Cyborgs, Cyberspace, Cybersexuality and the Evolution of Everyday Creativity
Frederick David Abraham
Blueberry Brain Institute (USA) & Silliman University (Philippines)
[©2005 rough draft, send suggestions and comments to abraham@sover.net]
Synopsis
Everyday creativity lives at the fractal imbrications of the individual and culture, which are evolving in some very rapid ways. Advances in science and technology drive much of this evolution. Some of these advances are in computer systems (cyberspace); some are in the hybridization of the human body with robotics (cyborgs); and some are in communications, artificial intelligence, cloning, genetic manipulation, stem-cell ontogenetic manipulation (which can now eliminate the male from reproductive participation), pharmaceutical and molecular manipulation, nanotechnology, and so on. This evolution influences the programs of emancipation suggested by postmodern social theory and philosophical hermeneutics. Cybersexuality—a philosophical, literary, scientific genre—provides a prime example.
This evolution also involves
some very fundamental human motivations. For example, the desire to optimize
knowledge and stability, to know our origins and destinies, our meaning; the
ontological-existential quests. The quests for truth and for stability are at
once two sides of the same tapestry, sometimes in competition with each other,
and sometimes synergistic, but always interactive, playing in the same
attractors. Creativity lies in exploring where and how to weave within these
fractal imbrications. And creativity requires instability. How does the tension
between the need for stability and instability resolve itself? Or put another
way, why does stability require instability?Herein is some commentary on this
evolution within the context of a thread of literary and philosophical work
that Jenny Wolmark calls, Cybersexualities.
Introduction
Cybersexualities is the title of a book of readings edited and with commentary by Jenny Wolmark (1999). She subtitles the book “A reader on feminist theory, cyborgs and cyberspace”. The topic arises from the confluence of postmodern cultural theory, feminist theory, and recent trends in science fiction and extrapolations from the fields related to artificial intelligence, which have been made largely realizable from advances in technology. That is, the gap between science fiction and reality seems to be shrinking due to advances in technology (see also, Baudrillard, 1988a).
Postmodern cultural theory in turn arises partly from the synthesis of Marxist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and existentialism (Poster, 1989). But at the same time, postmodern (and post-analytic, and hermeneutic) theory has challenged these and other traditional views in many ways. Thus each of these sources, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and existential theories, undergoes a transformation while being conflated. For example, Lacan’s psychoanalytic concepts become more socially and less biologically founded. These confluences were heavily influenced, at least for Wolmark, by two principal texts. One is Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985). The other is William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984).
. . . employs the metaphor [of the cyborg1] in order to argue, firstly, for a reconsideration of Marxist and feminist analyses of the social relations of science and technology which rely on a received model of domination and subordination and, secondly, for the development of an innovative socialist-feminist political strategy that is not dependent on totalizing theories and in which the formation of new and unexpected alliances and coalitions are prioritized. (Wolmark, p. 2.)
In Neuromancer
‘The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,’ said the voice-over, ‘in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks. . . ‘Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding,’ (Neuromancer, p. 51.)
Gibson coined the term [cyberspace] to describe the ‘consensual hallucination’ . . . ‘Everyone I know who works with computers seems to develop a belief that there’s some kind of actual space behind the screen, someplace that you can’t see but you know is there.’ (Gibson, from an interview, quoted by Wolmark, p. 3.)
Wolmark points out:
In my view, this is the real significance of the metaphors of the cyborg and cyberspace — not only did they embody the lived experience of information technology, but they also offered a means of reconceptualising that experience in potentially non-hierarchical and non-binary terms. (Wolmark, p. 3).
