The Mind and the Ecosystem

The Mind and the Ecosystem

A conscious mind, which can direct an animal body, can take itself as the end and the animal functions of life as means. From Aristotle to Immanuel Kant to Theilard de Chardin the mind was taken to be the telos of life. Animal species were classified from lower to higher according to the degree of intelligence they were judged to have, and according to the measurable size of their brains proportionate to total body size and weight.

But for evolutionary biologists, the brain and the mind evolved for the species, and have to be seen as subordinate to the lives of that species. Biologists hold it meaningless to grade minds across species--as though the mind were an entity that would have value unto itself. Each species has evolved in and exists in a specific ecosystem. If it has survived and flourished it has evolved the intelligence it needs to flourish in that ecosystem--an octopus in the ocean, a leopard in the jungle, an ant colony in the prairie, an albatross in the trade winds.

Most species do not evolve bigger brains because brains put heavy demands on nutrients, oxygen, and energy. Though on average the brain constitutes but two percent of body weight in modern humans, it consumes sixteen percent of the body's energy. Bigger brains affect prenatal and postnatal life for both mother and offspring. They require more time to mature and grow. They are complex and fragile and increase the possibilities of pathologies. They can adversely interfere with other neural and behavioral systems.

Friedrich Nietzsche noted that instinctual behavioral functions performed more efficiently and more effectively than those, which involve conscious reflections and deliberation. Self-conscious deliberation is at best a means for contriving new skills or correcting existing ones; indeed "over thousands of years the human mind produced nothing but errors" (110). The judgments the mind forms based on the fundamental logico-ontological axioms that there are things, that there are selfsame things, that a thing excludes contrary properties--what Nietzsche calls the fundamental errors--inevitably produce a simplified, falsified representation of the environment. Today an immense portion of human mental activity is devoted to technological war and technological exploitation of planetary resources between wars that devastate the ecosystem in which the human species evolved.

Bipedalism, Tool-Making, Brain Enlargement

In Thinking Animals Paul Shepard sets out to understand the specific kind of intelligence the human primates developed. Paleoanthropologists had long worked on the assumption that bipedalism and brain enlargement had evolved together, in a cycle of cause and effect powered by the production of tools: the upright stance freed the hands to make tools; tool production required intelligence and evolved bigger brains. What was specific to the mammalian consciousness that evolved bigger brains was hand and eye correlation. The fact that simians--but also raccoons, squirrels, many rodents--detach things with their front paws or hands and hold them up before the eyes for comprehensive visual inspection was taken to be fundamental for the specific kind of consciousness these mammals developed. The focus on the manipulated substance produces a consciousness that collates facets of that substance as they pass into view into the unity of an object. The manipulation that discovers instrumental possibilities in the thing extends a trajectory of time. The most recent and most powerful elaboration of this explanation is found in Martin Heidegger. It is manipulation that makes a succession of discrete visual patches into the continuity of objects; it is manipulation that extends a dimension of time in the depth of the spatial field.

Current empirical evidence has dissociated the links between bipedalism, tool production, and brain size. Digs in Laetoli in Tanzania and in Ethiopia revealed that the earliest-known tools were found in sites in Ethiopia and east of Lake Turkana in Kenya dated around 2.4 million years ago. There is no evidence of substantial increase in brain size until 700,000 years later.

Homo habilis had for a million years made tools by taking a cobble, knocking off some flakes, and using whatever that left. Around 1.4 million years ago, paleoanthropologists find an entirely new style of tool manufacture. The new tools, first found in the Olduvai Gorge, were dubbed "bifaces;" they are longer than they were broad, pointed at one end and rounded at the other; they have a sharp edge all around, are quite symmetrical, and have curved contours from end to end and from edge to edge on both sides. Their makers thus worked from an image of the finished product they had in their minds. The makers of these tools had brains about 1000cc, which is nearing the modern range for adults (1000 to 2000cc), and were identified as Homo erectus.

Paul Shepard has little to say about the correlation of preconceived tools, brain size, and intelligence in our species. Instead, he sets out to understand the difference between the minds of reptiles and warm-blooded mammals, the earliest of which were probably nocturnal. Then he looked at the difference between nocturnal animals and animals that eventually emerged into the daylight world and evolved a vision on the basis of an already highly evolved mammalian olfactory and auditory sensorium. Eventually some of these now diurnal simians and apes left the forest and advanced into the savanna. There they entered not only a vastly more diverse mix...