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Central nervous systems and complex brains evolved to coordinate and integrate: to coordinate and integrate a large, complex, self-propelled creature with its surroundings, by coordinating and integrating the sensation and control of its parts (which are spaced further and further apart with the evolution of larger, more complex creatures, and which also spread as an individual grows), tightening the link between perceiving and acting. 
 

Social Knowing

Many species have evolved complex behaviors and practices that depend on cooperation, on the coordination of behavior and on a sensitivity to other members of the same species. The more successful creatures are in merely recognizing each other (as conspecifics, mates, offspring, relatives, group members, individuals) the more detailed and intricate will be their cooperative strategies. Creatures that know more about each other will be more successful in predicting or affecting or evoking each others’ actions, more successful in coordinating themselves -- their embodied knowledge -- with their conspecifics. They will be more intimate cooperators.

Ants exhibit a panoply of intricate social behaviors, from nest building and organizing to functional differentiation amongst castes to domestication of aphids and fungi. Ant communication is achieved by altering the environment with chemical traces. Bees communicate through ritualized dances. Insect colonies like ant hills and beehives are sometimes likened to superorganisms that collectively exhibit behaviors that resemble functions associated with autonomous creatures.  Even with their limited neural structures insects achieve collective intelligence through coordinated action. 

In any creature where the young are born dependent on parental nurturing, sociality of some kind is necessary for survival. This necessity lies behind the development of many elaborated patterns of familial and group behavior. In some bird species, sexually immature year-old birds will help care for newly hatched siblings.  In some mammals immatures are cared for by a collective. Some animals have evolved large-scale patterns of coordinated behavior: birds flock, mammalian predators hunt in packs, grazing animals herd. 
In these cases, patterns of behavior are stable across many generations. Behaviors may change suddenly in response to drastic environmental change, such as sudden climate shift or a move to a new habitat. But within a relatively stable environment, social behavior in these species will remain relatively stable, changes moving slowly through a population across generations by genetic distribution.

Primates

Careful observation of primates has led to the understanding that culture, the process by which patterns of behavior are spread through a population by imitation and learning, is not limited to humans. Our closest cousins, chimpanzees, have a variety of behaviors confined to specific communities and spread by imitation, for example, fishing for termites with a leaf rib or using leaves as toilet paper.  Likewise orangutans, our most distant great ape cousins, exhibit behaviors that are cultural, including the use of simple tools and ritualized greetings.  Primatologist Carel Von Schaik hypothesizes that the ability to coordinate behavior this way must have arisen at least fourteen million years ago amongst the common ancestors of chimpanzees and orangutans.

Emerging humans refined this kind of coordination to new levels of depth and detail. The multiplicity of advantages that detailed coordination afforded made it a potent force in the refinement and spread of physical and behavioral adaptations in humans. It is by means of this refinement that humans have achieved their great numbers and wide global distribution, their ingenuity in adapting to any environment by adapting the environment to themselves. 
According to the archaeological record, since the human evolutionary path split from the other primates about six million years ago, human anatomy underwent a series of alterations that led to the emergence of the familiar human form about 100,000 years ago. Changes to the skeletal structure accompanied a preference for walking upright. Changes to brain size and organization and changes in the vocal production mechanisms accompanied a preference for living together in tightly bound association. About 50,000 years ago the changes precipitated an explosion in human artifact production. Archaeologist Richard Klein has said, "There was a kind of behavioral revolution 50,000 years ago. Nobody made art before 50,000 years ago; everybody did afterward." 

The most obvious difference between humans and our nearest relatives is in the widespread manufacture and use of complex tools and artifacts -- especially symbolic and communicational tools which make possible complex social organization and the ability to accumulate and refine knowledge about the world. 
What these abilities and practices rest on, capitalize on, refine and accentuate, is our highly developed ability for coordinating our internal structure with each other.