Notice that these two metaphoric sources emphasize nature and nurture. The cyborg emphasized the innate nature, the biological foundations of beings. Cyberspace emphasizes the importance of environmental and learning contributions to being and becoming. This distinction is somewhat artificial. Obviously, in the first place, nature and nurture never exist independently of each other. They interact and change in the process, a dynamical system. They don’t exist independently of their mutual attractor, the abstraction of their dynamical process. In the second place, biological systems obviously can learn just as cyborgs do. And in the third place, cyberspace has its own nature, including fixed structural elements. The distinction is claimed mainly on the basis in that the cyborg places a priority on replacing some of the biological aspects of being as human and machinery merge, while cyberspace changes the individual by replacing some of the environment—the only dynamical and structural changes in the individual consisting of biological, mainly neural, plasticity.
Excursus on the Evolution of the Hominid
Brain
Humans share the same basic anatomical plan, especially with respect to the brain, which is similar in all mammals (Magoun, 1963; Livingston, 1967) and even in amphibians and reptiles (Herrick, 1948, 1956; MacLean, 1958). Hominid evolution retains those basic features, and overlays some important additions and elaborations. The first Homidae, Australopithecus, during the period of 5.5-7.7 myBP2, diverged from the Panidae which was facilitated by a rift and ecological isolation in east Africa (Coopens, 1982, 1996). The new ecological conditions favored the evolution of posture and locomotion, diet and dentition, culture and the use of tools, and encephalization and cortical reorganization—endocasts of A. afarensis (species status unresolved) show an expansion of parietal cortex at the expense of primary visual cortex, at least by A. africanus 3-4 myBP. Africanus shows a small allometric3 increase in brain size (Holloway, 1996). This theory of cortical organization and increased brain size for Australopithecus is denied by Tobias (1996) and others, but entertained as plausible by Coopens (1996).
Two to three myBP, further climatic changes took place in this region of eastern and southern Africa,with a concomitant rapid and dramatic evolution4 of Hominids with the appearance of Homo and two species of robust Australopithecines (Robustus and Boisei, both of which became extinct). Homo habilis, the first Homo, was the “size of a chimpanzee, exceptionally intelligent, imaginative, inventive, creative, talkative, emotional, and social [Oldovan tools]. . . and had a larger brain (640 cc vs. 440 for A. africanus, a more exclusive bipedalism, a new diet, and an improving culture.” (Coopmans, 1996, pp. 108-9). During the one million year reign of H. habilis endocranial capacity increased considerably (to about 900 cc for H. erectus). Allometrically, these enlargements were even greater. There were increases in size and gyral details and in asymmetries in frontal and parietal areas of the cortex. Especially, there was in a prominence at the position of Broca’s area, well known for its importance in speech.5 There is also greater venous cranial drainage, important for improvements in locomotion, cognition, spatio-temporal coordination, and increase in brain size. Thus while the change from chimpanzee to A. africanus was gradual, the evolution to H. habilis was rather rapid and involved considerable increase in brain size and organization.
About 1.5 myBP H. erectus appeared and migrated widely from east Africa to Africa, Europe, and the Far East over a period of about half a million years. Their unique Acheulian tool culture was elucidated by the Leakeys at the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania (Leakey & Lewin, 1977). They were also the first to use fire. In addition to an increase in brain size, there was continued cortical lateralization, reorganization of posterior parietal cortex for multi-modal processing and integration important for natural selection via social pressures for increased communication, and visuospatial integration for tool-use and hunting, memory of spatial location of self, others, and environment (Holloway, 1996). The increases in meningeal vascularization also support these contentions (Saban, 1996).
With the radiation from Africa of Homo erectus, there was apparently a gradual evolution of the first Homo sapiens neandertalis (500,000 – 120,000 years ago), with a corresponding gradual increase of several skeletal features, in brain size and meningeal vascularization, and changes in tool culture (Mousterian). Coppens (1995, p. 110) makes the point, based on a measure of the length of cutting edge per kilogram of stone tools, that there was more significant biological evolution in going from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens neanthertalis than technological evolution, but that subsequently, the evolution of Homo sapiens showed greater technological evolution than biological. He conjectures, “It appears that ‘instinct’ was more important than knowledge during initial evolution, that that the volume of data to be learnt was becoming more important than ‘instinct’ 100 000 or 200 000 years ago.”
