship as principles of symbolic design.

A fascinating issue is the consideration of the sociobiological implications of human language as the equivalent of genetic coding of information. This is the foundation of historical linguistics and comparative linguistics, which has been the scientific basis for linguistics. Words take on a function not unlike that of genes or more specifically alleles and the structural patterning of words in language is the cultural equivalent to the genetic patterning of DNA in the genome. Words are little symbolic devices, or molecules of meaning, that are transmittable between people within the framework of a common, shared linguistic code. The structural and historical patterning of words, and their change, like genetic mutation, is surprisingly regular and consistent enough to be studied in a predictive and scientific manner.

Thus, taxonomic trees for language families have been constructed that are not unlike taxonomic trees found in the natural history record. Rates of change have been recorded and considered to be relatively constant, like a linguistic clock, under ideal conditions of linguistic-cultural transmission, that are not unlike the molecular RNA clock found to occur in genetic transmission. In fact, so closely tied are these aspects of linguistic and genetic historical reconstruction, that linguistic evidence is often directly compared to genetic evidence in the reconstruction of human history. It is assumed that the rise and development of language, say the family of Indo-European languages, is closely attached to the rise and development of genetic distributions of humanity that can be essentially referred to as Indo-European. It comes as no surprise that the principle proponents of gene-culture co-evolution have also been the some of the primary scholars of Indo-European migration. What was found in studies by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza was that even among early Indo-European pioneering communities, there must have been some degree of miscegenation and gene flow from the original predecessors and the invading tribes of Indo-European ancestry. If there was genetic transmission across cultural boundaries of human populations, then there was definitely also cultural transmission occurring as well.

Understanding the central role played by language in cultural transmission processes, leads naturally to a speculation of pre-oral cultural systems that are both very closely tied to genetic transmission structures, and that can be considered to be therefore both proto-linguistic in character and to probably be extremely conservative. To understand such a pre-oral system of information, we must grasp what an oral system is, as this has been explicated especially by linguists who have been interested in the so-called noetic transformation of humankind. It must have constituted an early and prolonged "information revolution" which gradually but with increasing rapidity spread throughout the primitive human world.

Proto-language had to have something to attach itself to. Young children, long before they speak, take notice of things in their world. They point, touch, grab and squeeze, and attempt to manipulate everything they can get hold of. They often try to put these things into their mouth, as if to eat them or at least taste them. Soon they begin emitting sounds that at least from an adult standpoint appear to be incoherent and at best in mimicry of the adult sounds they hear from birth. Children at this point come to recognize objects in their environments, and shapes and basic forms that they come to transfer onto other similar kinds of objects and forms. They do this passively even without naming or linguistic articulation. They gesticulate linguistically rather than articulate.

Whatever the original form of the things that constituted human proto-language, I believe that it had to attach itself to things that were common in the shared environment and that moved with the people as they traveled about. This can be certain material objects like stones and bones and sticks and leaves. It can be other life forms that commonly crossed their paths, not unlike the calling systems of other primates. It can also be things like the moon, the sun, the stars and clouds or their shadows, that seemed to always be over their shoulders wherever they went. Pointing fingers or things and waving seem like good things to do. Gesticulating would give emphasis to these gestures, especially if the gesticulation were consonant or in mimicry of another's gesticulations connected to the same association. Thus gesture-gesticulation attached to environmental cues appears to be a good candidate for an early word symbol.

Oral cultures are distinct in human history as they are generally considered to be very conservative. Oral cultures cultivate a form of language and repetition that permits great mimetic capacity for storing information. Oral cultures typically exhibit a form of reasoning that is analogical and strictly speaking pre-logical or even at times very illogical unless we perhaps enter within the symbolic systems they embody. Poetry and song arise out of oral traditions, as do dance and music. All oral cultures have very well developed religious systems that include magic, some form of animism and mythico-ritual process that regulate human social relationships. These religious symbolic systems typically enshrine the traditional values and lore of the people in ways that are made naturally coherent and consistent for the people, and often also regulate human adaptive functioning and the material world of the people.

Oral cultures are by definition preliterate societies. In general, they lack any form of written record or literate transcription of their language. Of course, there are proto-literate societies that mark a boundary line of transition between a purely oral and literate mode of communication. Typically, these societies in fact have some form of pictographic system that, though inflexible and context-bound, can be fairly uniformly interpreted by members of the cultural system, or at least by specialists. The interesting things about many early petroglyphic designs is that they are very inscrutable and mysterious from a modern and literate perspective, by a person who is not a member of the culture that created them. That they exhibit repetition and delimitation of abstract form entails that they were undoubtedly symbolic systems of some meaning and value. The iconographic function of such pictographs however abstruse they may be now are frequently associated in a very deliberate way with natural phenomena that the makers observed, studied and considered important in their symbology.

The rise of literacy accompanies the rise of writing systems. The rise of writing systems accompanies both the rise of a distinctive form of state civilization, and is associated with record keeping that transcends the limitations of human memory, and also the rise of historical knowledge and a rational noetic consciousness of humankind. It also anticipates the rise of science and a view of the world that is fundamentally secular and non-religious, or at least post-religious in important ways.

With the rise of writing there is an accumulation of knowledge through systems of storage. This accumulation of knowledge entails that people do not have to rely upon the same mimetic devices that they utilized in a purely oral manner. Thus long standing and traditional oral systems often break down as systems of esoteric transmission, and schooling takes a form that it is conventionally understood today, not so much as an apprentice to a singer of tales, but as a student to a purveyor of recorded knowledge. Sacred lore is often then transcribed, and this sacred lore, assuming material form in non-ritual social process, develops a bureaucracy and even a priest-hood around it to protect it and manage its transmission.

Consideration of literate society and the rise of historical civilization brings to bear another interesting and related subject of the history of writing and the evolutionary development of writing systems. I believe this history is important to understanding the symbolic manner of cultural transmission, and for illustrating the probable pathway of phylogenic development that human cultural evolution undertook, particularly in the form of language. Writing systems proceed in clear stages from iconographic and pictographic systems that, as sign systems, were inherently inflexible and context bound, through rebus and syllabary systems that range from being pictographic in character to fully phonetic systems. They finally emerge as fully abstracted phonetic alphabets that are very streamlined and exhibit the full range of human language potential. It is also worthwhile considering this historical pattern to note that new writing systems generally emerged not directly within the context in which older systems operated. They tended to emerge upon the introduction of these older systems to new societies and their adoption and modification to new cultural systems, or else in the peripheries of pre-established systems. These kinds of changes had the consequence eventually of rebounding upon the older system to involve the progressive revision of the older system to "keep up with the times."

The move from an oral society to a literate society marks a shifting transition from reliance on primarily vertical-horizontal modes of cultural transmission, hence relative conservativeness of tradition, toward predominant reliance on diagonal-horizontal modes transmission. This created new possibility for widespread state organization and control and management of resources. It also entailed that the pace of change in cultural patterning could be stepped up by a whole order of magnitude.

The rise of printing technologies in the 15th century, that marked the beginning of the Renaissance, the rise of electronic communications media in the last century, and the rise of new digital technologies in the last couple of decades, have all marked an important noetic transformation of human symbolic reality based on a mode of communication that is primarily horizontal in form and function. This has had a great effect in the rapid dissemination of new ideas and information, and a "liberating" effect for both the human mind and the human body. It accompanies the rise of a new form of state that at least has some pretensions toward democracy around the idea of "rights" and equality and "freedom" that, as far as I can tell, are ideas that were rooted and closely associated historically to horizontal communications media like newspapers.

