Note: These materials are intended as supplements for students in Ant. 301. These pages are in development and will contain errors.

Primate Precursor

The Third Human Radiation - Speech

Adaptive Features of Cultural Systems

Value Systems

Culture

Contrasts Between Culture and Species

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST'S DILEMMA

THE DIVERSITY OF HUMAN LIFE WAYS

Domestication of Plants and Animals

Life ways

Rise of Complex Societies

Value Systems

Futures

Primate Mental Evolution

The evolution of cultural processes remains a central topic in anthropology. Some of the fundamental distinctions between culture, language, and cognition may be made more clear and understandable by a consideration of their evolution in a hypothetical ancestor.
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Primate Precursor

We begin our hypothetical scenario with an imaginary antecedent so primitive that it has neither culture nor language. Many of its responses are innate and its ability to learn is small by primate standards. However, no matter how rudimentary, the ability to learn has high adaptive value. The individual does not have to wait for a mutation during meiosis to provide an alternate behavioral response. Instead, it may carry a repertoire of responses and select from them on the basis of past experience, a valuable trait since environments tend to be complex and changeable. Learning, a difficult or expensive characteristic to support, remains rather rudimentary in the evolution of most life forms on our planet. It may be that choices between behaviors also increases the chance of behaving inappropriately, so selection processes pushed not only for plasticity, but for also for limitations on plasticity that improved the likelihood of a useful response.

Learning is also biologically tied to the nature and quality of information that is perceived. It seems noteworthy that only two groups in the animal kingdom are "smart". They are the Cephalopoda (nautili, cuttlefish, squids, octopus) and the Vertebrates. Another feature that these groups share is a similar type of eye and visual processing. Even the characteristics of nerve activity (as measured by electrodes that record currents) in these two groups differ from nerve activity in other animals. The wave forms are greatly simplified with less noise.

In an ancient earth sea, the ancestors of vertebrates evolved brain tissue that could track, predict, and perhaps learn the movements of predators and prey. Those ancient brains found a biological way to compute and use three or four dimensional models (time is the fourth dimension). Once achieved, this neuro-visual system was expanded and new parts of it devoted to other tasks. This produced the related trends of expanding brains and increased behavioral complexity.

There is no way of knowing when these perception and prediction skills became sophisticated enough to merit the label "cognition." Rudimentary cognitive abilities are perhaps as old as mental maps since "self" would be located on those maps.

With time, a changing pattern of behavioral plasticity that is based upon a structured pattern of learning is evident. Some types of learning are tied to unlearned response complexes (bonding, sexuality, xenophobia...). The time and circumstances for the learning event can be genetically coded (critical periods, motivation for appetitave activity,...). Generally there is a tendency for plasticity based upon learning to be tailored to fit the niche of that animal - indeed it becomes an important feature of that specie's specializations.

Our now much evolved imaginary animal has become social, and has a set of vocalizations and behaviors that allow social interactions, including consort and parenting activities. It relies on many different avenues of perceptions for communication (vision, olfaction, touch, hearing). But these acts are innate (genetically coded) and there is a division between just the sending of messages and the more involved decoding of external messages. The complexity of context makes decoding more challenging than sending a signal. With time, the process of interpreting signals from others and integrating that information with context becomes more sophisticated. Although our animal is limited to the vocabulary coded in its genotype for messages to send, it can learn to interpret messages from other species. The receipt of messages then becomes more plastic and learning-dependent than transmission.

Indeed, the two functions even become partially separated in the brain - context interpretation on the right side and call coding on the left. Perhaps there are physical constraints upon the extent that one can disperse sound decoding in neural pathways. Some sound signals are high speed events with rapid fading and non-repeating structure that must be captured in real time or not at all.

