Denton (1993: 135):
As Sir Peter Medawar said, ‘In human beings, exogenetic heredity — the transfer of information through non-genetic channels — has become more important for our biological success than anything programmed in DNA…’
Monod (1971/1997: 160):
We have already spoken of the day when, venturing beyond the communication of concrete and actual experience, Australanthropus or one of his kin managed to express the content of a subjective experience, of a personal “simulation”. On that day a new day was born, the world of ideas; and the new evolution, that of culture, became possible. From there on and for a long time, man’s physical evolution must have been intimately connected with and profoundly influenced by the development of the linguistic capacity, which so thoroughly changed the conditions of selection.
Modern man is the product of that evolutionary symbiosis. Viewed otherwise, he is incomprehensible, indecipherable. Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry. This is yet truer of man than any other animal species by dint of the dual evolution — physical and ideational — that he is heir to.
Semiotic systems channel biological evolution by biasing the probabilities of which individuals mate. For example, birds of the same species in the same region with differently evolved semiotic systems for courtship tend to interbreed less than those with the same evolved semiotic systems for courtship. If the specific semiotic system is one that is wholly passed on genetically — biologically inherited — then this biasing of genetic replication remains within biological evolution as sexual selection.
However, if the specific semiotic system is one that is passed on culturally — socially learned — then this biasing of genetic replication occurs through the interaction of two distinct evolutionary systems: the biological and the social-semiotic. That is, in this case, gene selection potentially depends on a semiotic lineage that is evolving in parallel to the biological lineage.[1]
On this basis, the speciation of the human lineage from the other chimpanzee lineages can be seen to have occurred as a co-speciation: both biological and social-semiotic.[2] That is, the speciation of language, as a new social-semiotic lineage, co-occurred with the speciation of humans, as a new biological lineage.[3] Humans didn’t develop language; humans emerged as language emerged.[4]
Footnotes:
[1] As with any symbiotic relationship, there is a continuum from semiotic systems serving biological systems to biological systems serving semiotic systems. The latter is exemplified by martyrdom.
[2] The biological-semiotic co-evolution of humans is reflected in the traditional importance of religion as the critical criterion of group membership, and in the co-ordination of biological development and semiotic ontogenesis, given religion as the continuation of ancient models of perceivable experience (as previously discussed). This co-evolution is also reflected in the concept of ‘race’, whose meaning varies according to both semiotic (cultural) and biological (visible somatic) variables.
[3] Perhaps this co-speciation makes sense of the special status given to religious belief as a marker of identity, if religions are the descendants of ancestral semiotic models of existence.
[4] The increased meaning potential and awareness provided by language not only increased the ability to stay alive and reproduce, it expanded both the meaning/value and the awareness of the meaning/value of staying alive and reproducing.