This brings to bear the notion of the importance of ideas and their transmission in human culture. Ideas have had important consequences in human history. To think that zero or the wheel was an important invention, that was an idea lacking in some cultures, and had to be carried there, and may have had profound revolutionary consequences for human civilization, is usually overlooked. Some sociobiological theorists would like to credit memes as being equal to genes and even implicitly to posit a direct relationship between the genetic transmission of ideas and information and their transmission in cultures. A meme would of course be a symbolic construct, and would be a minimal definition of a symbol. Internally it would have only intuitive form, that is implicit, vague and without distinct outline. Symbols require external material form to attach themselves to--this provides the frame of reference for the definition of their ideational patterns. We cannot really therefore talk of ideas as such outside of their material form, except perhaps in some ideal, noumenal way.

In general, it can be said that cultural processes and patterns of information transmission are related to genetic information transmission patterns, but are also fundamentally different and separate from it. Cultural transmission takes more modes and leads to different consequences than genetic transmission. In general, it can be said that cultural transmission allows for the effects of cultural diffusion of information independent of genetic structure, and thus for the occurrence of patterns of change and development that are essentially non-evolutionary.

In general, I refer to these processes as transculturational and this refers to any transmission of information across cultural boundaries that may have the effect of changing a society. In general, the non-evolutionary patterns that are the result of transculturation have been the rise of human technological and historical civilization as we understand these things to be today. This form of "civilization" is rooted to the notion of traditional cultural patterning but transcends this patterning by virtue of the effects of diagonal and horizontal transmission processes.

Transculturation is closely tied to what is known as acculturation, which is defined in minimal form as culture contact that results in change. Acculturation theory has its own presuppositions of "progress" and "modernization" that need to be taken into account anthropologically. Transculturation better describes in more general and less biased fashion the overall process involved in the rise of human civilization. Basically, a good idea sticks around and is traded like gold. Fire, once discovered and its utility value harnessed and extended, became an idea whose time had come. It must have spread like "wildfire" throughout the primitive world. Firecrackers and silk may have been state secrets kept by China, but even an efficient Chinese bureaucracy couldn't forever stop leakage of these ideas to the west.

I have come a long way around, almost full circle, from beginning with a digression on sociobiology and gene-culture evolution, ending with a highlight on human civilization as something or some set of things that is essentially non-biological in form and function. Somewhere along the circuit, a full sense of sociobiology as a driving force of human society was lost. Of course, the primary point of departure on my revised form of sociobiology from what has been conventionally promulgated as such, is that I have taken human symbolization as a basic mechanism that is central to its understanding and expression in human cultural patterning. This pattern is universal to and distinctive of the human species.

In general, sociobiological theory wants to surreptitiously sidestep and circumvent the entire problematic of symbolization in the patterning of human culture. Thus it wants to make this patterning predominantly accountable for on the basis of genetic information transmission alone. We can see broad sociobiological parameters vaguely and deeply rooted in early gene-culture co-evolution, but we must also see that the developmental outcome of the evolution of human culture has been something much more than mere genetic enumeration.

It is now time to reunite our thinking in coming full circle to the point where we departed. In this, I will hypothesize what I claim to be the unique features of the human condition on planet earth. That is, from a strictly sociobiological point of view, the patterning of cultural fitness and cultural selection that has come to play a critical role in evolutionary development of life on earth.

Like fitness and selection in biological theory, cultural fitness and cultural selection must be understood as fundamentally complementary concepts. They are in a sense the measure of one another. I would define cultural fitness as the measure of the degree to which cultural traits and adaptive patterns have conferred basic adaptive and reproductive fitness upon the human organism. In a basic sense, this deals with the human relationship with its natural environment, but there is a derivative sense of cultural fitness that includes the degree to which any individual human being is fit within the parameters of the culture of which that person is a member. Each cultural pattern, being integrated about some line of optimal adjustment, defines at least implicitly what it is to be a fit member of the society. Most societies make rather explicit and manifest their symbolic definitions of achievement and success. I would claim that in our market-based system, money is the "bottom line" measure of an individual's fitness. Behind this monetary fitness of the modern human being, there is some sense of symbolic status that accrues from the acquisition and control of money and that leads to a sense of well being and security within a social system.

From a sociobiological standpoint, it is evident that cultural fitness had its origins in the trait configurations that were uniquely human and that were from the beginning closely associated with the raise of basic human cultural patternings. It can be considered the degree to which human genetic change conferred adaptive fitness of human beings in cultural contexts, and which permitted human beings to carry their cultures and to transmit them. In the beginning, the principal reference point of this cultural patterning would have been the central issue of biological survival and reproductive success, especially in a social framework. Gradually, as is evident on the development of gene-culture co-evolution, cultural fitness began to take on increasingly cultural and derivative frames of reference that were no longer directly or strictly tied to the issue of biological survival and success in a natural world.

It is obvious that at an early point, cultural fitness began to take a lead compared to alternative forms of trait-fitness that human beings may have been selected for. Modern humans are not known for their large canines, their physical strength, their large carriage or their specialized hypertrophisms. They are known for their generalized adaptation to a wide range of possible environments, for their large brain, bipedalism, sexual and violent nature, and for their great hand-eye coordination and lingual dexterity. While these are not altogether flattering traits of the human species, it is clear that they went along way in conferring cultural fitness of human beings within a natural world--a form of fitness that proved extremely adaptable and successful.

The derivative forms of cultural fitness take increasingly divergent forms from what we can consider as strictly sociobiological. For a long time now, cultural fitness has had to have been defined in contexts that were primarily man made, or artificial, rather than being strictly natural. Even the fitness of other life forms within a cultural framework of adaptation has to be taken into account, for instance the domestication of canines or of common farm animals and plants. We have evolved by means of cultural standards of fitness alone entire breeds of dogs that are completely domesticated and from a species point of view unique from anything occurring in the wild. Even in an indirect sense, many species of animal has coevolved in the context of human cultural environments. I would give the rat special status in this regard.

This consideration brings up the complementary notion of cultural selection. Humans have from an early point, as an outcome of their successful cultural adaptations and its external manifestation, imposed upon their natural worlds their own influence over the selective forces of nature, to the point of introducing their own unique form of cultural selection.

Cultural selection, like its complement fitness, can be seen to take two alternate forms depending on our frame of reference. At its early stage, we can consider it to have been the form of natural selection that led to trait selection promoting cultural adaptation. Once this basic trait configuration evolved, which it appeared to do by the time of Homo habilis, it set up a resonance effect between this trait configuration and the natural environment. This eventually led to the increasing cultural control and manipulation of natural selective forces and factors that affects the selection of other forms of life. We can say that it even led finally to the cultural selection of humankind itself, albeit in a derivative manner as described in cultural fitness above. The paradox of this is that Darwin's original theory of natural selection was largely based upon examples of human cultural selection in animal and plant breeding. The term selection itself derives from this example.

