SYMBOLS, SEX AND SELECTION

 While going through books I hadn't read yet, I encountered a 1997 item by evolutionary biologist Terrence W. Deacon, THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES. This time I decided to sample a chapter out of order, to get a general idea of Deacon's approach to symbols in the context of evolution with the standard priority of organisms maximizing species survival through sexual selection. The random chapter I chose, "Symbolic Origins," happens to concretize one of Deacon's most interesting takes on the evolution of symbols in culture.

What was the spark that kindled the evolution of symbolic communication? If symbolic communication did not arise due to a "hopeful monster" mutation of the brain, it must have been selected for. But by what factors of hominid life? How can we discover the context of this initial push into such a novel form of communication?

One of the first ideas Deacon dismisses is the notion that language must have come about to optimize many of the standard societal interactions between prehistoric hominids of the Pleistocene. he points out that at a time when most animals, including hominids, communicated many day-to-day interactions with nonsymbolic strategies such as gestures and call-and-response vocal symbols.    

 A generally less efficient form of communication could only have gained a foothold if it provided something different, a communicative function that was not available even in a much-elaborated system of vocal and gestural indices. Given these disadvantages, what other possible selective advantage of symbolizing could possibly have led a group of hominids to incur such costs? 

Deacon then points out that "intense sexual selection" is usually the factor that causes "significant evolutionary changes in communication in other species." He references the evolutionary use of the term "ritualization" to describe lower animals taking on patterns to optimize sexual selection, whether the patterns are gestural (male and female grebes dancing together on a lake's surface or visual (the familiar example of the peacock's tail, a distinct individual disadvantage for the sake of gene transmission). These examples initially suggested to me that Deacon meant to argue that symbolic language might have evolved to facilitate sexual liaisons, but it turned out that Deacon pursued a more roundabout conclusion.

After some general comparisons to other animal species' habits of both mating and provisioning for the young, Deacon focuses on one of the distinctive provisioning strategies of hominids: the regular seeking of meat as fodder, even in times when there are not shortages of edible plant-life. Again, all or most of the hominid strategies for mating and provisioning can be handled by nonsymbolic communications.

Although there is a vast universe of objects and relationships susceptible to nonsymbolic representation, indeed, anything that can be present to the senses, this does not include abstract or otherwise intangible objects of reference. This categorical limitation is the link between the anomalous form of communication that evolved in humans and the anomalous context of human social behavior. 

The thing that hominids do, that other animals do not do (and yes, Deacon addresses so-called "pair bonding"), is the abstract system of marriage.      

Marriage, in all its incredible variety, is the regulation of reproductive relationships by symbolic means, and it is essentially universal in human societies. It is preeminently a symbolic relationship, and owing to the lack of symbolic abilities, it is totally absent in the rest of the animal kingdom. What I am suggesting here is that a related form of regulation of reproductive relationships by symbolic means was essential for early hominids to take advantage of a hunting-provisioning subsistence strategy.

In this chapter at least, Deacon does not address the social evolution of religion in detail. But he seems to imply broadly that the pressure to negotiate a non-Rousseauan "social marriage contract" came first, and therefore all other forms of ritualization utilizing symbolic constructions came later.

Deacon concludes his argument by stressing "co-evolution:"

The argument I have presented is only an argument for the conditions which required symbolic reference in the first place, and which selected for it despite the great difficulties and costs of collectively producing and maintaining it. Much of the story of this intermediate evolutionary history, extending for over 2 million years from language origins to the present, has yet to be even imagined in any clarity. But putting evolutionary causes and effects in appropriate order and precisely identifying the anatomical correlates of this transition are a prerequisite for providing anything beyond "just so" versions of the process. The key to this is the co-evolutionary perspective which recognizes that the evolution of language took place neither inside nor outside brains, but at the interface where cultural evolutionary processes affect biological evolutionary processes.  

And I conclude my argument, for now, by adding that though I agree with the basic concept of co-evolution, I don't necessarily think that marital customs alone, with their emphasis upon "social altruism," necessarily preceded religious customs, which certainly carry much of the same valence. Since according to the index Deacon does not address prehistoric religion in the rest of the book either, it would be stimulating to compare Deacon's hypothesis with those of an "evolutionary biologist" who had studied the historical manifestations of prehistoric religiosity.