Representation

Cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, has developed a model of brain-culture co-evolution that shows the development of human cognitive capacities as being intertwined with our evolving use of different representational techniques, distinctive human cognitive structures emerging from interactions between people and a human-altered environment.  He identifies three distinct phases occurring with the successive adoption of imitative gesture, symbolic language and writing as strategies of representing the world for the purpose of communication. 
In Donald’s model, humans’ earliest representational strategy, based on physiology and practices most closely resembling those of our primate ancestors, were mimetic, or imitative, using physical gesture (based on neurological findings, cognitive neuroscientist Michael Corballis suggests hand signals predominated ) to indicate and refer in a non-symbolic way, what Donald calls “public action-metaphor,” probably including an expanding repertoire of facial expressions. This style of communication provided improved but still crude tools for modeling and understanding the world, and good tools for coordinating people. Music, dance and theater are practices which probably first arose as pre-linguistic, coordinative strategies based on gestures of the body. 

These are practices by which people use their shared environment to coordinate with each other -- not just their behavior but their physical organization. People became more closely attuned by conjointly aligning  aspects of bodies and brains by way of an environment containing a flowering of communicative acts and objects. At the same time, the survival advantages of this increasingly more detailed alignment promoted its spread. The changing cultural environment selected for the malleable brain structures which accommodated such coordination. The faster cultural/neural communicational tools were refined and spread, the faster and more accurately they were able to be refined and spread, in a kind of evolutionary feedback loop. 

Language

But it was with the emergence of language and true symbolic practices that early humans became like modern ones. The use of symbols is widely recognized as the adaptation which truly distinguishes people, what Donald calls “the principle cognitive signature of humans.” 
Language  provides a system of vocal and body gestures by which we can evoke meaningful structures in each other and in ourselves. The gestures we use are minimal relative to the complexity of the relations they can evoke, relying for their communicative power on the activation of equivalent structures in the communicators. 

Successful communication depends on common structure. Linguistic communication requires a shared language: equivalent associations between word sounds and arrangement and internal structures of meaning. Spoken language additionally relies on subtle visual cues between speakers which we unconsciously use all the time. For example, a common phrase like, “Hey, look at that!,” usually accompanied by a movement of the head, a mere tilt of the chin, is an invitation to share attention by directing it to something in the common environment. The phrase is devoid of meaning unless we know the setting and orientation of the speaker and have access to the object of interest. Strategies like gaze-following and sharing of attention are skills acquired from our primate ancestors, necessary for linguistic competence. Such cognitive skills, precursors for the development of sophisticated communication in early humans, were refined in evolution and are further refined in individual development. 

Paul Bloom, a researcher in developmental psychology and child language acquisition at Yale, conducted an experiment which demonstrates one way in which gaze-following and attention-sharing are used in human communication, in this case, the learning of new words by a child. 

A three-year-old child and a researcher faced each other with several objects between them. Some of the objects were novel, created for the experiment. When the researcher said an unfamiliar word while looking at an unfamiliar object, subjects understood the word to be the name of the object at which the researcher was looking and used the name appropriately. In taking this subtle cue from the researcher, a child showed the understanding that another speaker is a person like herself, possessed of knowledge and beliefs that may be different from her own. To perform this act of double inference -- that the word the researcher is speaking is a name and that it is the name of this particular object -- she must know that other people have an intention in speaking, and that this intention is manifested by familiar patterns of behavior that can be understood through reciprocal patterns of behavior. By looking where the researcher looks, attending to the object of her attention, the child can mean what the researcher means. 

True symbolic language gave its users unprecedented power to model reality individually and collectively, to discover, express, share, accumulate and refine new strategies and previously undetected relationships. Observations of the world and successful behaviors could be shared and refined within a community, spread to other communities, and passed on to succeeding generations. This greatly accelerated the creation and spread of new strategies for living. The ability to rapidly accrete and refine knowledge, building on what has come before, has been called a “ratchet effect.” 
Language is a strong cohesive force. It allows the creation of narratives and myths embedding knowledge of the world and social ideals that cohere a community around a set of beliefs. It gives the power to structurally organize and coordinate ourselves: to organize neural structure of the members of a group by conjoining that structure to a common, collaboratively maintained system of symbols that can be simultaneously external and internal, simultaneously collective and individual. 
 
 
 
 
 

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