We can see cultural selection operating at a fairly early point in human evolutionary history. These early humans obviously hunted herds of big game, and probably accomplished driving many such populations into extinction. At a later point in time, human beings managed to push back the primeval forests that covered most of Europe, Asia and eventually North America. In North America it is evident that early big game hunters drove mammoths to extinction, and at a later historical period tried to do the same with bison, wolves and bear.

Indeed, Darwin framed most of his theory of natural selection using primarily examples that were technically speaking, a form of cultural selection. He mostly regarded natural selection process and their outcomes to be so gradualist and elusive, as to be essentially unobservable. He argued mostly by analogy from easily observable examples of animal breeding, of pigeons, dogs, sheep and other domestic plants and animals. The term "selection" was in fact borrowed from this breeding lore, the picking and culling of specimens for reproductive alteration.

A prolonged dawn of humanity characterized by a hunting-gathering and foraging way of life led ultimately to an incipient form of horticulture and harvesting and to a pattern of sedentism that was characterized by several noteworthy examples of cultural selectionism.

This was the transformation of domestic environments and domesticated environs by means of cultural selectionism, the domestication of many plants and animals primarily for purposes of food, work and for other symbolic reasons. It was the rise of environments on earth that can be considered in an extensive sense to be exclusively human--i.e., urban humanity. It is not necessary to go into detail about this process, but to note in passing the sociobiological connection of increasing cultural selectionism in conferring basic adaptive and reproductive success on human beings, albeit in cultural rather than in completely natural ways.

Technological civilization can be considered to be the outcome of this developmental pattern of cultural selectionism, and we can see from the beginning the role that tools played in advancing cultural selectionism. Tools allowed effective hunting. Tools allowed the harvesting and cultivation of plants and animals. And now, tools came increasingly to provide the mechanisms and energy to drive more complex and sophisticated process that has effectively transformed the entire earth.

We can say that the rest is history, as indeed it has been. We can only now speculate on the latest form of cultural selectionism that is witness not only the vanishing of the last remaining rain-forests on earth, and the mass extinction of many forms of life. But the disruption of entire ecosystems and even global scale disruptions of the basic geo-physical systems underlying the biosphere itself. Especially, I believe, we must seek to understand the biological significance and outcomes of cultural selectionism as it is coming to intrude increasingly upon genetic and genetic evolution itself. It has reached a point that human cultural selectionism has largely come to be the major determining factor in evolutionary process, and to a great extent has replaced natural selection processes over many regions of the world.

Natural selection of course continues, especially at the margins of human civilization, as this is about the way the human relationship to nature has been defined. Enduring what are fundamentally restricted and socially circumscribed habitats, wild forms of life are perhaps undergoing speciation and selection processes that are unparalleled in natural history. In these narrow zones, perhaps, evolution is raging, and if it knew any better, it would be raging at humankind.

Many species have been counter-adaptive to human civilization as well, and achieve considerable success in this regard. New forms of bacteria appear to be emerging in the environmental context of the human body and the social body. It is clear that one way or another, human cultural selectionism has become a major force to be reckoned with for life on earth today. And this is whether it is experienced in the form of habitat loss from urban development, in the form of ecosystem disruption from environmental pollution and catastrophe, or from massive poaching, deforestation, or over fishing. In whatever form it is experienced, it has had a net effect of driving back the flow of life, and stemming its tide generally in all corners of the earth.

I will not make any blanket statements on this matter in this regard, except to note that there are both good and bad aspects of this process. Without a doubt, we should seek to understand these processes of human cultural selectionism and cultural fitness much better than we do, especially in its impact upon the natural order of evolutionary process.

I wish here to emphasize that biological engineering is but one more logical step in the long evolution of cultural selectionism, where the willpower and control of humankind is increasingly asserting itself in every more basic and powerful ways upon the very shaping forces of life itself. This is cultural selectionism. It is the outcome of human sociobiology deeply rooted in our natural history, but it is not in itself a form of genetic transmission.

I must finish the last chapter of the second part on the issue of the current condition and predicament of humankind. We as a single species represent a tremendous biomass. We occupy by our nature certain trophic levels in the natural chain of life. We have through our patterns of cultural fitness and cultural selection come to increasingly interfere with and control the fundamental processes that controlled the evolution of life from the beginning. We do so without a fundamental sense of responsibility or far-sighted vision of what place our current roles will take us to in the long run. We appear to be more driven by basic sociobiological issues of social competition than we were even a millennium before. We are quickly reaching the total carrying capacity of the biosphere itself, such as we have shaped it with our own collective hands and tools. Once our world reaches its point of saturation, we will have little where else to turn except out to space, and space represents such vast distances that it remains for most of humanity and life on earth an insuperable boundary.

The human age is a biological age that is represented by the near total dominance and monopolization of life by the human species. We are quite correctly in an age that can be characterized as the age of the Human biological regime. This has been undeniably an age of mass extinction and a termination process for many patterns of natural selection that were for a very long time the driving forces of evolution.

The basic sociobiological drives for survival that makes people so competitive, can become the same drive that prevents us from charging over the edge in our human race to achieve. This is only possible if we can engineer a social system on a global scale that will effectively counteract the same natural human predispositions toward competitiveness and violence that so characterizes our nature. We have to come to impose a system that serves to re-channel the symbolic expression of this human potential in ways other than what we have known before.

The choice remains ours to make, and it will be made by default if we do not conscientiously take some form of collective action in our lives. A new sense of responsibility tied to global ecology has been dawning, and the clock is slowly ticking away. This responsibility indicates an emergent understanding of the role of humankind, and cultural selectionism in mediating the relationship between nature and culture for the entire earth. It is a responsibility for assuming a role of stewardship over the earth's natural resources in a manner that will guarantee its protection and survival in the indefinite future. Obviously, the model of unlimited economic growth and human expansionism must be done away with. Obviously, means must be found for bringing the rate of human reproduction to a standstill, and to allow the human population to achieve a lower level of equilibrium with the earth.

I would like to argue in this paper that Life on earth has entered a new epoch, and that is the age of the Human regime. In this age, human selective factors largely made by people or indirectly resulting from the behaviors of people, have had a critical and dramatic impact on all forms of life upon the planet. This regime of human biology is, on a biological scale, relatively recent, and may, in the long run, have the appearance in the record of a sudden mass extinction event. Unless humans carry themselves, by their own blind adaptation, to the verge of extinction, taking most of life along with itself, humanity must come to terms with its own role and function in this new regime as the primary stewards of life, and assume some sense of environmental responsibility.

In a sense, this can be considered to be an expected long-term outcome of evolution itself, that led to selection for more intelligent adaptation, hence bigger and better brains, hence the expression of intelligence as something even beyond the control of biology's basic forces. Human beings themselves are evolving, but this evolution has slowed down largely due to its successful adaptations to all environments and to the massive increase in human population. The selective factors that play upon human evolution now are more social than they are natural, and thus humans are becoming increasingly the victims of their own selectionism.

The concept of human stewardship of biological life proceeds from the realization, not of life's dependency on us, but of our dependency on life, for if we destroy most life on earth, then chances are that we are in the process also destroying ourselves. But stewardship also proceeds from the realization of the responsibility that it entails and that knowledge of our interdependencies in life creates. It proceeds as well from sentient, aesthetic and ethical considerations relating to life, and that demarcates us, as human beings, as unique to the planet. It leads to a form of non-violence that becomes reflected at many levels of our individual and social behavior and structural organization. It leads to concerted and well-organized efforts to repair and restore the health and vitality of damaged biological systems, and to protect those systems remaining from further disruption and destruction. This non-violence begets a form of respect for our selves as well, as living creatures that are part of a larger natural system.

