The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 2. Sex and Speech

After the expanded brain and abstract thought capacity what broke the hominoids out of the anthropoid ape stock? The answer lies in two more critical new components of a biologically enabling nature - for a total of three balls to juggle, if you will. One of these is sex; the other is speech.

Primate sex and speech are the only things of significance to be added to the genetic pie on top of the arboreal adaptive anatomy and the concomitant expanded abstract thought capability. Let’s talk about sex first.

Human sexuality required the revolutionizing of the biology of the sexual system. 365 day a year female receptivity to male advances is what separates hominoids from the great apes. It provided assured group life for the obvious reason that you can’t have non-masturbatory sex if you don’t have access to a partner. However, constant female receptivity is not the only feature of primate sexuality that assures group life. Male constancy in pursuing sexual pleasure is just as important.

Homosexuality and Heterosexuality

This is true because for the advantages of group life, it is irrelevant whether sexuality is heterosexual or homosexual. The mechanics of sexual object identification among higher primates allow for both to occur as children are socialized. Thus, homosexuality is a permanent part of the human condition, as well as that of our nearest relatives. Which explains, for example, why we have lesbian chimps in the Congo, within the chimpanzee bands. Human sexuality (and that of our nearest relatives) is primarily for the purpose of social organization not for the purpose of reproducing the species. There will always be someone to impregnate the female. Then as well as now. The structure of sexual relationships acts as the skeleton for the musculature of social organization.

The key to understanding human sexuality is group life. It gave the hominoids and the chimps safety from predators. Once hominoids emerged as social animals they had conquered the Earth, as far as fearing predators is concerned. That is, as long as they stayed “social.” In other words as long as they stayed together. A wandering lone hominoid could be caught and eaten then as well as now.

Finally, there is one more physical change in the hominoid line which we want to point out. One which is intimately related to the efficiency of group life. Can you guess what that is.

Talking

Speech is rudimentary in many animals including the chimps and the gorillas in the sense that they make noises that communicate ideas. Higher primates have the abstract thought capability to make words and sentences but they don’t have the physiological ability to enunciate the phonemes (the fundamental repeatable units of sound) to make the morphemes (fundamental units of meaning) which constitute words. This required an anatomical change in the throat and voice box. Such anatomical change requires genetic selection over a long period of time. That genetic selection had to occur no later than about seven to five million years ago among the hominoids.

But it is not speech that separates the hominoids from the other great apes. Speech is a result of the group life that was shaping them; it accelerates the process of strengthening the group efficiency by making the coordination of hunting and gathering, offense and defense, invincibly efficient. It makes cooperative collectivity permanent.

Was speech “just” a matter of improving the efficiency of group life in the defensive posture? Was it “just” the matter of making the collective production of tools and using them to produce the fundamental needs of life more efficient? What about accelerating the rate of brain alteration because of the warp-speed advance in the use of intellectual symbols? (Spoken words.)

Yes. Talking was a revolutionary gigantic leap forward in facilitating the way the earliest people could intellectualize about the world around them. Talking, made the passing of learned behavior to successive generations certain. Initiating a true material cumulative process of “cultural memory” being passed on from parents to children. It made the use of complex kinship reckoning feasible. Thus, the complex organization of society became possible. The selective advantage is obvious; we can see why, therefore, talking did accelerate the rate of genetic expansion of the brain itself. As the molecular biology of brain genetics develops perhaps a test can be designed to relate these genetic changes to changes in vocal anatomy and other aspects of cultural evolution.

The Pattern of Avoiding Surplus Social Product is Set

- And, complex kinship reckoning and complex social organization became principal ways of using social time; simultaneously diverting some of that social time from becoming “labor time.” In effect the result was a true dialectical opposite: in other words, the first mechanism, by which human surplus social product accumulation was negated in favor of only producing what was needed day to day, is the mechanism of spending time thinking and symboling rather than engaging in productive activity. - And, this is critical, for the avoidance of surplus product creation is the basis upon which primitive society avoids envy, jealousy, coveting and the like anti-social centrifugal tendencies that are the only tendencies that can tear Band society apart! The pattern of doing non-productive things to evade surplus social product accumulation has been set! It will be with us for millions of years. In fact until the last six thousand years it was the only way people had to handle the danger of too much produce inequitably distributed among a Band (or Tribe).

At any rate, the first true hominids (humans) we do have in fossil form, as well as their stone tools. They walked the Earth five million years ago! They are known best - almost exclusively - from Africa. But there are reasons to consider the possibility that these Homo australopithecines have extended across the entire tropical and subtropical Old World from Africa to China’s Pacific coast.