While the most dominant thrust of the evolution of hominid brain seems to be on neocortex, which seems most responsible for cognitive development and control over the basic limbic-emotional system of the mammalian brain, there was some also some evolution of the limbic system. The evidence is based on the comparison of living primates and their relation to evolutionary history. Hippocampus, especially parts involved with memory and cognition are greater in humans than in apes. But the septum and cortico-basolateral parts of the amygdala increased relative to the centromedial nuclei of the amygdala, thus “it can be concluded that in the limbic system, evolution tended to enhance those components related to pleasurable and enjoyable experience, while the components related to aggression and rage remained underdeveloped.” (Eccles, 1989, p. 106).
A brief summary might be that the basic limbic-emotional organization of the brain is ancient, evolutionarily speaking. And that the amount of layer/columnar replication of neocortex and multiple cortical sensory and motor mapping increased gradually, but passed a critical bifurcation parameter, hastened by genetic isolation (punctuated equilibrium; Gould, 1988;Gould & Eldridge, 1987), passed evolution of human culture from more biological or instinctual control to more informational evolution, while at the same time increasing the role of cooperation and altruism. Some of the evolutionary pressures that produced the biological evolution could be utilized by other cognitive functions. Biology places potentialities and limitations on creativity. Cybersexual discourse explores the future of the evolution of those potentialities and limitations, and the possibilities of their contribution to emancipation.
Excursus on Postmodernism and Gender
Postmodern literature, despite its great diversity, has a major theme of establishing discourse rather than ideology as a means for providing a continuing flow of society toward equal opportunity and freedom from tyranny and discrimination. Wolmark’s commentary, which sets the theme of her book, seems to place science fiction literature as sharing some communality with this postmodern discourse (cryptically buried in her terms, “non-hierarchical and non-binary”; quoted in the introduction above). Such communalities can co-exist along with some differences. For example, Hutcheon (1989) has noted the communality of the theme of social liberation that is shared by feminist and postmodern agendas. This communality exists despite the difference that feminism has an agenda, an ideology6, while postmodernism avoids such ideologies in favor of establishing societies based on open-forum discussion (although one might argue that perhaps that aim itself could be considered some sort of generic or non-specific ideology).
I think Wolmark inherits this language of ‘non-hierarchical and non-binary’ from Hélène Cixous. For Cixous, as for Derrida, oppositions (binaries) can be dangerous, a source of oppression. For those of us involved (and many who are not so involved) in dynamical systems theory, we have a great deal of admiration for the Heraclitian model of oppositions as creating a process of producing a new dynamic (an ‘attractor’—a pattern of activity created by mutually interactive agents) that surpasses each component of the binary (Bird, 2003; Sabelli,1989) . But we have to understand that the dynamical process may produce maladaptive or harmful cultural attractors, as well as desirable ones. This can happen especially when the relative strength of the influence of each component of the binary is asymmetrical, which is the meaning of her term, ‘hierarchical’. A healthy social process must eliminate the asymmetry of the binary to produce a more symmetrical attractor beneficial to all participants in the binary opposition.
Some of these hierarchical binaries include culture vs. nature, form vs. matter, speaking vs. writing [to which I might add, conscious vs. unconscious, and logical vs. emotional]. All of these binaries are related to the opposition between man and woman; all have one element of the binary as privileged over the other. (Adapted from Sarup, 1993.)
[Cixous] argues for the possibility of sustaining a bisexuality: not as a denial of sexual difference, but as a lived recognition of plurality, of the simultaneous presence of masculinity and femininity within an individual subject.
For Cixous, writing is a privileged space for the exploration of such nonhierarchically arranged bisexuality. . . she favors texts that are excessive in some ways, texts that undermine fixed categories. (Sarup, 1993, p. 111).