What starts off as a systems analytic approach, ends up as a meta-ethical and normative approach. But this is a logical and natural outcome of the development of life on earth, and should be a part of that system, especially if we are not to proceed blindly to our own mass destruction and eventual extinction.

Anthropogenesis and the Anthropological Construction of Reality

World Openness and the Unfinished Nature of Homo saipiens

Human systems theory constitutes a subset of biological systems theory. It must be understood that human beings are biological animals of a definite and fairly well known origin and a long evolutionary history of development. They have become, by virtue of that development, symbolic creatures with fairly large and sentient brains and with socio-cultural patterning that defies evolutionary history at almost every turn.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Human Proto-Systems

Models of proto-culture, based upon primary cultural development within natural and non-culturally mediated environments, are developed in relation to a fundamentally human evolutionary ecology. The role of human society and symbolization become fundamentally inseparable in human reality from the basic challenges of adaptation to natural human environments. This has led to a fundamental patterning of human behavior in all respects that can be described as cultural rather than as natural.

There has been no reason to believe that the original human systems were comparable to anything known today or within the last five hundred years of human history. The first two or three million years of human evolution were more like the forgotten early childhood that most of us have lived, remembered but with fragmentary and disjointed images of moments and places. The first two or three million years were probably more like a long and endless dreamscape of humankind's slowly awakening consciousness. Of course, even within this long dreamtime of the first human beings, there may have been long lived traditions and memories that may dwarf anything experienced in recent times. These dreams and collective memories might have been kept alive for thousands of years, not by a long list of one's ancestor's names, but by a deep-seated symbolic attachment to a region and a way of life where one's ancestors have lived, struggled and died for time immemorial. At what point in this long sleep of human consciousness would the first names for people have been given, when something like names would become somehow important to one's self-identity and one's social identity as well? Jane Goodal began naming all her Chimpanzee's with familiar names, more to help herself identify and sort out who was related to whom, than for any convenience or consideration of the Chimps themselves who appeared not to require such devices to recognize one another and to what group they belonged or their social order in a system. And was there a long intermediate time in human evolution, between when the name becomes the first thing given to a new born baby by the parents, and a time when there were no names for people? Could there have been something like a long, stuporous between period when people gradually took on names or distinctive identities in a concrete and increasingly abstract sense? Can we have something like a proto-name or a "half-name" that is said sometimes or even just rarely? What are the qualities of life that become attendant to the ascription of names for people?

The object this seventh chapter is to relate archaeological systems theory, as this has been developed in the third part, to a more general theoretical framework that I have called human systems theory, in order to understand the implications of archaeological systems for a broader understanding of human systems in general, and the implications of human systems theory for application to archaeological knowledge and research. This in part entails understanding the conceptual provenience of archaeological knowledge within a wider terrain of knowledge systems especially as this overlaps with and interrelates to a number of other disciplines like history and anthropology.

Human systems can be said to be historically situated, not in terms of written documents so much as in terms of a generalized and symbolic sense of the past. Even rather "contemporaneous" ethnographies of "extant" peoples are in essence historical documents that deal with past events and systems that humans have developed as a product of time. The archaeological challenge has been and remains the fact that such systems have to be empirically amenable to scientific inquiry in the only terms that are available to us for their recovery and possible reconstruction--that is in terms of the material remains of such systems that are excavated and analyzed.

Thus, archaeology must take up the challenge of the past precisely where known histories, whether textual or oral, leave off. This sets fundamental constraints to archaeological knowledge that is less than ideal in almost every circumstance of its inquiry. The challenge of archaeological theory nevertheless remains the use of evidence of the human past to define and clarify both the history and the evolutionary structure of human systems development and their range of variation and expression in the past.

Archaeologists are not limited strictly to the material artifacts of the things they unearth, and their archaeological context in relation to other excavations. Ethnographic evidence is far game for archaeological researchers, as all such evidence is also part of the past. So is historical evidence. So is biological and ecological evidence. So is linguistic and symbolic and other cognitive evidence. Evidence of human systems in the present provides a great deal of information pertinent to our past, because our systems, in an objective sense, are derived from past systems and therefore should contain hidden clues and surviving structures from the past. It is somewhat akin to studying a middle-aged adult to understand how human beings develop as young children. All of this evidence has utility value for archaeologists if it can help them to analysis and systematically interpret the evidence of the past in a relatively unbiased manner. Such evidence is therefore only useful in so much as it is factual, empirically driven, and scientifically defined and tested. It makes no sense to apply anthropological models. It is somewhat less than useful if and when it is itself biased, ideologically confounded, and closed as a form of knowledge.

In this fourth part, I attempt to address aspects of what I would call "common" culture in the sense of the elaboration of primary cultural patterns in a primitive and prototypical manner without the degree of technological sophistication or conceptual innovation that is evident in more "traditional" anthropological contexts. Cultural systems can be considered to be "metasystems" in the sense that they achieve natural integration of various forms and functions in a consistent manner. The study of cultural patterning usually entails the dissection of natural systems along subject and/or disciplinary boundaries of knowledge stratification. These boundaries rarely reflect the real organizational patterning of culture, and often interfere with understanding the interrelationships between different institutional aspects of socio-cultural process.

I approach from a multidimensional and polythetic standpoint several basic aspects of what I would call "primitive" cultural systems, namely, language, symbolic cognition, social organization & structure, religion, art, ecology and what I will call historical process. I then in the final chapter attempt to tie these various dimensions back into what I would call a synthetic explanation of a primitive or primary cultural metasystem.

The aim and presupposition of a concept of a primitive "common culture" is that the original, prototypical form of cultural patterning on a basic level was more or less the same for everyone, in that most people were presented with very similar kinds of ecological life-profiles. They may have inhabited a very broad range of ecological zones and niches, but they may also have faced the same basic kinds of evolutionary and existential consequences with the same basic rudimentary tools, techniques and symbols for mediating and mastering their environmental situations. "Common culture" can be referred to as "basic cultural patterning" that underlies structurally all variations of form and function evident in the ethnographic or archaeological record.