Our evolving animal, now a primate, has considerable skill in decoding situations and messages. Although its own communicative acts are largely innate, cognitive abilities provide great flexibility in coping and manipulating the environment. There is even a beginning of flexibility in sending signals. This primate is sophisticated at predicting the environment. It lives in a social group whose complex structure is requires extensive monitoring (awareness) and social manipulation. The planning of strategy and deception are part of the required social skills. (return to outline)

The Third Human Radiation - Speech

In this context, a transition from a call system to speech does not seem unexpected. Communication in the ancestral human lineage became progressively free of innate signals, and more and more dependent upon learning. This meant that human vocal repertory, not as strongly bound by the signals themselves, progressed toward a speech system. The shift to speech included both improvements in learning abilities and changes in the anatomy and neuromotor control of the speech apparatus. We tend to think of this as a special and unique process, but it may, in fact, have occurred several times and many of our vertebrate relatives may have moved varying distances down this path.

The development of speech is accompanied by an elaboration of neural anatomy that supports speech abilities, and is perhaps second in importance only to the previous trend toward increased learning in communication and behavior. Speech itself may be an expensive way to communicate. It requires extensive training periods and great effort to avoid confusion since it is not naturally redundant unless accompanied by gestures and intention movements. Furthermore, speakers from distant groups encounter dialect confusion. Fortunately, the older mental abilities are still present to judge context, situations, and intentions. The learned content of speech demands special investment in learning and practice. Maximizing the learning component of speech produces a language system. (return to outline)

Adaptive Features of Cultural Systems

The watershed features of language is that it changes the way individuals share information. One could make direct reference to items and details that were displaced in time and space. Even imaginary subjects could acquire a mental reality and utility. Without language, great reliance had to be placed upon observational learning - an individual was dependent on its own experience or what it could deduce from the behavior of others. Language allows transmission of information without observational learning. Instead of the collective knowledge of humanity being fragmented into the experiences of small relatively isolated groups, larger units could contribute to the cultural experience. The larger that unit, the greater the cultural diversity and innovation. One could compute person-years by multiplying the number of people in the experience network by the number of years they have lived. This would be a small network if it is based only on observational learning. Language allows these networks to become very large, spanning millennia, and crossing continents.

language can produce an explosion of cultural change. One can imagine an ancient vertebrate ancestor who had to learn all that it knew about its environment by direct experience. In socially living groups, information could be transmitted across generations, allowing more complexity of learning. Language makes this process more effective. As a result, the individual possesses a smaller portion of the total culture, and the rate of change is amplified.

Rates of change are described by the following equation:

y=f(A)+ f(B)+ f(C)+ f(D)+ f(E)+ f(F)+ f(G)

where:

y = rate of cultural change

A = Period of Minimum vertebrate intelligence

B = Period of Mammal/Primate intelligence but no language

C = Period of Language (bound by memory and oral traditions)

D = Period of Writing

E = Period of Printing press

F = Period of Early electronic era

G = Period of Current electronic era

and:

f(D)=Dd(t)

and d = number of person-years per population

and f(D) = 0 prior to writing

f(E)=Ee(t)

and e = number of person-years per population

and f(E) = 0 prior to printing press

f(F)=Ff(t)

and f = number of person-years per population

and f(F) = 0 prior to electronic communication

f(G)=Gg(t)

and g = number of person-years per population

and f(G) = 0 prior to inexpensive digital storage and retrieval

t = time

Note that in mathematical form, this model for culture change resembles models for infectious disease dispersal more than those for natural selection.

Another important feature is that culture is Lamarckian in nature. That is, innovations can be self-engineered and then passed to others.
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Value Systems

As languages become sophisticated, they acquire a new adaptive function -- effective transmission of value systems - systems that motivate complex behavioral sequences and insist upon consistently adaptive acts. It is not technology that is the height of human achievement. That is too new. It is the efficient way in which we transmit values. Value systems are different from less generalized rule systems in that value systems set goals to work toward or to avoid. They are systems that focus energy and effort. Some values are supported by sets of rules that have grown over time to translate the values (or principles) into behavioral choices. An unusual property of some values is that they are adaptive only as goals. It can be catastrophic for some of the goals to be realized.

