Does intellectual evolution take place simultaneously?

Great Debates
1

Before you start reading this, I must warn you that I haven’t done enough research on the subject matter, mainly because it would be an arduous task considering how broad the topic is. Everything I write here is opinion and observation, and I would like to read the input of more informed individuals than myself. Therefore, you’re not going to find citations for everything I claim to be a fact, but I will be happy to do on-request research and produce a reliable reference whenever I’m prompted to.

My premise is that intellectual evolution takes place simultaneously. Tracing the origin of this concept will take us back tens of thousands of years when the early communities of human beings started forming communities, living together and upholding the same routines as their counterparts across the globe, or within the same ecozone. While this may be attributed to instinct and the need to find food, protect the women and children and so on, it doesn’t explain how things go forward from that point on, when - fast forward a few thousand years - these isolated communities have turned into civilizations and each came up with their own set of gods, each of whom was specialized in some task or aspect of life, and eventually reaching the idea of a monotheistic god. The deities of these early religions were initially animals, then semi-human, then completely human, then one supreme being beyond human understanding. I’m not well versed on the differences between the Old and New testaments, but a general look tells me that the New Testament is more advanced, at least in terms of storytelling.

Moving on across time and different civilizations, you’ll notice that certain political, economic and scientific concepts have evolved simultaneously in different places with no proven connection or evidence that a painter in Renaissance Europe saw the work of another painter who lived in the same time but in a different place. The same goes for the Evolution theory itself, which was preceded by more-primitive ideas of evolution. Did Darwin see their work, or did it just happen that this was the next inevitable step along the intellectual path?

When exposed to similar circumstances, human beings are likely to behave in a similar way, but how does this apply to intellect? Take a look at Russian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Take a look at fashion. New trends of fashion don’t appear because everyone saw someone famous wear something strange on TV; that only applies to the majority. But there are trendsetters who almost simultaneously reach the same - or very close - variations of things to wear, or new haircuts, or something else. In this light, you can see how movements such as feminism, anti-colonialism and social justice have emerged with their own pundits and leaders probably reaching the same conclusions at the same time.

And this process - in my opinion - witnessed a great expedition with the progress in telecommunications and the emergence of the internet. Just surf the web and see user-generated content, and how a comment on a thread on social media receives a million likes from a million people who thought exactly the same thing, or felt the same way, about a piece of content each of those people have seen or read for the first time. Is it an instinctive human response, and is it that this works by a formula, such as (all those people know about the holocaust + all those people speak English with similar proficiency + all those people are not religious = all those people will have similar thoughts when they see a pink bird overshadowing a blue moon?)

I don’t know if I made any respectable sense, so please let me know what you think.

2

But…obviously it doesn’t. There are, even now, “primitive” places where intellectual life of the people is extremely limited. There are places where the literacy rate is low. There are immense regions where literacy exists, but at a level of comfort short of the cutting-edge of the world’s university towns.

There was a period of time when the Muslim Caliphates were the apex of civilized learning, and this was only ended when waves of extremely hostile conquests rose out of the east. In pre-Columbian America, civilizations rose and fell, and, while one might say there are parallels with the rise and fall of Rome or of China, these periods of greatness are far from simultaneous. They happen as often out of phase with each other as in phase.

When aspects of civilization seem to be causally linked…they usually are. Indo-European language groups are similar because of diffusion: people wandered from hither to yon, bringing their languages with them. The prevalence of such things as Father-Sky Gods (Zeus, Jehovah, Marduk, Osiris, Zeus, Odin) are not coincidences, but a “family tree” of inherited lore.

I think the premise is simply incorrect: when regions are isolated, there is no simultaneity to cultural progress…and when regions are not isolated, cultural progress is communicated by diffusion, and thus is not coincidentally simultaneous, but causally linked.

Or else I’m misunderstanding the OP entirely, which happens all the darn time.

3

I should have mentioned that such communities must maintain the least requirements for such intellect to be born and develop in the first place. In communities that are still worried about picking food from the trees, I won’t say they will follow the same path.

4

Simultaneously to what? Or did you mean simultaneously among separate populations?

5

It sounds as if you are asking whether the direction of evolution and the timing of its consequences takes place contemporaneously within separated groups.

It doesn’t, except by coincidence.

If you look at human groups (to take one species), and look at groups which have been widely separated geographically, there are marked differences in physiology and marked differences in “cultural” things.

Evolution does not have any direction other than reproductive success. If a group is reproducing successfully, only the (random) genetic changes which improve reproductive success will get widely penetrated. There will not be selective pressure for genetic variants which head in directions we might think are useful (“intellect,” perhaps, now that we have a culture which values it) but which do not improve reproductive success for that group in its current niche.

With humans, as groups migrate, external influences change selection pressures, and of course random changes arise that may be advantageous for reproduction. Those new genetic variants are passed only to descendant groups. In general, if you look at the history of human migration (which only recently finished populating the planet), you’ll see migration has tended mostly to be in one direction. This is partly because geographical barriers tend to open and close due to climate variations (a green Sahara; ice; sea level changes; volcanic eruptions). At a practical level this has resulted in surprisingly minimal backflow of genes into ancestral groups. This has obviously started to change in the last few thousand years with increased mobility.

We would expect neither the phenotype nor the physiology nor the culture of groups widely separated by time and geography to be very similar, and they aren’t.