At the same time, I wish to call into question the wisdom of presuming such a "common culture" in place of what may in fact have been a general absence or vacuum of culture, especially in the elaborated forms that we have come to understand this in traditional tribal contexts. A strong case can be made for a prevalent condition of cultural schizophrenia and social-ecological atomization upon a basic level that tended to stand in the way of the formation of larger social organizational structures or the emergence of long-lasting and widespread cultural traditions or civilizational complexes. The notion of the primitive culture bearer as an omniscient informant, of an almost completely individualized patterning of cultural variation, flies in the face of the notion of traditional culture as being coercive in taboos and sanctions and depending upon a mechanical solidarity to achieve social coordination. But it may not be so far fetched a notion if we understand that in the original framework of primordial or proto-cultural patterning, not such frameworks, rules or social formations existed by which people could be molded in similar and common ways. Some kind of a nuclear and familial framework did undoubtedly exist, and these must have been integrated into some larger and consistent network of relationships between familial frameworks. It appears, for instance, that bilateral kinship patterns are more suitable for an atomistic framework than patrilineal or ambilineal kinds of patterns, as the emphases is upon the collateral ties of ego in a dynamically shifting present, rather than rooted in a deeper sense of the past. A case can be made for reduced, context-dependent and relatively diffuse structures of meaning that lack semantic refinement. From a linguistic standpoint, we are talking about socio-cultural contexts that can be called "pre-oral" in the way that oral cultural traditions are understood. At the same time, from a cognitive standpoint, we can refer to the relatively undifferentiated state of cognitive development that takes its cues mostly from the natural environment and its patterning, and lacking any significant material or social cultural context within which it can achieve a standard or highly elaborated form. A strong case can be made that even perceptual patterns would be fundamentally different and experience a form of organic synaesthesia or eidetic response. We can see in religious forms that the basic pattern is a very diffuse form of animism in which there is no clear boundary between the natural and the supernatural, or the state of reality and the states of dreams.

I do not mean to suggest, by the term of cultural schizophrenia, that our hominid precursors were non-rational, unorganized or incapable of sane problem solving and lucid perception of the natural world. Rather, to the extent that human intelligence is conditioned by environmental stimuli, when the cultural parameters are lacking or reduced, it can be seen that environmental patterns rooted to a fundamental sense of human ecology without technological or cultural sophistication, will take priority. The result will be the ordering of disorder, or the symbolic structuring of external stimuli and phenomena that are essentially random and naturally patterned, rather than being culturally organized.

It might be expected that in such circumstances, instinct would play a greater role in the organization of behavioral response, especially to the extent that instinct would guide what can be considered to be impulsive or automatic responses to environmental stimuli or situations. The cultural controls, and attendant psychological repressions of basic impulsive drives, would not exist except perhaps in a very rudimentary form.

The result is an understanding of our deep sense of the shared past as something fundamentally very different than any human being of the 20^th Century, even in remote regions, may know or have an experience with. At the same time, if this is a basic and common "proto-cultural" pattern, then aspects and dimensions of this patterning should remain rooted in our shared "natures" even today, in spite of our cultural conditioning and attempts to mold people into perfect culture machines. We cannot today say exactly what a natural human being, unfettered and unconditioned by cultural processes, would be like. We do not know what the full range of human instinct might have been. But if we look for analogues in nature, we can distinguish the domestic dog with its feral cousins, especially the prototypical wolf, and we can see that the wolves instincts are fit within a tight social-ecological framework and conditioned by this framework. This is exactly what is broken down and "bred" out in the domestication of many different breeds of dogs, fit within a range of functional social-ecological contexts, whether this is herding sheep or cattle or hunting rats and small varmints.

In this, we can see the early basis for the emergence and differentiation of cultural patterning as being in the varying socio-ecological frameworks in which groups of people found themselves. This range of frameworks expanded over time to encompass almost every possible terrestrial ecological zone open to human beings.

I would like to think that our ancient precursors were finely attuned to their natural world, and that culture arose essentially as a by-product of this sophisticated ecological adaptation of human behavioral response. Humans were capable of observing many patterns in natural settings, and of learning from memory, experience and experimentation, the behaviors and manners of all kinds of flora and fauna. This kind of knowledge was perhaps traded off for cultural knowledge and dependency, and was thus progressively lost when humans achieved cultural and technological sophistication. The idea that our early hominid ancestors could observe nature in detail, and become the expert naturalists of their environment without needing to know the scientific names or taxonomies of the species they dealt with, capable of rapidly reading and adapting to ever shifting frames of reference, is perhaps as cliché as it is ignored as a reasonable explanation for proto-cultural patterning.

The kinds of proto-cultural metasystems our precursors had were perhaps more like the patterning of Chimpanzee groups observed naturally in Central and Western Africa than any other kind of animal we can think of today. They undoubtedly exhibited a greater range of patterning than can be found among the reduced and circumscribed populations of primates in the world today.

Proto-Cultural Systems

Proto-culture can be defined as the basic aspects of primary cultural adaptations and institutions in relation to the general definition of culture already offered in this work. Anthropological culture has always construed the definition of culture, ethnographically described, as being bound within a preexisting context of cultural tradition and social history. Anthropological inquiry has fallen short of addressing the problem of what cultural adaptations may have looked like before the emergence and elaboration of such cultural contexts and traditions in the world. To some extent, this becomes a central problem in archaeological systems and in the definition of archaeological culture versus anthropological culture. If archaeologists can answer sufficiently for themselves and other scientists the question as to what constitutes the pan-human basis of cultural patterning, and how basic cultural patterning may be distinguished from its elaborated derivative patterning in human prehistory, then archaeological systems theory will have taken a step toward greater comprehensiveness and objectivity of its knowledge base.

The explanation I seek for human proto-culture is well with a human systems theoretic perspective, to the extent that such proto-culture was foundational to the rise and development of human systems in the first place. I seek to define proto-culture in terms of the first developing institutional manifestations that such culture would have taken beyond the ecological and obvious technological and material aspects, that some anthropologists might consider to be not culture itself, but the by-products and manifestations of a deeper cultural process.

The basis of understanding a protocultural system is, I believe, to understand such a system in what can be considered a minimally differentiated state, or a maximally undifferentiated state. Differentiation theory relates the cognitive organization and mapping of the human brain with the order and level of complexity of behavioral response and pattern recognition in the effective environment. Undifferentiated response is characteristic of an undeveloped and unsophisticated state of mind, and is characterized by certain distinct features such as diffuseness of stimulus-reponse patterning, lack of sophisticated mechanisms of ego-control or defense, lack of flexibility of response patterning, etc. In a relatively undifferentiated proto-cultural patterning, the distinctions we may make between different institutional aspects of a culture may be unclear or vague at best. Language may exhibit a minimal structure and the hallmarks of early primary acquisition such as overextension of reference. If we are referring to a language system that is primarily, or at least seeming, one of gesture-gesticulation, we can refer to a heavy degree of context-dependency in the structuring of the language, its primarily concrete and functional application, the lack of separate between para-linguistic and linguistic signals, such that linguistic signals may not be given priority over non-verbal forms of communication. Such a language system, though in a broad and basic sense universal to all proto-cultural systems, would in fact be so idiosyncratic in its effects that it would be effective for only small-group communication, presumably within stable family or kin-centric groupings. Similarly, language and thought would be fused, as would be body language and feeling. The capacity for sophisticated prevarication by the strict separation of modes of expression and communication would be lacking compared to what is achievable in more differentiated systems. It would be expected therefore that very early proto-culture would in essence be primarily functional and adaptational in orientation, and would reflect very concrete and naturalistic relationships with an effective environment in which other people were more a part of the natural framework than a part of a larger social-institutional setting. We would expect therefore that the first differentiations of language, culture and cognition to be primarily those relating to the pragmatics of getting things done, of survival, and a rudimentary semantics that is understood in a concrete and relational sense, rather than in any abstract or formal manner.

