Entwicklung einer spezifisch menschlichen Eigenschaft: Kultur

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Etwa 2,5 bis 3 Mio. Jahre vor unserer Zeitrechnung entwickelte sich aus einer Klimakrise heraus ein hominider Typus, der sich langsam von seiner Umwelt unabhängig machte. Möglich wurde das vor allem durch eine überproportionale Entwicklung des Gehirns, der Entstehung des Großhirns und mit ihm, neben den Instinkten, einer eigenen Willensinstanz zur Reaktion auf die Umwelt.
Jeden weiteren Kubikzentimeter Nervengewebe mußte sich der Mensch erkaufen, indem er etwa einen halben Tag der Embryonalentwicklung außerhalb des Mutterleibes verlagerte [...] “The long gestation period, the extended dependency of the newborn, the year-round nature of sexual attraction, all seem to play a part in keeping parents and offspring together. [...] Humans, in short, have a social as well as a bio-logical genealogy. Such social genealogy, in turn, is a means by which humans seek to control their own breeding. It is [...] what Darwin called artificial selection in regard to the other animals, but now with humans as its object as well as its subject.” (Mazlish, s204)

Diese speziell menschliche Verbindung unter den Generationen ist Transportmöglichkeit von Wissen aus der Vergangenheit in die Zukunft. Damit verlängerte sich der Zeitraum für die Entwicklung neuer Fähigkeiten.
Richard Leaky prägte dafür den Begriff der ‘Sozialen Intelligenz’, seiner Meinung nach eine treibende Kraft der Evolution.

“The reason that most sets off humans from the other animals is first and foremost a cultural artifact. Humans are special in the sense of being able to see `connections` among phenomena, which they are then able to arrange systematically and to pass on as culture, that is, by some form of abstract language, by conscious education, and by logical argument.” (Mazlish, s208)
“The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset [...] says simply that ‘Man is his history’. History, of course, has two meanings: the totality of all that has happened to humans in the past, and the structured attempt to understand the meaning and patterns of selected parts of that past, and to put them down in writing. [...] The second is a comparatively recent awareness, emerging prominently with the Greeks and their attempt to discriminate between history, that is, inquiry (the literal meaning of the word) and myth. Both myth and history are attempts to know and understand the past, and in this sense both depend on memory of a special sort and a transmittal over generations, by cultural means, of the particular memories. [...] History as such, of course, is a more scientific attempt than myth and has evolved out of a specific cultural development, in order to give sense to and derive knowledge from the past. It marks a dramatic separation from nature, construed as eternal, recurrent time, and the demarcation of human, or novel, unique, ‘constructed’ time.” (Mazlish, s210)

Entwicklung einer weiteren, spezifisch menschlichen Eigenschaft: Kunst

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Auf die Entwicklung von Sozialgefüge und Kommunikationsfähigkeit folgte, nach einer Stagnationsphase, eine ‘Explosion der Kreativität’. Neben neuen Werkstoffen, Werkzeugen und dem ersten Aufkommen von Handel entwickelt sich vor allem Kunst (Malerei, Musik, Bildhauerkunst, Schmuck). Kunst entsteht, obwohl sie keine unmittelbaren Vorteile im Überlebenskampf bietet.

Kunst ist aber eine logische Folge aus der Entwicklung menschlicher Gesellschaften. Der Zusammenhalt über eine Generation hinaus (s.o), die Wissensvermittlung zwischen den Generationen führen automatisch zu Symbolen und Ritualen, durch die Wissen vermittelbar wird. Mit der Kunst entsteht also auch eine erste gedachte Parallelwelt unabhängig von der realen - eine erste Mythen- und Glaubenswelt. Ganz in diesem Sinne ist Religion der Versuch einer Sinngebung über den eigenen Tod und die eigene Generation hinaus.
“As of now we can say that consciousness of death as a future state, is a fundamental part of the human condition that distinguisches it from the other animals [...].” (vgl. Julian Jaynes; The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind; Houghton Mifflin Boston 1976 in Mazlish, s206).

Vernunft

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Die Vernunft ist in Bezug auf die geistige Leistung des Menschen und ihren Nutzen für Wissenserwerb und -weitergabe nur schwer von Mystik und Glauben zu unterscheiden (vgl. unten Descartes). Sie ersetzt das Irrationale durch das Rationale (vom Standpunkt des Menschen aus) und schafft doch auch ‘nur’ eine gedachte Welt (vgl. Realitätsbegriff bei Watzlawick). Die Griechen waren die ersten (in der westlichen Welt), die sich mit dem Thema Vernunft bewußt auseinandersetzten. (Es fällt auf, daß Vernunft als Thema im Hauptwerk westlicher Kultur, der Bibel nur am Rand erwähnt wird: “[...] the Christian religion places a strong emphasis on escaping from the body, [...] By denying the body, the claim is made, we become free. For many Christians, as Elaine Pagels explains, `the `good news` of Christianity meant autonomy: that a Christian could actually defy destiny by mastering bodily impulses. Forces conjured by such names as Aphrodite and Eros ... must now yield themselves, like beasts before a lion tamer, to the rational will ... ascetic Christians were no longer at the mercy of uncontrollable forces - neither the powers of destiny, or fate ... nor the passions that arose from within.”, Elaine Pagels; Adam, Eve and the Serpent; Random House New York 1988; S.316 in Mazlish, s218).

