Mental DNA and the Ascent of Homo Erectus

If in the 17th century, someone came into the room where you sat for supper by candlelight and explained that the chair you sat on and the food you were about to consume, were actually not what they seemed, but rather events completely unexpected. They explained to you in philosophic terms that as the perceiver, you supplied the tastes, textures, colors and all sensual data; that even the chair isn’t solid but made of atoms and that in its structure there was so much space between atomic clusters as to be comparable to the space between solar systems, a cosmic area so vast that even when galaxies collided solar systems seldom clashed. You would be incredulous. How could the good green earth and all its components be a bleak grey affair? How could such a solid “thing” be a fluid event? By then, you’d have heard of Christopher Columbus and other explorers circumnavigating the earth. You would have accepted earth as a globe which rotates around the sun, but this?

Five million years ago, ape-men with the expert vision of their ape genealogies – they were the size of chimpanzees – walked upright and became excellent hunters and tool-makers. For three million years or so they lived on the unmeasured grassy plains of middle earth, but incrementally one line of them started to change, perhaps one to two million years ago. They acquired an arch in their feet and their hip joint moved to the center of the pelvis. They developed spinal curvature. Their skull changed. A domed forehead grew as the brain doubled its size. Their height increased and they became Homo Erectus. They began writing, drawing and using symbols. Their first engravings are some 30,000 years old. About 8,000 years ago, they began collecting and planting seeds and they founded the first villages. Sometime around this era appeared the first written tablets of food recipes and inventories of foodstuff. After this, came the first primitive alphabets. The stories and knowledge which had been passed on through vocal traditions about shared experience began to be recorded. They were collected eventually into crude libraries which became communal brains, or if you prefer, Mental DNA. So what was only a single generational genetic inheritance, came as a manner of speaking, available to many and put all humankind potentially at par.

A confluence of events occurred. In a time of cooler temperatures around the world about 600,000 years ago, Homo Erectus moved south on mass (over many centuries). Water locked up in ice allowed the emergence of land bridges across the Bering Strait and down the Indonesian Islands as far as Australia. Their brains were now the same size as ours; their spoken language skills as good.

Over the centuries, the temperature of the world meliorated. Glaciers retreated and land bridges disappeared. Many societies were cut off from middle earth.

Homo Erectus – “Upright” man (or Homo Sapiens – “Wise” man) populates almost every part of the earth today, not always upright, not always wise. However, the point is, the baby daughter of an African bushman – given the right circumstances – could be raised in a city by loving adoptive parents, educated at college and become a virtuoso at some study. Our pigmentation, body stature and other superficial physical features are directly related to the environment whenever one group of us stayed long enough in one part of the world – i.e., for thousands of years – to be fixed by natural selection. Now the features remain apparent for generations no matter where we live, but we started as one single line, likely destroying the other slower less intelligent ape-men for food and as competitors.

That said, however, my idea of Mental DNA isn’t to be confused with memes, a unit of cultural ideas transmitted to one another through speech, gesture or other phenomena of imitation which self-replicate and respond to environmental pressures supposedly in the same way that genes do. But alas, memetics is just yet another form of scientism. No memetic code exists, none ever could.

By proposing ideas follow fixed laws as they do with genetics, there’s an underlying assumption that humans can’t create new ideas and actually change because of the new information, i.e., it presupposes human freedom is an illusion. When it comes to social/ethical philosophy, scientists, mathematicians and logicians in studying the brain think they are studying the mind. Ideas can’t be put under a microscope except allegorically.

Mental DNA is offered as an idea that’s a genetic or IQ equalizer. Many brilliant thinker’s legacies are today available for free to nearly every mind on the planet. Reading a book is like talking to the author. Mental DNA is: “His pain, your gain.” Some work is still required to retrieve it, however, nothing like the dear price paid the first time around. This has created an accumulated multiplier: the exploding of multi-media has resulted in the rational individual’s rise to defend themselves against their enemies, almost always religionists, Marxists, social-planners, political-scientists, collectivists and statists.

If Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins use memetic theory as a metaphor – and this is always dangerous to do with people – then enough said.  If they truly believe that human beings are reduced – ultimately – to being preprogrammed by irrational memetic replication then their atheism is shallow indeed and their assault on religion laughable. There is no delusion for people holding a belief in free will. Are religions just the results of earlier memes? We are subjective but by running interference (and trying desperately to find some objectivity), we can in small measure control our reality. The application of reason in our life and the commitment to a rational point of view with proof as the arbitrator gives us some freedom over our own small world, especially our own morality. The idea of human behavior as a deterministic event where ideas – using us as host – piggyback on us to some end, sounds familiar because in the broad sweep, it’s Hegelian, recasting the old seesaw of thesis antithesis to some platonic teleological end. Academic philosophers just can’t get past Plato. Dennett, and many others, loved to practice proto-science, and don’t memes sound so scientifically juicy? Like sociology, memetic theory suffers similarly from scientism and to become useful beyond cult popularity, seems impossible. The internet has allowed regular people (read: non academic thinkers) to express their ideas as they seem fit – and they are nicely drowning out the elitists –  and believe me when I say that these Platonists (Marxists, Catholics, Theologians, Liberationists, Tenured Professors, etcetera) don’t like it. They believe people are stupid, and left to their own devices, will fall down.

I admire Dennett’s Theory of Mind – I think of it as The Onion Theory – and see that it accounts for much of its nonlinear operations without any explanations to (Chomsky-like) innate faculties or any spacial possibilities (of where the illusive “mind” resides). The self is a strong existential fact for human (and mammalian) creatures. The personality, which I often collapse to (mind, soul, I, ego, self, etc.,) is a metaphor for the person at the wheel of the car. Why this is important for memes and human freedom is obvious. We’re strong personalities: from that start, we can develop character, moral codes and commitment to reason. As adults, even if we are caught out in “A Heart of Darkness” the onion stripped back is not necessarily the end of our character. It may well all be human convention, but it is nowhere near hopeless. We aren’t completely free as the religionists maintain, but we’re a long way from slaves to a memetic theory or any such thing. We have limited freedom: we can claim control over our selves and work at our strength of character.