The basis for an understanding of proto-culture is in terms referred to as the worldview problem, or rather, how people come to organize and structure their view of the world, and how this affects their behavioral interactions and adaptations in the world. In this, the analytical distinctions are made between the problem and role of language, culture (conceived in both a material and social frame of reference) and cognition, and the nature of the interactions between these three areas. Like the previous eco-cultural model that relates the individual, environment and social group in a systems based, interfunctional model, the relations between language, culture and cognition are not seen as being necessarily ordered in any deterministic manner, but rather in a complementary and interfunctional system. It can be said therefore that in a proto-cultural phase of human evolution, one that presumably characterized the first three or four million years of hominid cultural development, that these three analytic distinctions may not have been as clearly made as they can be today in reference to modern or contemporary historical culture patterning. These were all but facets of the same essential anthropological trait complex in its most basic sense, and there may have been little distinction between language as a form of communication and thought as a form of feeling or self-expression, or between the thoughts and feelings of the self, as somehow fundamentally private and ego-centric, as opposed to those expressions of other members of one's group. Socially, groups would have been "organically" intertwined such as the boundaries between self and significant other would have been diffuse at best and in some ways altogether lacking. Touching, holding, shading into physical aggression or expressions of human sexuality and feeling would have been a normal part of one's own identity, and a way of reinforcing one's bonds and identity in the world. Grooming is a typical behavioral response of all primates that permits alleviation of stress and interpersonal communication at an organic level.

Perhaps if we want to understand human protoculture, a good place to start is in the observation of human child culture in contexts where this is not mediated by adults. Of course, this is only a rough analogy, as it is clear that even very young human children are imbibing a very great deal about their cultural context and world beyond that available to them in the immediate framework of their family and home life. In other words, most of contemporary child culture is pretty much shaped already by the larger adult-sized cultural context in which they are raised, thus confounding such an analogy between contemporary child culture and human proto-cultural patterning.

We can explain the rise of what might be referred to as intermediate or secondary institutions as a manner of introducing increasing levels of differentiation and control over the behavior of the individual, with internalized controls mutually reinforced by external social sanctions and constraints, whether direct or indirect, explicit or implicit. Language, culture and cognition would in such "fully humanized" contexts have emerged as full blown, such that it would become possible for people to say one thing and mean another, or to act in a manner that is independent of the response patterns of the rest of one's group. This was not arrived at overnight, and its possibility seemed to be indirectly at least relative to the larger eco-cultural system as this was gradually emerging.

Proto-Symbolism

The noetic behavior of our hominid precursors would have been fundamentally different from what we experience today. The cultural context for the development of symbolic behavior as it occurs today would have been almost entirely absent. The almost steady increase in cranial capacity, especially in the regions of the frontal and parietal cerebellum, demonstrates a positive correlation between increase in brain size and the emergence of a viable cultural context within which people could operate. And this was not a hen or egg type of question. It is clear that selection in human beings was continuously in favor of larger and larger brained individuals who had greater symbolic capacity that became expressed in terms of cultural mediation of the natural world. I do not believe that selection operated upon an individual level, so much as upon a group level, which in human terms became defined increasingly in terms of cultural differentiation of behavior within group contexts. Selection therefore favored those small groups the individuals within which could effectively adapt to and survive their complex environments, in intermural competition with other groups. In small group configurations, population bottle-necks could occur frequently under adverse circumstances that eliminated even a few members, and hence a founder's effect could be experienced within a relatively short time. A group that was culturally successful would be capable of rapidly expanding its population base and of branching out and expanding the limits of its usual home territory. Many groups would have come and gone--many might have failed. Each would have represented a natural experiment in the articulation of basic cultural patterning.

It would be difficult to say exactly what set of selection factors were important to the rise of bigger brains in human evolutionary development. We can site natural factors that promoted adaptive survival, social selection factors, such as mate choice and preferences that favored some individuals over others, or cultural selection factors (sanctions and constraints, conditioned aversions and appetites) that operated within a group context, or possibly even early psychological selection factors of personal preferences and idiosyncracies of character. It would be impossible to devise a coherent and consistent model of these selection factors operating one way in every and any evolutionary context--rather, it would have been more realistic from a systems standpoint to examine the possible combinations and interaction of these kinds of selection factors to determine what may have been the most likely order. Cultural selection factors would have played an increasingly important role as time went by, to the point even of practically disengaging more immediate forms of natural selection.

An important question to ask in the evolution of human cultural behavior is at what point that individual human behavior and needs became subordinate to the needs of the group as a whole. At what point would some altruistic, genuine social commitment of the individual to the group be demanded. Individual and group survival would have been one and the same thing in early contexts--an individual dispossessed of his connection to a group would have been doomed to perish. At the same time, small groups probably depended upon the actions and competencies of just a handful of leaders by which to achieve success, as well as the cooperation of everyone. I do not believe it was ever possible for members of a group to freely dissociate themselves or detach themselves from the framework of the group. If social atomism existed, it must have existed at the level of the small group or band, possibly a loose consociation of a handful of families or at most of several lineages bound together by exchanges and intermarriage and by social custom that demanded reciprocity. Families would not have been atomized, so much as small groups would become splintered off from larger more established groups to expand and form satellite populations.

If we were to examine any culture-geographical map of any period of remote hominid history, we would surely find many colored bounded culture areas across a variegated landscape. What we could not see in any slice of the map of time would be the transitional patterning of movement, growth and death of groups and the ways in which these various culture areas fluctuate from one decade to the next or from one century to the next. There would be nothing upon such a map that was permanent and not ephemeral given enough time. The map taken a thousand years later would look completely different that the first one take

If we wish to find models for pre-symbolic behavior, the best place to start is with the examination of human child culture and cognition before the age of five-years-old. I do not believe that this is the best possible model to use, but it is surely one that is immediately available to us. The reason for this is not the claim that hominid precursor brains were childlike and did not develop to a level of maturity, but that the symbolic context for the development of mental capacities comparable to anything known today among human beings simply did not exist in the same form. We end up with preliterate, and indeed, at early enough time, with pre-oral people. In such contexts, it can be said that most mental operations were probably fairly concrete.

If we seek to use as exemplars the behavior of hunter-gathering peoples of the recent past, we find a degree of sophistication of behavior and intuneness with the environment that is anything but childlike and undeveloped.

I would make an assertion that proto-symbolic behavior may have had the following characteristics:

1. It was based upon direct emblematic pattern recognition and mental association of concrete perception without significant propositional formulation. In other words, if our hominid precursors "thought" a lot about things in their world, their thoughts would have been directed more towards immediate concerns and concrete associations without a significant degree of formal abstractions;

2. Behavioral experience, perception and response was "polymorphous" and largely unconditioned. In other words, there were in place few if any psychological mechanisms of repression of experience, and behavioral response was particularly organic toward the environment and other social relations, rather than psychological;

3. Memory experience was largely context-based and geographically situated to a degree that may have been in fact more refined and hyperdeveloped than normally occurs with people today. Memory cues were taken from an environmental framework based upon fine motor skills and pattern recognition that allowed our earliest ancestors to make detailed associations within a natural environment.

4. Cognition would have been characterized, most likely, by what I would call a strong sense of "field dependency" that developed early and in which reliance for cues and information for memory association was derived from an external environment and in turn projected upon an external environment that was always shifting and anxiety provoking.

5. Mechanisms of projection and repression were largely diffuse and undifferentiated, such that pathognomic imagery invoking fear or great anxiety would have taken an unspecific form in the environment.

