Episodic to Mimetic Culture: The fi

Episodic to Mimetic Culture: The first transition in the evolution of the human brain was
from episodic to a mimetic representation capability, a transition which distinguished
humans from other mammals. The mental modeling becomes much more sophisticated
where instead of specific events or situations human experience is modeled into some form
of integrated form. An illustration of the “integrative capability of mimesis” is creating,
duplicating and passing on rhythmic expressions of human experience (Donald, 1991).
Mimetic modeling is involved in the “invention and practice of sport, games, dance, ritual,
and craft” but without verbal thought as mimetic culture is nonlinguistic. Donald
hypothesizes that Mimetic skill developed for social reasons, but in any case once it was
established Mimetic skill led to advances in cultural development; it provided society with
the skill to model itself (Donald, 1991). Mimetic culture is extremely useful today in civic
and religious rituals where collective thought occurs; such exchanges are more common
than most modern humans think (Donald, 1991). Mimetic expression was present in Homo
erectus in games, tool making and ritual and standardized gestures done in a social setting.
Mimetic representational capacity in Homo erectus, according to Donald (1991), set the
stage for semantic memory storage, symbols, and the theoretic mind of Homo sapiens. In
effect, mimetic representations serve as an interim stage between episodic and symbolic
cultures in human brain development--i.e., the development of tools, for example, would
have required some form of rudimentary symbolic representation to pass on the skill to the
next generation.
Mimetic to Mythic Culture: The social role--i.e., to promote social cohesion and
cooperation--of Mimetic skill was reinforced, according to Donald (1991), by the invention
of myth. A society myth is a conceptual model of the human universe or existence inside
the objective or physical environment. Myth builds up over generations and is the narrative
for a specific human social group to be used to compete against other groups “In
conquering a rival society, the first act of the conquerors is to impose their myth on the
conquered” (Donald, 1991, p. 258). The power positions in that society are those who
uphold and control the parameters of the group’s predominant myth, the priests and
shamans. The Mimetic skill is “the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool”
(Donald, 1991, p. 215), both at the level of the individual in the society and, more
importantly, for the social group itself, unifying its members to compete against other
groups it comes into contact with. The increasing size and complexity of larger social
groups, which could defeat smaller social groups they were in competition, required more
efficient social relationships; they needed to be conceptualized and controlled. Language
developed to facilitate myth development and transmission, not as it is commonly
conceived the other way around: “The most important source of selection pressure for an
improved vocal apparatus would have been a mind that needed the features of vocal
language for its modeling agenda” (Donald, 1991, p. 220).
Information behavior: a socio-cognitive ability
Evolutionary Psychology – ISSN 1474-7049 – Volume 5(2). 2007. -268-
Theoretic Culture: Language was an adaptation “that met specific cognitive and culture
needs,” which can be specifically labeled as “the formalization and unification of thought
and knowledge” into theoretic systems (Donald, 1991, p. 216). Theoretic thinking was a
much more powerful form of thinking than what had come before in the Mimetic culture.
Theoretic culture includes analytic thought, grammatical invention, memory-management
skills, attentional algorithms and the development of theories linking concepts together in
abstract thought (Donald, 1991, p. 378). Theoretic concepts create symbols such as the
equal sign that are what Gregory (1981) calls “mind-tools”, which capture a nascent mental
model for a concept, allowing it to be used for storage, cognitive manipulation leading to
generative information/knowledge processes.
Mythic to Theoretic Culture: The adaptive pressure driven by natural selection favored
social groups with the greatest ability to symbolically model the world around them in a
distinctively human reconstruction of reality. This is speeded up by human drive to increase
the size of external memory in written text and computer systems.
Model of Information in EDSC and Information Behavior
Figure 1 starts from Alexander’s (1990b) EDSC model and the centrality of man as
a social being in our evolutionary story, we model Donald’s (1991) unitary theory of
human brain evolution. Donald’s (1991) theory provides an overview of the evolution of
human cognition based on knowledge structures stored in the human LTS. These
knowledge structures provide information processing mechanisms in the STS for decoding
and encoding operations in human memory which take place when environmental stimuli
input enters the cognitive system.
According to this thesis, human brain evolution is driven forward by inter-group
competition leading to intra-group social cooperation, which over the course of human
evolutionary history has created an ever more complex human ability to create mental
models of the human physical and social environmental and the place of humans in that
environment. The driving force of this evolution is to form the integration of human
experience into a coherent narrative of human existence. This narrative enables social
cohesion within the group to more effectively compete against the other groups competing
for limited resources.
In Figure 1 we model the human socio-cognitive ability as a system of inputs and
outputs. The inputs are sense data from the physical and social environment, anomalies and
knowledge from the social group and the individual. The outputs are greater social
cooperation leading to increased efficiency when competing with outside groups for limited
environmental resources. The integrative mind tools are located in the middle of Figure 1
and act as propulsions for transforming input data, anomalies and knowledge into social
cooperation/competition outputs. We have listed the integrative mind tools systems of
thinking capabilities vested in the human brain at various points over the course of human
evolution, from episodic culture early on in evolution to theoretic culture in the present day