I think we can safely say that the writings about cybersexulaity are such explorations, in this case those writings are exploring within the context of science fiction, and social philosophy that deal with the interactive effects, real and imagined, of technology, society, and conceptions of gender.
“Like Lespector [Brazilian author of fiction very syntonic with Cixous], Cixous wants to reject the constraining masks of social identity in favour of a Heideggerian notion of the multiple and temporal experience of Being.” (Sarup, 1993, p. 114.)
If the poles of a binary, or multiplicity, are more symmetrically coupled, then instead of evolution to fixed positions (that is, one of the ideological positions of a binary versus the other ‘wins’; becomes an ‘absorbing state’), there ensues a complex dialogue, a strange attractor. Instabilities play a role, which in turn enable social change, a paradigm shift, a bifurcation, a ‘road not taken’. To permit this dialogue is Tillich’s “Courage to Be” (1952; Abraham, 1996, May, 1975).
Incursions into Cybersexuality
Topoi (Crucius, 1991) refers to a sense of community and home, of belonging and meaning from both the point of view of our place in the universe and from the point of view of our place within various contemporary communities in which we live. One source of such sense of meaning in our lives derives from being a participant in the long evolutionary development of our species, and the evolution of our cultures over generations of homo sapiens. Many authors examine the disruption of the role of reproduction and parenting in science fiction, and by doing so, force a reexamination of those roles and their implication both for understanding our human nature and for providing guidance in the emancipation from some of the psychosocial aspects of those roles that have become repressive. Understanding in both these areas helps to nurture creativity in our everyday lives. While science fiction is by no means the only literary genre dealing with these issues, the advances of modern science and technology has made many of these fictional disruptions a reality, giving them added urgency.
Mary Ann Doane (1991) states, “[for] some contemporary science-fiction writers technology makes possible the destabilization of sexual identity . . .” (p. 20) As examples, she discusses L’Eve Future by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1886) in which a mechanical Eve, a perfect (but sterile) replica of a woman, reveals the dissociation of sexual desire from reproductive capability and motherhood. L’Eve also exhibits the “compatibility of technology and desire” themes repeated in much science fiction since then, such as in the films The Stepford Wives (1975), Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), and Blade Runner (1982). In the case of the film Lang’s Metropolis (1926) the replication engenders fear rather than desire: “The fears and perpetual anxieties emanating from ever more powerful machines are recast and reconstructed in terms of the male fear of female sexuality, . . .” (Huyssen, 1986), who also claims that “the ultimate technological fantasy is creation without the mother.
It is of interest to note that in some science fiction, empathy/sympathy for the other gender is promoted. In Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (1969) sexual partners undergo, occasional, sequential, synchronous, gender reversals. Thus knowledge and empathy with the partner are greatly enhanced compared to the human experience. Empathy can also be appreciated in the pair of Alien(s)’ movies in which there is role reversal seen in the strength of the character of the female protagonist, and in the amplified violence of the human male giving ‘birth’ to monstrous alien creatures.
As dynamical system theory suggests, large changes occur when there is large instability. Doane’s discussion of destabilization of sexual identity, and the sexual transformations of La Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and the movies, Alien(s)’ “births” represent such instabilities. Reproduction is diabolical in its very nature, it “. . . makes something fundamental vacillate.” (Baudrillard, 1981, 1983). Doane pushes this concern one step further: “What makes it vacillate are the very concepts of identity, origin, and the original . . .” a là Benjamin (1969; Doane, p. 31.)