6. Detailed knowledge was drawn directly from and related directly to a complex natural environment, such that it could be expected that observational knowledge was built up for instance of detailed information about particular kinds and qualities of different flora, fauna, geographical locations and weather or climatological conditions.

In such a framework, symbolic representations would have been rudimentary and unrefined, and drawn directly from imagery in the natural world. Such representations would have served cognitive responses that were fairly concrete and non-abstract, not requiring significant further rationalization or ratiocination. When reason was invoked, it was a kind of concrete logic that reflected the natural order of the world around them. I do not think that conceptions of today that represent "social constructions"--marriage, murder, or even "love"--would have had much significance in such contexts. I doubt whether if anyone then did anything "wrong" that it would be considered "sinful" or become the cause for great consternation. Rather, right and wrong behavior would have been largely situationally defined and modified by the expectations of reponse such behavior would elicit from others. It would be difficult today for any of us to imagine what the noetic, subjective consciousness of this kind of behavior would have been like, as we are so prone to the rationalization of our experiences that even our perception of experience, our first apprehension and encounter with the world, has become transformed in a basic way that prevents us from experiencing the world in a more direct manner.

Proto-Language

The first development of human language demands explanation, and is important for several reasons to the development of archaeological systems theory. Language patterning and change follows systematic principles that constitutes the basis for the science of linguistics, and these patterns entail that some elements and features of a languages will show signs of similarity and patterning that permit us to make reasonable guesses about inheritance and ancestry of language families. The concern I have with proto-language is to explain how such early pre-linguistic systems may have been instrumental in the cultural mediational function that permitted human adaptation. Human language in a basic sense is symbolic, and it encodes meaning in an abstract way that permits its reification independently of the experience to which the meaning is associated. A great deal of language pattern can be said to be "native listener intuition" in the sense that fluency in a language, and an implicit, embedded understanding of its semantic structure is a prerequisite to using and understanding its codifications in any useful manner. All language from a non-native listener point of view can be said to appear "holophrastic" or in the form of long one-word sentences, as a non-native listener is unable to make the fine phonetic and phonemic distinctions that are necessary to convey and carry meaning. Even Chimpanzees in their chatter and calls may be making semantically meaningful statements that appear to a non-native speaker as so much gibberish--human listeners would be unable to make the finer phonetic distinctions of a Chimpanzee language system. This is a typical response patterning to oral linguistic signals when there is no embedded basis for understanding the system.

I will venture to state that a human protolanguage will tend towards the following kinds of patterns:

1. It will appear to be holophrastic.

2. It will have a reduced grammatical structure that conflates unmarked covert categories of meaning, and its semantic structure will be similarly unrefined and basic.

3. It will be pragmatically oriented.

4. It will be largely context-dependent and context driven as a language system.

5. I will predict that human protolanguage tended to begin in the back and low in the mouth, and only moved forward and high as time went on.

6. I would venture also that original protolanguage lacked a full phonetic-phonemic complement of vowel and consonant sounds, but tended to rely upon a few key sounds around which other sounds were developed or derived.

7. The language would tend to be "prototypically" basic in the sense that it included basic nouns and verbs, or perhaps even a single syntactic class of words that could function as noun-verbs depending upon the context of its use.

We can refer to the common semantic feature of the overextension of reference as a characteristic of such a system--the same term being applied differentially to different classes of objects or things, perhaps then subsequently marked to distinguish the different categories of meaning.

In the development of a theory of symbolic linguistics, I have previously made an assertion that human proto-language would have been in the form of "gesture-gesticulation" such that body language, facial expression and especially hand signals would have been intrinsic to the speech act or communication event. A sign language may have been an early form of pan-language that permitted people ease of communication across linguistic boundaries. Gesticulations would have taken the forms of "calls" and vocalizations characteristics of many primates that express emotions, warnings, states of agitation, or that communicate the presence of some thing to other members of one's group. Body language may take very symbolically stylized expressions that leave the listener, or watcher, with little doubt about the intentions or expectations of the communicator. If one observes deaf people signing language, they are almost reflexively moving their mouths while they gesture with their hand signals, and this brings the focus of attention not on the hands itself, which are in continuous motion, but upon the face of the speaker. It is known as well that those who use sign language are employing the same areas of language, namely Broca's area and Wernicke's area, that are employed by those who are able to use language aurally and orally.

If one examines the history of communication systems, one sees that in general writing systems go from very context dependent, iconographic pictographs, towards mixed rebus systems, through mixed pictographic-syllabaries, through true syllabaries based upon the sound system of the language, through mixed syllabic alphabets, to full alphabets, which represent the complete abstraction of the meaning independent of the sound carrying units. I believe a similar model would apply to the oral development of human language as well as to the development of symbolic cognition in the human brain as well, and all these developments are also tied to the larger contextual issues of the development of cultural patterning in human groups.

Context dependent systems fail to fully separate the meaning from the thing that carries the meaning, or the vessel of the meaning. Each thing would have its own meaning, and this meaning may be generalized or specifiable in a given context, but the thing that it is intrinsically attached to would be invariable and received as a whole thing. For purposes of simplification, a single polysemic symbol can stand for a great deal of complex meanings that are context dependent. Typically, such symbols would encode and stand for entire events, or episodes, or situations or even settings that are clear to the mind of the purveyor of these symbols, but strike any stranger unfamiliar with the entire system as a complete mystery. Such symbols can be seen as overloaded and top-heavy devices that cannot carry over flexibly from one context to another. They are like coded signals that stand for entire sentences or even entire paragraphs of meaning, compared to symbolic forms that just stand for one word that may nevertheless carry a definition or set of definitions that are context dependent.

The linguistic landscape 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago may have been fundamentally more variegated and complex than the linguistic landscape one or two hundred years ago. Where now we might speculate about one mother tongue from which all extant languages may be descendants under a single superfamily tree, the roots of this tree 100,000 years BP may have been only one set of systems among many that existed at the time. What we witness in our current distribution of languages are all full blown human languages with complex structures. This may have been, like elaborated culture, only a single set of linguistic achievements 100,000 years previously.

The language systems that may have existed back then may have been fundamentally different in structure and form than what we understand languages today. Where there may have been from 3 to 5 thousand languages that were spoken in the world 1000 years ago, there may have been 5 to 10 times that number of proto-languages used 50,000 years ago. Our modern human precursors, the descendants of our African Eve, represented only one set of tongues out of many that were being used. They did not radiate out 50,000 to 70,000 years ago to encounter only ecological vacuums wherever they went. The proto-languages that were developed previously may have had a multi-regional genesis that reached back to Homo erectus half a million years previously, and represented many, many different proto-cultural orientations that were competing with one another upon a complex mosaic landscape for success and survival. Single, more successful language systems, systems that developed on the move, so to speak, came to crowd out and predominate and proliferate at the expense of less successful precursors. It was not that the languages themselves were more or less efficient, but that they would have been part of a larger cultural system of adaptation that was relatively more or less successful in competition to other systems.

The earlier proto-linguistic systems were not just pre-literate, but in a sense, they may have been pre-oral as well, in the sense that we relate oral cultures to an oral tradition and to secondary institutions that reinforce and encode this tradition. Thus, linguistic codifications might have been in general more attached directly to a sense of place and thing than is the case with oral traditions. In this regard, we must also ask what the origins of a sense of song, poetry, meter and dance may have been, and how these may have related to the early development of language. If people sat around the hearth at night, information may have been exchanged, stories told, and dances performed and trances envisioned.