The individual is primed to acquire value systems at an appropriate time in development. Furthermore, a value system can exist with no reinforcement other than mental processes, and sometimes can survive the most extraordinary negative stimulation.

By selecting value systems that organize behavior in adaptive ways, the same human genotype exhibits numerous behavioral phenotypes and behaviorally adapts to a wide variety of niches. Just as gene changes may be too sluggish to readily accommodate rapid changes occurring in human ecosystems, a great danger to present humanity is that our value systems may be too slow to change in the world that we are consuming. There is also danger in the other extreme since there are few, if any, mechanisms to prevent changes in value systems that are destructive to the genotype.

Values may determine goals that motivate behavior; goals that are adaptive only as something to seek, but if actually attained can be catastrophic. For example, a herdsman who is motivated to convert grass to cattle is adaptive, but a successful pastoralist must always have a surplus of grass, a violation of the apparent value system.

On rare occasions humans deliberately alter values and deliberately change their culture. For example, in the early 1960's the marriage and bride wealth system of the Kamba of East Africa functioned well as it had in the older tribal life ways, but in the complex society of today this same system causes sexual discrimination against women. In the tribal world, a wife was the center of shamba (farm) economy where she and her children grew crops and livestock. Marriage arrangements included payment by the groom's family of an expensive bride wealth, an amount in money or livestock that required years, even decades to accumulate. The wife was then the husband's possession to be treated as he liked. A man could have several wives if he could afford them. Divorce was simple - she could leave, but the bride wealth would have to be repaid. Unless the family was wealthy, the bride wealth was quickly recycled to acquire brides for other relatives. An unhappy husband could abuse his wife, perhaps threatening to injure or kill her to tempt her into leaving and obligating her family to return the investment. Today, an additional option is for a woman to leave the tribal area to find a life in the growing urban populace of East Africa. In this case, her family could disown her, and possibly avoid the bride wealth refund. In earlier times, education was available primarily to males, partly because educated females were not popular investments of bride wealth. This pattern changed abruptly in the early 1960's, when volunteer laborers built more schools and household money was diverted to hire additional teachers. Kamba women simultaneously sent all their daughters to school, taking a large step away from older values, resulting in consequences that may be as important to Kenya as the civil rights movement has been to the United States.

Value systems remain one of humankind's most adaptive and most dangerous behavioral adaptations. (return to outline)

Culture

Culture is most easily defined as "learned and shared behavior". Earlier traditions to define culture with the aid of exhaustive lists have not been very productive (see Kroeber and Kluckholn, 1952; Cafagna, 1960). Terms like "preculture" or "protoculture" have been applied to what are clearly cultural behaviors among nonhuman primates (Itani, 1965). Unfortunately, we tend to make the same error concerning culture in nonhuman animals as Darwin made about nonwestern humanity. We underestimate how complex their cultural learning is. Goodall was at first puzzled by the apparent high intelligence of chimpanzees in the laboratory and the seemingly low level of innovation and cultural activities in free ranging animals. Because we did not appreciate those activities in the context of field work, we underestimated the learning abilities of many primate species. Even after thousands of hours of laboratory and field observation, the social science community was generally unprepared for the implications of Gardner and Gardner's (1969,1971) experiments with Washoe.
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Contrasts Between a Culture and a Species

Perhaps the most common mistake social scientists make when thinking and describing culture is to apply a simplistic biological model to it as if it were an organism instead of an acquired trait. Table 15-1 illustrates some of the differences between organisms and cultural traits. The first difference is the source of variation and innovation. In an organism, it is an event of chemical chance. That does not mean that all mutations are equally likely, but it does imply an element of randomness in the process of innovation. In contrast, cultural traits can exhibit planned or patterned innovation. Deliberate invention occurs. Innovations can respond to "needs" and can be goal directed. Of course there could be an element of chance in cultural variation, but the consequences of goal directed innovation (problem solving) are rather different from organic mutation.

