The Human Mind: Animal Heritage and Cultural Vectors

Abstract

Humans are biological entities with social and cultural history; both dimensions metaphorically expressed as the “Biological-” and “Cultural-tectonic plates”. In an evolutive context, the concept of predation applied to the Natural Kingdom appears as an anticipation to our species’ cultural predatory behaviors. They include dynamic components associated with violence linked to social prevalence, reproductive behavior, territoriality, and access to food resources, and, in general, to aggressive or maladaptive behaviors. Another view of our “Cultural tectonic plate” has been lucidly expressed by Eduardo Colombo (2012): “the structure of our basic knowledge represents an epistemological field built on the old archetype of submission, where the subject is subdued by the networks that weave the practices and discourses that condition it; let's say to be brief, a subject determined by the structure of the system." Based on the behaviors of the chimpanzee and the bonobo, who share a common ancestor to Homo, Boehm (2012) poses that humans would keep behavioral styles from chimpanzees (tendency to conflict, male predominance), and bonobos (preventive behavior, female predominance). This anticipates a potential behavioral bipolarity with uneven prevalence distribution among individuals and social organizations. Based on social repression or “socialization”, cultural strata of variable “thickness” have been constructed on top of drives implicit to our animal condition. Nevertheless, it failed in their deactivation, only in reformulating or repressing them.