Proto-Society

One cannot sufficiently consider models of proto-cultural development without taking somehow into account the evidence of social relations and organization as these may have been similar or different than we now know these to occur. It appears for instance that bilateral kinship systems centered upon the kindred are more flexible to variable social structure than more rigid lineal and clan based systems. In this sense, one might expect the simplest kind of structure is a one based upon a Hawaiian kinship structure that encodes the fewest numbers of kin-terms that are most proximate to ego, compared to isolating structures that encode the highest number of kin-terms. It should come as a surprise therefore to find some of the most elaborate and complicated kinship systems to have been elaborated by the Australian aborigines, but this should belie something about the origins of their system, and the fact that they were originally in fact part of a more recent and modern period of human evolution in which complex moiety structures were clearly developed.

I will take a simple kindred system to be the most basic and prototypical pattern of kinship possible in human society. All elaborations of kin systems represent therefore some kind of variation or alteration from this basic prototypical form. This is not to say that the kinship systems of 500,000 years BP, if such things existed, all resembled more or less a kindred-based system. Kinship may not have been important at this time, and if it was, probably in a form much more simplified in structure and immediate in its implications and consequences, than anything now experienced.

Social structure is not just about kinship structure. It entails as well patterns of marriage or conjugation for the purposes of reproduction. First, modern humans have to get past the hang-ups of existing in a monogamous and sexually repressed society. It is likely that the original social structures of human society were largely polygamous of one form or another, and that mixed polygamous systems were the general rule for society 100,000 years ago. This is not to say that pair-bonding may not have occurred, but I suspect that the bonding of many social relationships may have lacked the psychological intensity and investment or carried the heavy social loadings that they have today. I suspect that many early humans entered into and out of relations out of convenience and as opportunity presented itself, but also that such relations may have been marked by much potential violence and conflict.

In such a framework, those who could keep promises may have had better long-term luck than those who might manipulate the truth to their own ends, though this is clearly debatable. Given the nature of most social interactions today, I would be inclined to agree that the chronic cheater and manipulator would have shown greater intelligence and would have been more successful in passing on their genetic complement to future generations compared to those who were tried and true in social relations. The real truth may have been somewhere in between, in the sense that loyalty and filiality and the need for solidarity or honesty may have been largely situationally or contextually determined.

What I see our protocultural ancestors being is enmeshed in a larger field of social relations that defined a competitive-cooperative continuum and in which any particular relationship may have ranged somewhere between these extremes for a variety of reasons. Thus, one's ally or friend in one context, may well become one's enemy or adversary in some other kind of situation. Trust was extendible only so far as the situation or circumstances demanded, and was dictated as much by narrow self-interest as it was by any altruistic sense of loyalty to a larger group. I may be wrong in this regard, but I do not see our proto-cultural ancestors as necessarily having been very heroic in their day-to-day life. I find few genuine heroes today, and I see no reason why yesterday should have been an inherently better period of time to live in. It must be seen that many of these kinds of abstract pro-social notions were later constructions of more developed cultural systems that may have placed a greater stake in human cooperative endeavors and in rigid conformity to somewhat narrow and coercive traditions. I doubt whether the earlier kinds of systems could have exacted or expected such coercive conformity from the members of the group. Rather, the coercion felt by the early members of society was the coercion of circumstances that may have frequently been life or death, circumstances dictated by natural selection and by a form of social selection without the intervention of well developed cultural variables or contexts.

If group boundaries were not exactly or always clear cut, then it is possible that allegiances, networks and group identities were continuously shifting, and that people might have been able to pass readily from one group or another, either by adoption, marriage, or by involuntary servitude. I think group boundaries may have existed, but never as an all or none kind of thing, or as a line drawn in the dirt between one's enemies and one's own kind. They may have existed as matters of degree of distance from ego or the kin-group, and the immediate kin-group may have been the primary reference point of one's social identity. There may have simply been no proto-social "nations" or even "tribes" or "the people" in a larger or more general sense of the term.

If we observe all economic relationships, including those of marriage, we see that those relations defined by reciprocity and trade are often also defined by potential risk and conflict. Thus, the cooperative-competitive continuum would have operated in both directions at the same time. It can be expected that people would have preferred to trade and barter over resorting to confiscation and force, but this is not necessarily true. Trade can be seen in this sense as both a conflict mediating mechanism, but also as a potential conflict-generating mechanism as well.

Human Ecology in Evolutionary Context

The models of archaeological systems theory developed previously are applied to a larger "eco-evolutionary" context that explores human systems as natural systems within a larger biological and evolutionary framework. Eco-evolutionary models that have been developed in biological systems theory are especially appropriate to the understanding of cultural systems as these relate both to other natural systems and as they relate socially to one another in larger regional and interregional settings. Archaeological systems are often restricted by a limited data-base to explore primarily human ecological relationships to a natural environment. It is therefore instructive and useful to go into greater depth to explore the possibilities of these relational patterning and their consequences for human systems and their trajectories through time upon natural landscapes.

In seeking to define more critically the interrelations between anthropological and biological theory, especially in the area referred to as ecology, I have developed a general sense of the perspective about population dynamics, and social relational and event structures, and understanding of social dynamics, mechanics and statics, that apply on both anthropological and biological scales and levels of observation with more or less equal measure. There are differences of course between anthropological, or human systems, and other biological systems that are non-human, and a part of this perspective in social ecology is the critical examination of these differences and their outcomes in a more systematic manner. Human systems are fundamentally biological systems at some level of competition with other alternative kinds of biological systems--but they are also cultural systems that create certain unique kinds of adaptational contexts and structures that permit alternative evolutionary pathways for life to follow. Social ecology has thus a kind of parallax of perspective, with one foot in biology and the other in anthropology, that informs the dialectics between the two fields of inquiry. Social ecology is thus a synthesis of this interdisciplinary dialectic.

I would say that this paradigm is in direct noetic competition with and opposition to the alternative paradigm that has been developed, and that is referred to as socio-biology. Socio-biology is a theoretical perspective that is rooted to the observation of insect communities, with general derived inference being extended to the structure of all biological communities. Almost pointless to say, nature articulates very different at the level of the beehive or ant colony than at the level of an ungulate herd or a Baboon troop, much less a full blown human city. The danger of such an approach is of course, the fallacy of overemphasis and a very basic kind of zoomorphization between inappropriate levels. As we step up the chain of phenomenal complexity of natural biological systems, we must see that the form of ant-colony ethics that may be applied to the structure of societies on an insect level does not apply to the structure of social groups among birds or reptiles, much less to primates and hominids.

Group structure and dynamics becomes an important frame of reference for understanding biological social organization upon all levels. Operating principles driving these group patterns at all levels predetermine and prestructure the outcomes of individual behaviors, and in turn are shaped by these individual behaviors. While most of this understanding seems to apply to animal communities, I will make a case that a similar if fundamentally different kind of understanding can be applied to plant communities as well, and to inter-Kingdom heterogeneous communities at a different level of analysis. We must understand that the informational patterning affecting these different structures are inherently different in structure and design, and therefore lead to different kinds of patterning and results.

Last Updated: 08/25/09