All of the contrasts are important, but one of the most dramatic contrast is the independence between culture and genes. A parent can pass only one gene of each characteristic to a child. Each child gets a haploid complement of chromosomes from each parent. Cultural elements have no similar constraint. In cultural replication, parents and children do not have to have intimate contact or wait for maturation before retransmission. They can completely avoid the bottleneck of intimate biological contact associated with both asexual and sexual reproduction. Cultural traits can pass through already existing humans who have little biological relationship and little contact with the point of origin. Indeed, the point of origin can be an artifact produced by a long dead human. If one is forced to treat a cultural trait as if it were an organism, the most appropriate models would be those that have been applied to infectious diseases.

Another important difference is to recognize that cultures are not transmitted as entities. What is transmitted is an array of cultural elements and to some extent every member of the cultural community is different and unique. Daughter generations differ from their parents. One can not freeze the cultural system and in some way ensure that every individual in the future has exactly the same cultural elements as every other individual. Part of the adaptive value of cultural systems is the plasticity that they exhibit through time. When someone proposes to "maintain" a vanishing culture, the best that can be expected is to select some subset of cultural elements and transmit them. It is improper to equate vanishing cultures with vanishing species. All of us have left behind the cultures of our great-grandparents, but some elements of their culture may survive. An extraordinary feature of culture is that we may select which elements to emphasize to our descendants. (return to outline)

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST'S DILEMMA

A basic problem when dealing with values is the difference between the way they are perceived and the way they operate to alter behavior. The consequences of a particular "value" do not necessarily correlate with its imagined properties. Indeed, it may work in the opposite manner, or in a way that would be intellectually objectionable if it were perceived. For example, a preference for male offspring may be a vital component of a value system in a culture whose ecology is based upon a gender ratio that contains a surplus of females. [If you tend to stop having children once you have a male, families who have male first children tend to be smaller. Attempts to produce sons if the first child is female results in production of more females than males (Lave and March, 1975; pages 69-71).]

As part of our anthropoid heritage, humans do not see the world the way it really is. The illusion of freedom (Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin 1984; page 287), optimism, and a variety of other mental attitudes are innate adaptive traits, but they are motivational in nature and do not organize behavior. Value systems and culture shape our behavioral plasticity into a specific array of adaptive responses. This dependence upon values was surely adaptive at a time in our evolutionary history when our antecedents were less talented at logic or planning; and as part of our biological heritage, we have no option but to try to understand and proceed along the same course. (return to outline)

Late Pleistocene cultures exhibited great diversification as regional industries added their own unique elements and exploited local resources. Mesolithic sites (Mode V technologies, also called Archaic by New World archaeologists) were widely dispersed, relatively permanent settlements where ecological circumstances permitted. Inhabitants of some settlements gathered local wild grains (including maize in the New World, wheat in Europe, and rice in Asia) and stored them for later use. These practices developed into horticulture, hybridization of cultivated species began, and certain variants were selected for replanting. Neolithic settlements (Mode VI technologies) and their associated agriculture developed independently in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. (return to outline)

Domestication of Plants and Animals

Domestication of plants and animals, which began before the end of the Pleistocene, continued unabated during the Holocene. Though hundreds of plant species are now cultivated, only about 200 are important food plants in modern times. Hundreds more serve decorative or non-utilitarian purposes and thousands are potentially beneficial. People of the Old World domesticated many animals, especially large beasts of burden (cattle, horse, elephant, buffalo, goat, sheep, dog), whereas the llama of the Andes and the ubiquitous dog are the only large domesticates in the New World. Consequently, the cart, plow, and riding animals are Old World inventions. Dogs are perhaps the earliest domesticated animals, known from archaeological sites as early as 12,000 YBP. Late Paleolithic human expansion probably dispersed dogs over much of the world.

The modern world's four largest food crops are wheat, rice, corn, and potatoes. Almost all the energy and 90% of the protein consumed today comes from cereals (wheat, rice, corn, millet, and sorghum). Evidences of wheat cultivation is found in the Euphrates Valley in Neolithic sites almost 9,000 YBP and rice cultivation in Asia may be equally as old. Corn was domesticated in Mexico about 7,000 BP. Sorghum and millet are probably African in origin. Potatoes are native to the Andes where they were cultivated. The chief meat animals are pig (domesticated from wild Eurasian pigs), poultry (domesticated from India), beef cattle (from Eurasia), and sheep (from S. W. Asia). (return to outline)

Life ways

There are no primitive humans, in the sense that there are no survivors of pre-modern human varieties, and there are no humans who can be described as living in pre-modern cultures or technologies. Indeed, chimpanzees may come close to living the lifeway that we imagine for pre-technological humans. No Holocene human group is so simplistic in sociocultural behaviors. Probably no Pleistocene human group was either.

If we look closely at the lifeway of chimpanzees, the niche that most writers speculate as pre-human, it is evident that humans are much better at exploiting the forest floor and forest fringe than chimpanzees. Humans can walk indefinitely in almost any weather conditions, run long distances, swim, dive, jump, and climb, and thus are able to exploit an extraordinary range of niches. We are capable of systematic sustained work efforts of great variety. Although human physical strength is modest, tenacity and manipulative skills allow us great potential for modification of our surroundings. A human hallmark is cultural complexity, that is the combination of ingenuity, technology, language, and value systems.

There is a tendency to conceptualize the diversity of human political units in terms of typologies and to consider the various types as evolutionary steps. For example, one of the most popular models (Service, 1975) proposed four stages:

1. band - small groups

-egalitarian hunter-gatherer society

-no one has any political control over others

-all relationships are personal and equal

2. tribe - larger groups

-have a recognized leader (head man)

-leads by example not by force

3. chiefdom -large agricultural groups

-hereditary permanent political leadership

-great inequality among populace

4. state - a bureaucracy that has a monopoly on force and

political power

A major problem with this model is that it does not realistically describe either the intricacies or histories of lifeways. In this unrealistic model, human bands are politically less structured than are most monkey societies. The Mescalero Apache Indians of the southwest were gatherer-hunters, yet no one familiar with them would view them as less talented or "simpler" than more sedentary peoples. The rarity of gatherer-hunters today reflects the successful dispersal of agriculture, not a failure of gathering and hunting. It is possible to convert from what some evolutionary models would consider an advanced life way and agricultural practice to another apparently simpler ecology. For example, many of the Plains Indians abandoned their sedentary agricultural life ways after the horse, introduced from Europe, made possible pursuit of buffalo on the American plains. Non-agricultural technologies do not imply simpler cultures.

In an odd way, development of open range cattle ranching in northeastern Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States is a similar phenomenon (Doolittle, 1985). The first cattle in mainland North America ("New Spain") were unloaded near the present city of Veracruz, Mexico in 1521. An estimated 130 cattle were imported into the Pánuco area of Mexico by 1530. At the exchange rate of 15 slaves per head of stock set by Governor Guzman, 1,954 slaves (Indians) were traded for livestock. The cattle proliferated rapidly, and within 90 years numbered more than 176,000 in the Pánuco area. Cattle from these large herds on the east coast of Mexico were introduced into Texas in the seventeenth century. The bountiful supply of feral cattle in northeastern coastal Mexico and parts of Texas led to development of the practice of gathering feral cattle with the use of horses, a pattern familiar to us from western movies. In some respects, the gathering of feral cattle in Texas was more parallel to buffalo hunting by the plains Indians than it was to traditional pastoralism.

