Talk:The Origins and History of Consciousness

Untenable selection pressure


The psychiatrist Anthony Stevens called The Origins and History of Consciousness, "a great but misguided book".

Stevens argues that Neumann's assumptions that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that preliterate human beings were "unconscious", and that Western consciousness has been subjected to different selection pressures to that of other civilized populations, are fallacious and biologically untenable.

The genocide of indigenous peoples has in part been attributed to Europeans introducing diseases to the Americas to which they had already become immune (through generations of selective pressure of living in close proximity with livestock, as they did in Europe at that time).

One can imagine after the introduction of visual writing systems that dyslexia was subject to a differential selective pressure in societies where written communication had become ascendant. Perhaps not so much in societies with a quipu record system. Dyslexia is at least part of our cognitive/conscious apparatus.

The realm of selective pressure is vast and variegated, with the vast majority of effects between small and/or cryptic (indistinguishable as a separate causal force). Modern academia has a very high threshold for selective pressure entering into the debate about cultural differences, and there are excellent reasons for adopting this social posture. However, it's still wrong to say that the selective pressures don't exist merely because they are too small, too unproven, too divisive, and too permanently cryptic to be worthy of discussion. &mdash; MaxEnt 22:01, 22 June 2020 (UTC)