Mirror neurons... Have to admit I was reading the article and thinking it through, mostly hammered, three martinis to the wind. I do that a lot lately because work is hard and depressing, and of course the news is hard and depressing...
I guess what really clinched the idea was a series of thoughts. The mirror neurons give a physiological basis for empathy, reading the emotive states and therefore the possible intention of others, and enables intuitive understanding of social situations. Then this complex in social organization (primates) makes possible the `meaning' of vocalizations, gestures, common or commonly shared responses, etc. Depending on how mirror neurons are wired, and how they get wired during learning, it seems obvious they should play a key role in social development.
When these empirical finding are combined with a comprehensive philosophy of symbols, language and culture, such as Cassirer's you get a pretty damned persuasive view of the origins of symbolic forms, language, and culture.
What I was thinking was this was one of the few articles I've read in neuro-sciences that seems to have a nice organic fit with Cassirer, Levi-Strauss and others from my long ago anthro interests.
I agree with Jerry M on the problem of Ramachandran's speculation tendencies, especially on the timeline of paleolithic cultural explosions, and his thought that language development spurred the big bang in paleolithic cultures. I think it is a wrong speculation.
The basis of that proliferation is more easily and functionally explained in the systemization of tool making, social and organizational innovations, and material driven necessities from the onslaught of the ice ages. This was a kind of first internationalization of human cultures.
My own pet theory, which I must have picked up from somewhere and just can't remember now where, is this. Human migration was driven by two primary factors. First, are the mass animal migrations. The second is the systemization and sophistication of culture itself, to make it portable, so that it doesn't depend on some unique set of local resources. In other words how to take your culture and tools with you. These two are inter-related since if you develop a culture and technology around a particular food species and the food has legs, then you follow the dinner table. You can see this in grand form by considering Caribou which have enormous migration ranges of something around 5000k:
``Caribou have a nearly circumpolar distribution. The woodland subspecies of caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) can be found as far south as 46o north latitude, while other subspecies (Peary caribou [R. t. pearyi] and Svalbard reindeer [R. t. platyrhynchus]) can be found as far north as 80o north latitude. Once found as far south as Germany, Great Britain, Poland, and Maine (USA), over-hunting and habitat destruction have diminished the historic range of caribou.''
http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/ Rangifer_tarandus.html
You can see a related sort of development in the native american cultures of California, where key natural resources like high quality obsidian and salmon shape the political economy-cultural fabric. There are key deposites of obsidian near most of the volcanic areas of California and you can trace the obsidian because of its unique chemical features. The maps of these traces also trace out the native american cultures and their trade networks. In turn this sets up a interesting dialectic between salmon and obsidian, since dried and cure salmon is central and basic to most river and coastal tribes. Going to the mountains or the ocean has long tradition out here.
That's why I noted that I wish these neuro-science people would get together with the deep background of physical and cultural anthro, and linguistics and biology. Everybody in these fields seems to think they are going to find the key. There probably isn't any key. It will probably require a great deal of cross field collaboration and co-ordination to get near understanding.
This lack of collaboration struck me early on. I had taken a really interesting and good introduction to psychology, then a second semester of biology that covered genetics and evolution, and finally another interesting introduction to anthropology that spent some time in both physical and cultural and field studies. I took all these classes within a year or so of each other. None of these fields talk to each other. The psychology class for example spent a fair amount of time on development, infancy to adolescence, learning theories, etc. But it seemed that the anthro crew hadn't spent a lot time with the developmental psych crew and the other way around---until I read Piaget who attempts to bring them both together with an evolutionary idea.
I think the bio-scientists that I've met or worked under were so highly competitive and egotistical, that they didn't seem to be functionally able to collaborate. Their idea of collaboration was approval of their own post-docs work. I agree with my alter-ego, fine work, fine work. They are so focused on their own work that they never seem to look up from the lab tray or computer in front of them.
Let's take this idea of empathy and its neurological base and accept for the moment that it is part of the understanding of the origins of culture and language. Consider empathetic thought as a general construct for ordering the world, for example. This idea fits very well with Levi-Strauss (Savage Mind), and more generally in cultural anthropology, when you remember that most early cultures have as their most obvious content a whole universe of animals, plants, landscape, eco-systems that surround them as their world. Certainly the early Egyptian, Mesopotemian, Indian, and Chinese cultures bare that sort of paleolitic trace.
The idea of animal spirits who are parents, heros, enemies, friends and lovers makes a lot more sense, if you imagine an empathic mind or construct at work. The animation of nature is a simple projection of this kind of thinking, and sets up the basis for mythological and symbolic thought in Cassirer's work (or my interest which is in the arts, where plants and animals are always coeval with people).
Consider how much more graceful and organic such ideas are when compared to the rather nasty neoliberal competitive features that seem to dominate the evolutionary theories of sociobiology.
In general, I like the integrationist or interdisciplinary approachs, say like that of V. Gordon Childe for example, where geographical distributions of related artifacts are used in conjunction with linguistic tracings and theories to create an approximate reconstruction of events of pre-history. I came across Childe in a history (Man and Wesern Civ) course at about the same time as the biology, psychology and anthropology classes. What made him stand out was his combination of archeological materials and language distributions to weave a probable history.
Unfortunately Childe developed an aryan cultural-linguistic theory for the basis of prehistoric indo-european languages, that pretty nicely fit the rising nazis propaganda machine. So Childe had to spend most of the thirties trying to distinguish his theories from some super-race idea. He placed his aryans as origining somewhere in southern Russia having a separate branch in Mespotemia. The general pattern of Childe's hypothesis now roughly corresponds to current ideas about the mass migrations of early humans in their diffusion out of Africa to Mesopotamia and then northwest to Europe, southeast to south asia and east to this Russian region and then further east into the central and east asia---and then from there to the Americas. What's interesting here is the same pattern is shown in the latest mtDNA studies of the distribuition of human mitochondria. In other words there is a convergence of theories on this basic migration pattern.
Doug writes, ``They [cats] are consummate narcissists, which, as Freud theorized, is part of their charm (like children and criminals).''
This reminds me of my grandchildren, especially Emily (3.5yrs) who will run right over her little brother (1.5yrs) stepping on his head or chest to get to say Daddy's lap or be first in line for a snack. Since Ethan is built like a brick shithouse, he doesn't seem to care. Someday soon, Emily is going to run into him and bounce off. She should start petting him like dog after that. Nice boy, nice boy, thinking, what a dummy.
But think about this for a minute. Remember the big teething problem? Biting the nipple for example. There is a strong reminder of social empathy. No milk if you bite, period. From Islamabad to New York City, every mother enforces this social rule. We are ordering our children's emotional states-social behavior from day zero, and the whole key to it is using our empathic mind to communicate, adding coos and kisses, and words and touch to re-enforce each with the other.
The nice thing is that children do eventually get it, where as pets usually don't---at least my pets usually didn't. The important part here isn't whether or not various other animals can exhibit empathy and engage their own socialized behavior around such a construct, but that we do. And, well, remember that most animals manage enough of some concept of another's intentions and communicate with each other often enough to get laid.
Kelly should get a kick out of this. Empathy: come for the animal porn and stay for the cultural analysis.
CG