Values, kinship systems and ecology are often interrelated. Imagine a human group adapted culturally and physically to living in the Sahel (the semiarid zone that separates the Sahara Desert from the tropical forests of west equatorial Africa). Its members are nomadic pastoralists, depending primarily on camels and cattle. Land use is somewhat variable since they have no way of knowing which region will receive rain, and without rain, there is no forage. They follow rains, grazing their stock on vegetation that flourishes afterward. Seeds are harvested for human consumption and the leftover standing straw of grasses is completely consumed by livestock. Enough seeds escape human and animal predation to recreate green pastures after the next rainfall. When rains do not come, there is no forage for human or animal. Since rains are seasonal, herdsmen watch their calendars carefully. If the rains do not occur, each family must take its belongings and stock and travel rapidly to safe forage on the borders of the Sahel where they then must compete with sedentary herds people for space and food. Every family has kin among the sedentary inhabitants of permanent forage areas where they can, for a consideration, find temporary refuge. If a family miscalculates and waits too long to retreat to safety, livestock do not have enough forage and water to get out of the Sahel and thus the group can lose all its animals. If this happens, sedentary relatives are obligated to provide seed stock to their kin so the pastoralists can venture back into the Sahel the next year and try to regenerate their herds. Thus, in an extremely unpredictable habitat, there can be flourishing nomadic pastoralists who are part of a larger economic network. The outward simplicity of such pastoralists masks cultural and technological complexity.

Unfortunately, culture change can stimulate great hardship. For example, drilling bore holes (water wells) encourages herders to attempt sedentism in areas in which habitats will not support continuous human occupation. At the same time, a lifeway that works well at low population densities, may be ecologically impossible with large populations. Some of the adaptive features of many successful cultures were mechanisms that kept population levels below carrying capacity. Changing value systems as result of culture contact can prompt a society to exchange a viable agriculture technology for agricultural practices that are not sustainable.

Although his theories are not generally supported by most modern Mayan specialists, Puleston (1973) proposed a model of this type for the demise of Tikal, one of the great Mayan cities of the lowlands of northeastern Guatemala from about 250 AD to 900 AD. In his model, the rise of the city was made possible by harvesting rainforest produce, especially seeds of tropical trees such as the Ramon. A Ramon fruit is similar to a small plum with an edible pulp surrounding a large nutritious seed. These fruits are produced in great quantities in the forest and are easily harvested by picking fallen fruits off the ground. Most importantly, Ramon fruits store well in a damp, cool environment, retaining nutritional value for a year or more. When the city of Tikal was flourishing, each courtyard (household) had a cellar (called a chultun in MesoAmerica) in which forest produce could be stored under optimal conditions. Then maize (corn), imported from Mexico, became a prestigious food staple and the traditions of gathering rainforest foods were abandoned. Chultuns were no longer dug since maize does not store well in cool damp cellars. However, maize did not flourish in the lateritic tropical soils, and the city could only be supported by extensive importing of foodstuffs (including maize) from more distant (and difficult to control) villages. Eventually the system collapsed as economical and political resources fragmented due to food shortages. The point is, a shift in value systems from forest fruits to maize agriculture was temporally successful, but in the long run it was a catastrophic step that could not be undone. Even if this model is historically unproven, a commonly reoccurring ecological tragedy in recent human history is the tendency for our value systems to lock us into an inappropriate or unsustainable agricultural pattern.

Shifts in food crops among agriculturists have been an important driving force in human history. For example, cassava, familiar to Westerners as tapioca, was domesticated in the Americas and introduced into west Africa by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, where it became an African staple. Since it required little labor to cultivate, slavers could plant it along their trade routes to have a ready source of food to nourish captives. It is possible that cassava made extensive slave trade possible by providing a reliable and low labor food source for slave caravans traveling through African forests.
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Rise of Complex Societies

A complex society is a lifeway in which specialization of labor requires only a fraction of the populace for subsistence and there is development of an elite class or classes who control resources. Other characteristics usually include urban concentrations of population and long distance trade with other population centers. Concentration of wealth is usually accompanied by large public works (buildings or monuments) and a leisure class sophisticated in writing, mathematics, and astronomy.