In Blade Runner, Rachel tries to prove her authenticity as a human to Rick. This raises the issue of the difference between an android and a human. What is the critical significance of the difference when so many human traits are encompassed in the android? The movie is based (with many themes left out), on Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do androids dream of electric sheep? (1968) to which we now turn. Let’s set the stage for the main theme. Androids are produced by the Rosen Association for export from a radioactive post-apocalyptic earth (2021) for export to be used as slaves in extraterrestrial colonies. Many of them don’t like the bleak conditions there and sneak back to earth where they are persona non-grata, to be hunted and destroyed. There are psychological scales (the Voigt-Kampff altered scale) employing psychophsiological (facial capillary and muscle reactions) measures designed to discriminate between real humans and androids. There are continual improvements of androids up to the current model, the Nexus-6, so that there is a continual evolution of sophistication of android attempts to defeat the tests and the tests used to detect them. To complicate matters, the issue of false positive identification could lead to the destruction of innocent humans. Some androids are running around northern California and Rick, the protagonist, a bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police Department inherits the task of finding and destroying them after his predecessor is killed by one of them, a very smart android. Rick heads for the Rosen factory in Seattle to check the adequacy of the test discriminating between some Nexus-6 androids and humans.
The critical difference is that androids only lack one human trait, empathy. The test detects this by finding a “flattening of affect” to empathic questions. Schizophrenics fail the test, but are considered all to be in mental institutions and thus would not be tested for androidism. If the test fails the test at Rosen Associates, production of the Nexus-6 will be stopped. Rachel Rosen, niece of the president of the corporation, meets Rick. The Rosen factory has an android and a control group ready for him, but as Rick is about to start, Rachel says “Give me the test.” She fails the test and Rick concludes she is android. Eldon counters that she is real. The test has failed. Eldon explains he has lived on a spaceship most of her life and the appropriate affect has not developed and she has missed police checks by staying in the factory. She is one of the non-institutionalized schizoids. Eldon accuses the use of the tests as unethical, as they probably have made false identifications before. The Rosens try to bribe Rick with the gift of a real owl; if the test is bad, he is temporarily out of bounty income until better tests can be created. Actually, like Rachel, the owl is a fake being palmed off as real. The over importance of pets, real and artificial is an important sub theme of the book that also raises important issues on the meaning of humanity, and the desperation and contortion of it by a post-apocalyptic world. She refers to the owl as “it” and he gets suspicious. He puts the apparatus on her again and asks one question while referring to his briefcase as being made of human babyhide. She reacts, the test is exonerated, Eldon “slumps”. Rick says to Eldon, “Does she know?” (False memories in the past failed to defeat the test.). Eldon replies “No. We programmed her completely. But I think toward the end she suspected.” Then, to Rachel he says “You guessed when he asked for one more try.” Rachel nods affirmatively.
To summarize, not only is the meaning of being human tied up with the history and future of the human-android-pet relationships (and religion in yet another sub theme of the novel tied up in the struggle between Buster Friendly, a mindless continual TV show and Mercerism, a mindless religion based on an over inflated empathy via mind-meld empathy boxes), but also there is a lot of everyday creativity as the protagonists spar, tied up in this narrative, showing the link between everyday life and ontology.
Claudia Springer (1999) notes that much of cyberpunk popular literature, including comics, has cyborgs or individuals entering the matrix (cyberspace) seeking to get rid of the “meat”, the organic body, and become pure consciousness. That should eliminate gender differences. She mentions Haraway’s optimism that this makes the cyborg a “potentially liberating concept that could release women from their inequality under patriarchy”. However, she points out that paradoxically gender becomes stereotyped and exaggerated in the popular cyberpunk literature, despite its transformation from organic to mechanical imagery, e.g. as with Robocop and with Topo and Neon Rose in the comic book, Cyberpunk (Rockwell, 1989). Or as Anne Balsamo (1999) puts it, “Cyborg images reproduce limiting, not liberating, gender stereotypes (p. 153). But Hans Moravec, a leading robotics expert at Carnegie Mellon, envisions downloading human consciousness into computer networks (1988). Lyotard (`1998-9) poses the question, “Can thought go on without a body?” To which he replies that “the most complex and transcendent thought is made possible by the force of desire, and therefore ‘thinking machines will have to be nourished not just on radiation but on irremediable gender difference’” (Springer, p. 41; Lyotard, p, 85.) Baudrillard “sees the collapse of clear boundaries between humans and machine as part of the same postmodern move toward uncertainty that characterizes the collapse of difference between genders: ‘science has anticipated this panic-like situation of uncertainty by making a principle of it’.” (p. 41; Baudrillard, 1988b, p 16.)