Of course, given that our genetic makeup drives the ability to develop culture, it’s not unusual to see parallel (and coincidental) similar changes that reflect intellect.

6

Evolution is constant. It’s always happening. There is nothing to be “simultaneous” with.

Having said that, dramatic changes in populations over short periods of time usually don’t happen when you have as large a population like us.

Having said THAT, I think you are talking about cultural changes, not physical evolution.

7

“It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time.”

– Charles Fort

8

N.B.: The “Hundredth Monkey Effect” theory has been discredited.

9

Sometimes it seems like the time has come for an idea or invention where many people try to invent or discover it. This says less about the people and more about the time when something is first possible.

The idea of uniform human progression isn’t historical. Different states and cultures rise and fall all the time. Intellectual fashions come and go. Many ancient societies were fairly cosmopolitan and accepting of other cultures. It was just easier to run an empire that way. Then some other societies came along and decided that was too soft so they burned and pillaged the heretics until they converted. Now we’re mostly back to being cosmopolitan, though some others that disagree show up in the news.

Sometimes CTers actually use the fact that two separate cultures were even vaguely similar as evidence of…something. For example, both Egyptians and South American natives built pyramids. Atlantis! Aliens! Egyptians sailed to the New World!

This would be news to several billion Asians and Indians, not to mention several million Africans. The idea that monotheism represents an advancement over polytheism is certainly a popular belief, especially among monotheists. Funny, that. I imagine, following this logic, that zero is the most advanced state. There were atheist philosophers in classical Greece, though.

10

I suggest the OP do some reading on the what a “meme” is. That seems like what he is wondering about. Wikipedia, I’m sure, has a good article and would be the first place to start.

11

Ah, yes. That clearly explains why each and every society scattered around the globe advanced at exactly the same rate steadily throughout history. Why Columbus ran into Native Americans smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic, as they were heading east. Why Newton and Liebnitz invented calculus at the same time as that Chinese guy, and that Indian, and that Inuit, and that Zulu, and those Japanese twins. Why the Roman Empire never expanded past Italy, as it bumped into the equally powerful Greek and Turkish Empires.

And so forth.

12

Well, if we assume homo sapiens has been fairly genetically consistent for, say 100,000 years (i.e. if a person could travel back in time 100,000 years, he could successfully mate with local sapiens, assuming his modern diseases didn’t kill them or their ancient diseases didn’t kill him) and all of what we consider “civilization” has occurred since then, well… probably something or other.

13

Cultural evolution occurs. But it doesn’t work like genetic evolution, not like you think. It isn’t tied to it, that is. People live on, but old ideas die out, or are reborn when someone digs up an old text. Recently, we’ve been lucky to connect the whole world through communications media, and so most humans have access to similar ideas and practices. But it hasn’t always been like that, and there are many possible futures where that doesn’t persist. But ideas are born, they reproduce, they spread, and they mutate. Some fail to take hold in people’s minds and die out, some spread like wildfire. In that sense, cultural evolution is very much like biological evolution. But the similarities basically end there.

14

Are we talking about morphic fields here?

Because if we are, then answer is no. Morphic fields are pseudo-scientific claptrap.

15

No, I don’t notice that. I notice that you have a bizzare idea involving lack of communication of ideas in Renaissance Europe, and that you’re so uninformed you’re unaware you don’t even known that one of the people presenting more “primitive” ideas of evolution before Charles Darwin was Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather. Which do you think we find more likely, that Darwin knew of ideas formulated by, amongst others, his grandfather, or that he was caught up in whatever mumbo-jumbo intellectual evolution you’re positing?

If there is a sensible idea somewhere behind your post I apologise for my lack of patience, but in my defence it’s really hard to read it as anything but nonsense.

16

Followed the link, got as far as ‘most of the so called laws of nature are more like habits’. I don’t think I need to know what morpic fields are after all.

17

I have clearly stated above that such event - if true - would only take place between societies that have reached a certain level of scientific, cultural and intellectual progress. Your text is impressive, in terms of literature, but you didn’t add anything new to the first comment on the thread. Thanks.

18

Besides Erasmus Darwin, here’s a linkwith a number of evolution theories - even if incorrect - that predated or were contemporary to Charles Darwin.

19

Yes, and they would all have been reading each other’s works if contemporary and predecessors works if not. In fact it’s right there in the text: “Buffon was an early advocate of the Linnaean classification system.”

Some ideas “have their time” because conditions are right for them. Who actually invented the telescope for instance is debatable, as several were developed when the required quality of lenses were widely available. Wallace and Darwin developed the idea of natural selection simultaneously somewhat by coincidence, but also because they time was ripe for it, and again the actual history shows that yes they did see each other’s work. Darwin was convinced to finally publish his work because Wallace sent him a draft of his essay.

There are also ideas that occur “out of time”. Hero of Alexander did work on steam, but the inventions did not spread because the technology level of society wasn’t in place to guarantee success.

If this is what you’re trying to convey, congratulations! You’ve rediscovered some of the core knowledge of the history of science and technology. And I don’t mean that sarcastically. Working things out for yourself is a good thing. But it still seems that you’re working from several false assumptions, such as a lack of understanding of the extent of correspondence between people of learning back before the computer, or that your ideas are unique and novel.

20

Just so you know, you haven’t stated anything “clearly”.