Though complex societies are a logical development in cultural evolution, complexity does not automatically mean sustainability. Since complex societies often overwhelm other societies due to their large military or trade power base, only those societies with robust value systems survive contact with a competing complex society. Membership in a complex society does not make an individual more complex - there are no inferior languages or peoples.

It was not unusual for a Kung Bushman, for example, to trek away from his family area to a westernized farm or township. Young men might stay for a time, working on a farm and experiencing the "complex society," and later return to their home area and to their preferred lifeway. Being a member of a "non-complex" society does not imply a lack of sophistication. (return to outline)

Unique interactions between speech capability and cognitive skills allowed humans to move into a technological niche. Our resulting ingenuity builds behavioral shields between our biology and the environment, creating a protected "techno-box" in which we live. Humanity faces three immediate and potentially catastrophic problems. First, the most modern protective technology is available and affordable only to a fraction of earth's peoples. Second, in most contemporary forms, the technology is not sustainable. Third, we have not managed to understand and control the culture process. It seems likely that the truly difficult problems are consequences of our cultures and their value systems, especially our inability to keep costs of population and life style below carrying capacity. Because humans live such short lifetimes, much of the geology and cosmology of our solar system seems permanent. We deal with problems of the present on the human time scale.

Evolutionary processes continue, both in humans and in other living species. This means that no matter what improvements we make in medical technology, there remains the possibility that a mutated pathogen will threaten human populations in new ways. There is no momentum to evolutionary trends- they continue only as long as circumstances support them. Given time, the biological characteristics of humanity will change. In the short run, continued interbreeding between geographic areas will blur the genetic distinctions between the larger populations. Establishment of barriers to gene flow between populations would encourage the emergence of new divisions, and extreme barriers (such as slow interplanetary travel) could produce the division of humanity into several species.

Some of the most controversial changes that we will face in the near future are conflicts between our technology and our cultural values. Genetic manipulation already allows us to alter genotypes. Clones of mammals, including humans, are now possible. Surrogate parents are already common - baboons bear chimpanzee infants, horses give birth to zebras, with endocrine modification, post-menopausal women can carry an in-vitro fertilized egg through gestation, etc. The technologies to generate a new species, or alter features of existing forms, are already available. Genetic manipulation will present us with far more complex ethical dilemmas than those we faced with the advent of organ transplant technology during the 1960s.

An exciting and frightening possibility is that we have the technology and knowledge to partly control our species' biological future. Probably any chosen course will produce both benefit and harm, and as occurs in ecology, short term and long term goals may conflict. Perhaps the most secure prediction is that each person will need more than ever to be well informed if we are to make rational decisions about our species' future and about our own lives. (return to outline)

POSTSCRIPT

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
-Emily Dickinson
Poem Number 1741

We began this course by posing the questions "What does it mean to be human?" and "How did we become human?".

The formulation of appropriate answers is our most challenging intelligence test. More than that, the insights that we find in our answers help us shape our future. Meanwhile, exploration of the nature and diversity of our primate and human heritage is fun. There is great joy when, in the midst of our work, we penetrate a wonderful mystery. The feelings of elation and pride that come with understanding are reward enough for the drudgery, tedium, and sometimes real danger that has been defeated. Insights that we learn from our colleagues feed a thirst that keeps scholars eager students for life. Surely we are all scholars on the same life journey toward an uncertain future. These notes will have served their purpose if they have contributed to your thirst.

Chad Oliver, an anthropologist, used a science fiction theme ("Transfusion" Astounding Science Fiction 63:4, June, 1959, Pages 44-77) to make the point that the study of human evolution makes an excellent test of intelligence. Data do not speak for themselves and must be interpreted according to one's insight and training. These insights are never without bias, and thoughtful debate is always healthy. At best we can hope that future scholars may look back upon contemporary achievements with the same reactions we have when we read Haeckel, Hrdlicka, or Weidenrich. It may not be important for our syntheses to stand the assault of time. It is enough to hope that our efforts contribute to progress and that through efforts like these, science is alive.

The reward is, within limits of our experience, to know ourselves as a species.

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