Cyborgs epitomize the oppositions of immortality and death, an opposition that implies uncertainty7, a theme Springer goes on to explore, “not even death is a certainty.” (p. 52.)
William Gibson(e.g., 1984) and Rudy Rucker (1982, 1988) have made immortality a central theme in their books, raising questions about whether nonphysical existence constitutes life and, especially in Gibson’s novels, examining how capitalism would allow only the extremely wealthy class to attain immortality . . . But cyberpunk fiction is not without recognition of the paradoxes and dangers of immortality. . . characters who become immortal are usually surrounded by a tragic aura of loneliness and decay.
Even Topo, in the comic book Cyberpunk, rejects the idea of leaving his meat behind and remaining permanently in the Playing Field when he is offered the opportunity. (Rockwell, 1990.) What he rejects is immortality. But the comic book reveals that the loss of his human body would be tantamount to death; . . .
[Nonetheless, Topo (Rockwell, 1990) says,] ‘after all, I’m only a data construct myself, now. Nothing equivocal about it. We live. We are forms of life, based on electrical impulses. Instead of carbon or other physical matter, we are the next step.’
These examples show that cyborg imagery revolves around the opposition between creation and destruction of life, expressing ambivalence about the future of human existence . . . (Springer, 1999, p. 52.)
Epilog
There have been opposite approaches to the search for truth. One seeks absolute knowledge (the Eleatics, Plato, Confucius). The other seeks diversity and change (Heraclitus, Gorgias, Protagoras, Lao Tzu). These approaches have been involved in almost every philosophical inquiry from the Greek cosmologists to contemporary postmodern and gender-oriented literature. The stage for this distinction was really set by “Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 544-484 B.C.) [who] argued that the entire substance of the world is in a ceaseless process of change, while the Eleatic philosopher, Parmenides (c. 540-470), held to the opposing theory that the ultimate substance (Being) is unchanging and unchangeable, permanent.” (Sahakian, 1968, p. 6.) Could the distinction be partly true and partly false? Many have tried to reconcile them. Xenophanes, was probably the first to try, viewing them as problems of being and becoming, and of rest and motion. Due to my interest in nonlinear dynamics, I have viewed them as aspects of stability and instability (change), a continuum stretched between two extremes.
Postmodernism and critical theory are heavily concerned with the relationship between emancipation and theory (Marçöl & Dennard, 2000; Poster, 1989):
[Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard claim] that the quest for certain truth and the claim of having attained it are the greater dangers. The logocentric philosophical tradition, with its strong assertions about truth, is complicit, for them, in the disasters and abominations of the twentieth-century Western history. On this difficult, even tragic issue of the relation of politics to truth, poststructuralists in general strive for a cosmopolitan position that makes every effort to recognize differences, even uncomfortable or disagreeable ones, and for a theory of truth that is wary of patriarchal and ethnocentric tendencies that hide behind a defense of reason as certain, closed, totalized. Above all, poststructuralists want to avoid forms of political oppression that are legitimized by resorts to reason, as this kind of legitimation has been, in their view, one of the paradoxical and lamentable developments of recent history. (Poster, 1989, p. 16).
Systems theory suggests that change and choice are dependent on having a certain amount of instability, of abandoning rigid ways of thinking and being, It thus, at least metaphorically, supports a Heraclitian and postmodern social theoretical view of the inherent importance of change, and thus, the ability to think flexibly and make choices. The discourse of change is an essential part of emancipation, of establishing an open society. But the essential source of change comes from within (self-organization in systems talk), to which these conditions of flexibility best flourish with a great deal of personal courage in the face of our existential-cyborgian anxiety, and often despite conditions of inequality and oppression in a society.
