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Special exhibition installation:
"Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture"
November 19, 2002–July 4, 2003
Gallery view of Introduction to the Invention of Agriculture: Ci Wara's Divine Gift |
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This, in a nutshell, is my version of the scientific story of human cognitive origins: of the sequence of events by which human beings were transformed into the remarkable creatures that we are. A new potential was born in Africa with anatomically modern Homo sapiens. And that exapted potential lay fallow until it began to be released by some unknown cultural stimulus. Most likely this cultural stimulus was the invention of language, for language is surely the ultimate symbolic activity, and one which might well have mediated the discovery of all the other uses to which this new potential might have been put. But with the emergence of behaviorally modern Homo sapiens a totally unprecedented entity was on the scene. And to understand the qualities of this new phenomenon, it's important to remember that Homo sapiens does not appear to be simply an extrapolation of earlier trends.
So what happened? This issue was the cause of the deepest disagreement that ever fissured the relationship between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin firmly believed that natural selection was the unambiguous explanation of human consciousness, while Wallace simply couldn't see how this could be so. But it seems to me that both men were right. It's just that they were right in different ways. For as Darwin knew, our peculiar consciousness is the product of our brains, which are indisputably the product of a long and accretionary evolutionary history. What evidently bothered Wallace, though, even though he didn't put it in these terms, was that the properties of the modern human brain are evidently emergent, unpredicted by what went before. In the lack of any evident alternative, Wallace favored supernatural intervention to explain this fact; today it looks to be more plausibly the result of a chance coincidence of acquisitions. For clearly, while classical natural selection plays an essential role in the evolutionary process, it is not a creative force. It has to act on variations that come into existence spontaneously. Nothing arises for anything, and the forces of natural selection can only work on variations that are presented to them.
(See references cited in this paper)
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