The origins of money and its role in modernity

Money is a human creation arising from organic, technological, and symbolic resources. The complexity of its operations makes it difficult to comprehend. The origins of money can be dated with some accuracy, but the social and symbolic processes that led to this world-changing invention are poorly understood. One of the most persistent misunderstandings that adversely affects modern economic thinking is that money emerged from barter. As will be discussed, the origins of money have more fundamental symbolic, social, and political foundations in statecraft, warfare, religion, and gift-giving. Moreover, money develops among beings capable of considerable flexibility in combining or “blending” ideas from diverse, sometimes incommensurate, domains of knowledge and experience, and specifically among a species for whom institutions—socially constructed habits of thought and action—are ontologically criterial. This chapter aims to provide a foundation for thinking about money as an institutional semiotic system. Topics covered include money and barter; sovereign money; money and gift-giving; money and violence; the money/language analogy; and international monetary exchanges.

Intersubjectivity is activity plus accountability

Intersubjectivity is central to human social life. We argue that the uniquely human form of intersubjectivity can be defined as the combination of activity and accountability. It consists of more than merely sharing knowledge or perspectives. Intersubjectivity arises through human social activity in which people pursue shared goals and where their respective contributions are observable and subject to public evaluation. We also argue that human intersubjectivity is intertwined with language, in two ways. First, some form of intersubjectivity is necessary for language to have evolved in our species in the first place. Second, language then transforms the nature of our intersubjectivity, through its definitive properties of inferentially articulated description, self-reflexivity, and productive grammatical flexibility. Social accountability—the bedrock of society—is grounded in this linguistically transformed kind of intersubjectivity. We illustrate these points with reference to data from two relatively simple examples: two-person timber sawing and two-person mat-weaving.

Technoscience, transhumanism, telos

This chapter focuses on human achievements accomplished with the use of technology and science as methods to explore humanity’s most daunting challenges. Each era of human achievement reveals previously unimaginable goals that, once attained, impact and positively transform the world and the future of humanity. Transhumanism offers a social construct for action-oriented strategies to inform and mitigate many of these threats. These strategies stem from diverse fields of inquiry, research, and analysis of possible future scenarios, and suggest the processes for implementing them. Notably, counterarguments to an intervention in the human condition—the characteristics and key events concerning human existence—often expose themselves as biases in moral perception that, in due course, fall short. Yet humans continue to be fueled by curiosity and a need for amelioration to transcend limits. What is lacking and most imminently necessary to address the exponentially increasing technology in our midst, and society’s varied perceptions and reactions, is straightforward guidance in navigating towards the telos of our humanity.

Emotion expression, empathic reception, and prosocial behavior

This chapter addresses facial expression and its potential for communication, a much-debated issue especially in regard to emotion expression. This expressive potential is thought to co-evolve with facial expression perception and to be critical in social life. Factors affecting the perception of human facial emotion have been explored over the last few decades and they encompass sender and context features, as well as the decoder’s traits. One of the most neglected traits is that of the decoder’s empathy. The co-evolution of emotion signaling, emotion perception, and emotion expression regulation are, according to recent evidence, most certainly linked to empathy, particularly to the extremes of trait empathy—at one end, very poor decoders, and at the other end, higher than average emotion decoders. Studies on nonhuman primate expressive communication, empathy, and prosociality, and clues from the fossil record, may provide insights on the links between emotion expression, empathy and prosociality in human evolution.

Art, sign, and representation

This chapter addresses questions about the emergence of art, sign, and representation, showing what these categories mean as applied to the archaeological record and how evidence of them may relate to the evolution of human cognitive capacities. It goes beyond the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic to consider marked or decorated objects from significantly older sites associated with Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa and Indonesia, Neanderthals in Europe, and Homo erectus in Trinil, Java. The materials evidence a range of graphic production across significant space and time. They indicate the emergence of graphic expression and its role in human evolution is much more complex than traditional Eurocentric model, as well as more recent models, allow. The review points to problems with the current epistemology of symbolic evolution and emphasizes how the use of “art” and other traditional artifact classes bias interpretations of prehistoric behaviors and models of when and why symbolling emerged.

The aboutness of language and the evolution of the construction-ready brain

The chapter presents the hypothesis that early Homo sapiens were language-ready in the sense that they had brains that could have supported language had it already been developed, but were not yet language-using. Informed by data from comparative neuroprimatology, the approach sees protolanguage emerging from complex recognition and imitation of manual skills via biocultural evolution, while cultural evolution alone supported the emergence of language from protolanguage. This approach supports the view that the Homo sapiens language-ready brain had the more general property of being construction-ready, and that this made possible the emergence of drawing and painting through later cultural evolution.

On the structure of early language

Both linguistic and neuroanatomical evidence suggests that there are two modes of processing in linguistic discourse, namely an analytic mode and a holistic mode. Competent speakers of a language know many linguistic entities in two ways: holistically and analytically, and can move between the two. The analytic mode is concerned with propositional language processing based on the compositional format of sentences, clauses, and phrases and their hierarchical organization, while the holistic mode surfaces mainly in unanalyzable, formulaic expressions, for example, in speech act formulas such as interjections (wow, ouch), ideophones (bang, splish-splash), formulae of social exchange (hello, sorry, goodbye). Research on the reconstruction of earlier stages of language evolution has for the most part been restricted to the analytic mode, and grammaticalization theory played an important role in this research. The present chapter demonstrates that a complementary analysis of holistic ways of processing can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how human languages may have evolved.

Transcending the rational symbol system

Symbols support the uniquely human capabilities of language, culture, and thinking. Therefore, cognitive scientists have tried to explain intelligence as founded on Rational Symbol Systems (RSS). RSS use syntactical and logical rules to combine discrete symbols into meaningful expressions and inferences. However, these symbols fail to capture continuous, felt experience. The proposed solution is to ground symbols in situated interactions and subsymbolic networks of associations. Historically, different approaches have attempted to overcome the shortcomings of RSS. These include science, by formalizing and operationalizing symbols; philosophy, by critically analyzing the relation between symbols and reality; art, by evoking subjective experiences; and spirituality, by expanding consciousness. Information technologies, such as artificial intelligence, neural networks, simulations and virtual reality, make it possible to integrate their results. That would allow externalizing and controlling creativity and intuition, thus inaugurating an evolutionary transition to a supra-human level of intelligence, the “Global Brain”.

Primate parents

In this chapter, the author will provide an overview of some of the main areas of research and ideas on the evolution of parenting in human and nonhuman primates, including parenting styles, and parental investment and attachment. The author will situate different approaches in their historical context of origin and analyze their merits and disadvantages. Then, the author will pose two fundamental questions that have changed how we approach the evolutionary history of parenting: “Who is a parent?” and “what is a parent?” The author will provide examples of some of the biases that are present in answers to these two questions, and of how a critical analysis of the traditional theories in the evolution of parenting is transforming the way researchers understand the evolution of parenting in recent years.

Culturing the Paleolithic body

In this chapter, we present archaeological evidence for practices of adornment of the body by Paleolithic hominins, including painting with ochre, tattoos, personal ornaments, clothing, and hairstyles. These practices served to mark differences such as gender, status, and ethnicity amongst people, to attract or intimidate others, and have been interpreted as indices of a symbolically mediated self and personal identity. We then discuss the possible evolutionary context for the selection of these behaviors. By way of conclusion, we consider the state of the discipline in interpreting these practices to explore constructed identities in the Paleolithic.