Speaking of courage as the key to the interpretation of being-itself, one could say that this key, when it opens the door to being, finds, at the same time, being and the negation of being and their unity. (Tillich, 1952, p. 32.)
Improvisation is acceptance, in a single breath, of both transience and eternity.
(Nachmanovich, 1990, p. 19.)
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Endnotes
[1]
“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a
creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is
lived social relations, our most important political construction, a
world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed
'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial
collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial,
political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the
imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a
matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's
experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and
death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an
optical illusion.” (Haraway, 1985, p.
1) 
return
2 myBP: millions of years before the present.
return
3 Allometry measures the relationship between
different body parts, usually on a log-log basis. If the parts are in a linear
relationship, then they have changed proportionately, but if one increases more
rapidly, then there is a divergence from the linear increase. Thus, the
increase in brain size might correspond to an increase in body size, or the
increase could be greater than the increase in body size. Jerison (1973, 1991)
has formalized this measure as the encephalization quotient, EQ. Endocasts (aka
endocranial casts) are used to estimate brain volume and features of the
surface of the brain and vasculature from skulls. Inferences on brain evolution
from the scarce information provided by these clues are also made from fossil
and contemporary evidence and from inferences between known phylogenetic
relationships based on other evidence, and from assumptions about ontogenetic
and phylogenetic relationships (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. return
4 Rapid evolution usually requires geographic
isolation, that is, a relatively small gene pool (Gould & Eldridge, 1977). return
5 “The strong communicative proclivities of
higher primates, the clear-cut formation of a true Homo-like Broca’s
area in a small-brained hominid (KNM-ER 1470 [an H. erectus skull]), the
strong cortical asymmetry, and the presence of stone tools made to a
standardized pattern all suggest some
social communicative competence beyond that of any chimpanzee.” (Holloway,
1996.) Holloway also rejects Gould’s (1988) suggestion that language was a
by-product of a larger brain. Jerison (1973, 1991) suggests that the
development of much cognitive ability took advantage of multiple mappings that
took place within sensory areas enabling cognitive mapping of complex
territories (e.g., for wolves), that set up association or interareal cortical
communication, which I think is plausible and gave some of the substrates for the later evolutionary
pressures for language and communication. Geschwind (1965) suggest cortical
sensory convergence could increase connections between experiences enable
naming and thus language. return
6
“Crucially, it is the universalizing and totalizing tendencies of those grand
narratives, in which both Marxism and feminism can be included, that have been
most criticised, particularly for their exclusionary effect, . . .” (Wolmark,
p. 5.) return
7 In dynamical systems theory, patterns
emerge in time and space from the interplay of factors (variables), each of
which is stretched out between oppositions, or ends of a continuum. When the
interplay is complex, the patterns become ‘strange’ or ‘chaotic’ attractors.
While usually described by the deterministic equations of vector calculus, the
trajectories of these patterns are often characterized as uncertain, that is,
from a given starting position, trajectories can diverge from each other in the
short term, due to the impossibility of getting the infinite resolution in time
and space for the starting coordinates. Systems that can possess this
‘strangeness’ exhibit two interesting characteristics, one being this
uncertainty, and more importantly, the other is that the systems can change
their behavior dramatically with small changes in environmental or control
conditions, a feature called bifurcation; they pass a bifurcation point. Of
great interest is the fact that such change from one stable attractor to
another requires the creation of instability in the system. Change, and thus creativity,
whether in cosmological, biological evolution, or cognitive evolution, in the
large or ‘everyday’ creativity thus involves both uncertainty and instability.
(Abraham, Abraham, & Shaw, 1990; Abraham, 1996; Sabelli, 2005.) return