“The Platonic belief in rational self-sufficiency eventually entered into the Christian belief system so that it too [...] insisted that Man's distinguishing quality was reason. Reason allowed him thereby to participate in the Godhead. [...] Descartes [...] became, in the seventeenth century the epitome of this way of thinking, replacing religion by science as the mode of establishing what is unique - reason - about humans. In Descartes's words in the ‘Discourse’, he knew himself as a thinker (‘I think therefore I am’), that is, as ‘a substance whose entire essence or nature is only to think.’ Later in the ‘Meditations’, he declared that he was in fact ‘a thinking thing’, nothing more nor less. By his rules, laid down in the ‘Discourse’, Descartes insisted that anyone could be sure of never making a mistake, finally ‘arriving at the knowledge of everything’. Having declared earlier that ‘God is pure intelligence’, Descartes, a believing Catholic but unknowing libertine, clearly was convinced that he had shown Man not only his true nature but also how that nature was at one with God, as long as it followed Descartes's rational rules. Since God was perfect, it followed that Man too, was perfect; or at least perfectible, Q.E.D.” (Mazlish, s207)

Körper und Werkzeug

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“[...] we are here [in the early twentieth century] at the limit of the mechanical world: we are precisely at that dividing line beyond which electronics and cybernetics would eventually lift the idea of `tool` to a level so different that the continuity seems lost.” (Hans Koning; ‘Onward and Upward with the Arts’ in: The New Yorker; 2.März 1980, S.80 in Mazlish, s183)

“‘From the rapidly accumulating evidence it is now possible to speculate with some confidence on the manner in which the way of life made possible by tools changed the pressures of natural selection and so changed the structure of man.’ [Sherwood L.Washburn, Tools and Human Evolution, Scientific American 203, no.3, 63-75] The details of the argument are fascinating because they link tools with such physical traits as pelvic structure, bipedalism, brain structure, and so on, as well as with the organisation of humans in cooperative societies and the substitution of morality or hormonal control of sexual and other ‘social’ activities.” (Mazlish s5). Werkzeuge ermöglichten die Ablösung vom Rhythmus der Natur, sie werden damit genauso Teil der menschlichen Evolution, wie des Rest des Körpers. (vgl. Karl Marx: die Überreste von Werkzeugen sind zur Bestimmung einer Kultur ebenso wichtig, wie andere Relikte).

“I - indeed, all mechs - am used to being broken into parts, repaired, and reassembled. That is the natural way.” (Gregory Benford; Great Sky River; Bantam Books New York 1987, S. 284 in Mazlish, s203)

Das Schutzbedürfnis des menschlichen Körpers vor materiellen und psychologischen Schäden (Schutzfaktor Kultur) sind Grund für das besondere Verhältnis des Menschen zu seinen Werkzeugen/Maschinen. “It is as if humans try to do away with their ‘human’ bodies, making themselves new, artificial creatures. Eyebrows are plucked, faces shaved, hair is cut and coiffed, holes are pierced in ears and noses, lips are painted, the body is tattooed - the list seems endless.” (Mazlish, s203) (vgl. Beginn der Industriellen Revolution in der Kleiderindustrie)

In der westlichen Welt war die christliche Religion ein Schauplatz der Auseinandersetzung des Menschen mit seinem Körper. Durch Entsagung, so hieß es, würde der Mensch Freiheit erlangen und sein weltliches Schicksal selbst in die Hand nehmen können, frei von körperlichen Mächten (ähnlich den Philosophen, die den Körper statt dem Glauben, der Vernunft unterordnen). “Angels were a marker on the Christian way to human perfection. Machines took on the same quality for more secularly minded humans. They did so in two ways. One way, embodied in the idea of progress, was to lead humans into a mechanical paradise in which they were perfectible because they had entered into a perfectible society, with all bodily tasks performed by machines, thus leaving the human as a purely spiritual creature, with all social problems solved. The other is that, the machine being perfect, in the sense that it could not err, for humans to become more mechanical meant that they, too, were fast approaching perfection.” (Mazlish, s218,219)

“Humans have consciously created a new ‘creature’ - the first such mechanical creation that we know of on the earth. It emerges as part of Man's own evolutionary nature. [...] On the other hand, whatever the development of, say, the combot, it can be stated categorically that though perhaps able to create other, varied combots, machines will not create humans. Humans, then, are unique so far in the sense of consciously creating other, different ‘beings’ - biogenetically, and especially mechanically - at the same time as these same creative powers play a more powerful role, in the form of culture, in creating their own evolving human nature.” (Mazlish, s229/232)

“What meaning does all this have?

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I have spoken of the human as a prosthetic god; and he or she will continue to be that. Humans will, indeed, also become more mechanical, both in body and in mind. In body, they are increasingly hooked up to mechanical parts - the macabre end point manifesting itself in life-support systems from which they need a ‘right to die’ in order to free themselves from such unwanted, purely mechanical ‘life’. In mind, Carlylean mechanization is now supplemented by metaphors of programming and artificial intelligence; and since humans think and feel in terms of metaphors, they approximate more closely in this regard to the mechanical-cum-computer. All in all, then, something like a new species will eventually emerge - Homo comboticus - that will compete with and very likely replace (or convert) most of the human types that have existed before about 1970; that is, precomputer Man.” (Mazlish, s228/229)