Negotiating reality: meaning, agency, and the evolution of human culture

Kelvin Dixon, University of York Alum on "Negotiating reality: meaning, agency, and the evolution of human culture"

Abstract:
Human culture is generally thought to be cumulative, with current evolutionary theories describing how humans uniquely accumulate “improvements” over time. These are said to spread through populations ‘ratcheting’ them into greater levels of complexity. However, such theories of cultural evolution have sparked debate and pose theoretical and ethical problems. As a growing number of species demonstrate cumulative cultural abilities, new questions must be asked about what makes human culture so uniquely rich.

Symbolism permeates every facet of human culture and language, which seem intricately connected to one another. We cannot understand the evolution of culture without first explaining both “symbolic behaviour” and language. However, current paleoanthropological thinking questions a simple ‘symbolic revolution’, pointing instead to a mosaic evolution of behaviours, physiologies, and artefacts across time and regions.

This paper will offer a new theoretical perspective based on the semiotic theories of Charles Sanders Peirce and the posthuman, material physics of Karen Barad. This approach returns to the entangled agency of the universe and demonstrates how matter and meaning are entangled in biological forms. Far from symbolic behaviour being unique to humans, it is universal to biological life, seen in the semiotic meaning-making (semiosis) and biological plasticity of organisms as they make decisions in intricately complex environments.

Using a case study of Oldowan tools, this paper suggests human language, culture, cognition, and physiology co-emerged through the continuous, communal negotiation of reality.

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