IUBio

Evolution of consciousness

William H. Calvin WCalvin at U.Washington.edu
Thu May 30 19:16:01 EST 1996


Depends, of course, on what one means by "consciousness" but, if you 
mean the high end of the spectrum (planning ahead, rational thought, 
speaking a sentence you've never spoken before) and not something as 
commonplace as awareness, then "when" turns out to be an interesting 
question.
   One of the puzzles in paleoanthropology is the relatively static 
nature of the Homo eretus culture.  There were two different toolkit 
styles apparent by 1.5 million years ago, but there isn't much progress 
thereafter.  Many suspect that the transition from HE to Hs maybe 
250,000 years ago, and the flowering of culture thereafter, was due to 
some substantial step up in intellectual capacity -- even though HE's 
brain was already pretty large, up within the modern Hss range.
   The step might well be associated with an emerging capacity for 
syntactic language at the HE-Hs transition.  While contemplative 
consciousness probably exists even in the apes, judging from the 
deception literature, adding structured language would have allowed much 
more sophisticated thought -- including rational trains of inference.
   There's a bit of this in the last chapter of THE CEREBRAL CODE (page 
along towards the end), which you can now find at:
  http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/bk9ch11.html
That book doesn't have much paleoanthro discussion in it, however.  My 
serious treatment of consciousness is in HOW BRAINS THINK, chapter 3:
  http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/bk8ch3.html
and the evolution of intelligence is in the following chapter.
-- 


  William H. Calvin                   WCalvin at U.Washington.edu
                       http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/





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