Origins & Cultural Evolution of the Modern Mind with Merlin Donald

Join us here for our Daily Zoom Meetups! We are honored to interview Merlin Donald on his seminal ideas of three stages of cultural development: Mimetic, Mythic & Technology-Supported Cultures. In “Origins of the Modern Mind“ Merlin Donald proposes a three-stage development of human symbolic capacity through culture: Mimetic culture: The watershed adaptation allowing humans to function as symbolic and cultural beings was a revolutionary improvement in motor control, the “mimetic skill“ required to rehearse and refine the body’s movements in a voluntary and systematic way, to remember those rehearsals, and to reproduce them on command. Following this development, Homo erectus assimilated and reconceptualized events to create various prelinguistic symbolic traditions such as rituals, dance, and craft. Mythic cultures arose as a result of the acquisition of speech and the invention of symbols. Mimetic representation serves as a preadaptation to this development. Technology-supported culture: Finally, the cognitive ecology dominated by ephemeral face-to-face communication has changed for most of us as a result of the external memory-store that reading and writing permit. Computer technology intensifies these changes by offering even more extensive capacities for external storage and retrieval of information. Donald suggests that the increasing reliance on external memory media in this third stage, which applies in varying degrees to most people in the developed world, may have profound effects on our cognitive development and behavior: “The externalization of memory was initially very gradual, with the invention of the first permanent external symbols. But then it accelerated, and the numbers of external prepresentational devices now available has altered how humans use their biologically given cognitive resources, what they can know, where that knowledge is stored, and what kinds of codes are needed to decipher what is stored.... When we study literate English-speaking adults living in a technologically advanced society, we are looking at a subtype that is not any more typical of the whole human species, than, say, the members of a hunter-gatherer group. What would our science look like if it had been based on a very different type of culture? The truth is, we don’t know, but it would profit us greatly to find out, because the human cognitive system, down to the level of its internal modular organization, is affected not only by its genetic inheritance, but also by its own peculiar cultural history.” Hope to see you there! See the calendar at A Meetup Every Day, Every Week, For Everyone! Every Weekday at 9pm ET; On Weekends at 12pm ET & 2:30pm ET We record all our Meetups and post them on YouTube. Feel free to keep your video on or off as you prefer. Watch Past Comprehensivist/Polymath Meetups here: