Monthly Archives: March 2024

03/2/24

Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (2016) “A Natural History of Human Morality” (Part 21 of 22)

0578 What about other research into how human morality came to be?

Tomasello sorts current theories into three baskets: evolutionary ethics, moral psychology and gene-culture evolution.

In order to appreciate Tomasello’s view on the contents in each basket, I present (once again), his vision.  The perspective level associates to phenotype.  The content level goes with adaptation.  The intersections previously diagrammed are alternate portrayals of situation-level interdependence2b.

0579 Evolutionary ethics focuses on reciprocity.

The idea of reciprocity applies, yet seems insufficient, to an explanation of interdependence2b.  In Tomasello’s vision, interdependence2b emerges from (and situates) cooperation1b,  in the normal context of cultural selection3b.  Cooperation1b emerges from joint attention2a, in the same way that a situation emerges from content.  Joint attention2aemerges from (and situates) sociogenesis1a in the normal context of natural selection3a.

Reciprocity pertains to the ways that cooperation1b virtually situates sociogenesis1a. But, reciprocity cannot account for joint attention2a, which directly situates sociogenesis1a.

0580 Moral psychology investigates prosocial behaviors.  Unfortunately, the field has not drawn connections to human evolution.  Tomasello’s vision pencils in many connections.  

Indeed, Tomasello’s vision takes moral psychology into vistas beyond the term, “prosocial behaviors”.

For example, here is the virtual nested form in the category of firstness.

Surely, prosocial attitudes are foundational to each of these potentials.  Plus, each of these potentials keys into attitude-associated behaviors.

0581 Here is the virtual nested form in the category of secondness.

Ah, moral psychology models prosocial behaviors that potentiate the phenomena of these noumena.

0582 Here is the virtual nested form in the category of thirdness.

Oh, moral psychology has nothing to say about these three topics.

0583 What does this imply?

Moral psychology is a discipline that investigates the phenomena of actualities2 that occur within the normal context of three styles of natural selection. 

On the phenotypic (perspective) level, natural (within culture) selection3c is similar to selective breeding, in which each long-lived successful tradition breeds for individuals who are more and more capable of maintaining its survival.

On the cultural (situation) level, each manifestation within a particular social circle competes3b with other manifestations.  For example, one teams competes with other teams in terms of productivity2H and having fun2V.

On the adaptation (content) level, natural selection3a brings an adaptation2a into relation with a niche1a.  Tomasello labels the adaptation2a, “joint attention2a“, and its niche1a, “sociogenesis1a“.

0584 The problem?

A niche is the potential of an actuality independent of the adapting species.

The actuality independent of the content-level adaptive species does not appear in Tomasello’s vision.

Tomasello’s vision is like a house.

The actuality independent of the adaptive species is like a ghost in the basement.

The union of house and basement is called the Tomasello-Mah synthesis.

0585 Gene-culture co-evolution connects the scientific disciplines of genetics and natural history, not as an intersection (as Razie Mah does), but as a three-level interscope (as Tomasello does).

The following interscope, characterizing gene-culture co-evolution, appears in Looking at Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson’s Book (2021) “The Story of Us”.  This examination may be found in Razie Mah’s blog, from July 10 to July 31, 2023.

586 Note how the interscope for gene-culture evolution elevates adaptation over phenotype, in the opposite of the way that the interscope for Tomasello’s vision elevates phenotype over adaptation.

0587 Overall, do any of these three baskets contain Tomasello’s vision?

No, just the opposite, Tomasello’s vision contains the baskets of evolutionary ethics, moral psychology and gene-culture evolution, plus more.

The arc of Tomasello’s inquiry into the origins of humans is notable in this regard.

The house of Tomasello’s vision is an architectural achievement.

Yet, there is that ghost in the basement.

To that ghost, I now turn. 

03/1/24

Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (2016) “A Natural History of Human Morality” (Part 22 of 22)

0588 The Tomasello-Mah synthesis shows the ghost in the basement of the house of Tomasello’s vision.

Indeed, as this version of Darwin’s paradigm begins to haunt the entire edifice of human evolution, then Tabaczek’s housebecomes more than a house with a basement.  If sociogenesis1b is the potential1b of triadic relations2a, then Tomasello’s arc of inquiry may be re-articulated using triadic relations.

0589 For example, Razie Mah’s Primer on Sensible and Social Construction may be used to re-label the eras of individual, joint and collective intentionality.  Individual construction associates to the category-based nested form. Sensible construction associates to the two-level interscope, containing content and situation levels.  Social construction associates to the three-level interscope, containing content, situation and perspective levels.

Here is a list of what that might look like.

0590 To continue, the re-labeled eras may be regarded in terms of the evolution of talk.

The evolution of talk is not the same as the evolution of language.  Language evolves in the milieu of hand talk.

0592 Next, I would like to focus attention on the era of collective intentionality.

Here is a list depicting the timeframe.

0593 Before the era of collective intentionality, hand talk is confined team activities.  Hand talk produces sensible constructions.  Each team develops its own way of hand talking.  

After the domestication of fire, team-tradition hand talk starts to be used generally, eventually producing fully linguistic hand talk.

The situation is very dynamic.  Since cooking with fire increases the number of teams, fully linguistic hand-talk is re-appropriated for specialized use in more and more teams.  Fully linguistic hand-talk influences all social circles.  In some of these circles, grammatically correct, yet apparently nonsensible statements, generate social constructions that open new cognitive spaces.  These novel cognitive spaces become sites for more sensible construction.

0594 The voice comes into play during community meetings (150), seasonal mega-band round-ups (500) and special occasion tribal pow-wows (1500).  The voice is used for synchronization.  Song brings a large gathering of hominins into synchronization.  Once this cultural habit starts, then singing joins other traits in sexual selection.  The voice comes under voluntary control.

0595 Most likely, the early speciations of late Homo erectus produced species that could sing and hand-talk.  But, they could not speak.

Speech is added to hand-talk with Homo sapiens.  Anatomically modern humans practice a dual-mode of talking, hand-speech talk, for the next two hundred-thousand years.

0596 Hand-speech talk would still be practiced by anatomically modern humans today, were it not for the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia.  The hypothesis of the first singularity proposes that the Ubaid is the first culture on Earth to practice speech-alone talk.

Here is a picture of the era of social construction.

0598 Today, all civilizations practice speech-alone talk.

This brings me to the limit of Tomasello’s vision.  I open the door, and step out into the realization that our current Lebenswelt is not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.  I step into the vision of Razie Mah.

0599 The arc of Tomasello’s inquiry, spanning from 1999 to 2016, opens onto three masterworks by Razie Mah.  These electronic books are available at smashwords and other e-work venues.  This examination relies primarily on The Human Niche, along with books contained in the series, A Course on The Human Niche.  A related series is titled, Buttressing the Human Niche.

Here is a list of Mah’s masterworks.

Still, there is more.

A Commentary on Michael Tomasello’s Arc of Inquiry (1999-2019) is available at smashwords and other e-book venues.  This commentary includes Mah’s blogs for January, February and March, 2024, along with an examination of Becoming Human (2019), the fifth book in a sequence of five books.

0600 My thanks to Michael Tomasello, who writes the books under examination while Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, for conducting a scientific inquiry, from which I have examined only several works.