Notes

1 Origins of Humanity

1. A standard textbook is McKee, Poirier, and McGraw, Understanding Human Evolution, 5th ed. In what follows I shall take this material as a given.

2. I shall often refer to the human species as “man,” which is traditional, but no exclusion of women is (of course) intended; I use this form simply for stylistic reasons, and compensate for it in other ways in the text. I also use it to refer to ancestors of ours that are not yet strictly of our species.

3. Bell’s book is a so-called Bridgewater Treatise and is intended to work as an instance of the argument from design, based specifically on the hand. We can appreciate the force of the premises without acceding to the conclusion. Bell is writing pre-Darwin and so fails to see any alternative to divine design. In fact, as Darwin later argued, the hand is an excellent argument against Creationism, because of the affinity of the human and ape hand.

4. It is actually more Darwinian to reverse Darwin’s formulation: it is not that the hand is adapted to act in obedience to man’s will, as if the will existed independently of the hand; rather, the will is adapted to the hand—a product (partly) of the powers of the hand. We have the will we do largely because we have the hand we do.

5. Thus Steven Pinker says, in How the Mind Works: “Hands are levers of influence on the world that make intelligence worth having. Precision hands and precision intelligence co-evolved in the human lineage, and the fossil record shows that hands led the way” (194).

6. I use the word “prehensive” frequently in this book, though it does not appear in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (OED), to mean “relating to prehension.” I sometimes use the familiar “prehensile,” but the word has a somewhat narrower connotation than “prehensive.” In the OED “prehensile” is defined as: “(Chiefly of an animal’s limb or tail) capable of grasping.” It would be odd to speak of prehensile mental acts, but speaking of prehensive mental acts occasions no linguistic recoil.

7. Apart from the works already cited in the text, I recommend Johanson and Edgar, From Lucy to Language; Gibson and Ingold, Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human Evolution; and d’Errico and Backwell, From Tools to Symbols: From Early Hominids to Modern Humans. For evolutionary background, see anything by Richard Dawkins, but especially The Ancestor’s Tale. I should also mention Raymond Tallis’s The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being, which contains some interesting speculations and historical background, though it is occasionally a little oracular for my taste. Recently published is the anthology The Hand, an Organ of the Mind, edited by Zdravko Radman, which contains a number of excellent essays very congenial to the approach favored here.

8. Partly I am motivated by the sense that philosophy of language in the analytical tradition has not been naturalistic enough—it has not located its subject matter in the broader biological world (this is also a theme of John Searle’s). But the naturalism I have in mind is not the doctrinaire reductionism one often encounters but (to borrow a phrase of Galen Strawson’s) real naturalism, i.e., relating language to the real biological sciences, not some philosopher’s preconceived idea of what counts as scientifically kosher.

9. There were, of course, many hominid species, now all extinct, that preceded the strictly human line—the Australopithecenes, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, the Neanderthals, et al. Our particular hominid species evolved through several stages of speciation, linking us to more apelike creatures—there was not a big jump from ape to human. I will simplify all of this by speaking of “our” evolution from apelike creatures, though this use does not denote humans alone. Indeed, much of what I have to say could be applied to the intermediate hominid species, on the assumption that they also achieved something akin to the Transition (for example, if Neanderthals developed language). So I am not really concerned with the human species as it exists in recorded history; I am concerned with the much earlier stages in which language, rational thought, and primitive technology arose—probably before agriculture.

2 Two Evolutionary Principles

1. This was known even before Darwin and provides a fine example of exaptation, whereby a structure acquires a new function by natural selection. The ossicles of the mammalian inner ear have their origin in bones used to operate the reptilian jaw, which became detached from the jaw and better suited to detecting high-pitched frequencies. Many intermediate forms of these migrating bones can be found in the fossil record.

2. The genes produce copies of themselves, as moving bodies “copy” their state of motion, until acted on by an outside force—natural selection or external influence. Animals don’t change unless they have to, as moving bodies don’t change their state of motion unless acted upon. That is, constancy is the default state of things.

3. This is an important difference between biological evolution and cultural evolution, which can proceed by abrupt, creative leaps forward. Human creativity is not inherently conservative and gradual. Modeling biological evolution on cultural evolution produces misplaced tolerance for saltationist explanation. This is precisely where Creationism goes wrong, among other ways.

4. For language, saltation looks especially tempting, because of the absence of intermediate forms in Earth’s existing fauna and the fossil record. But we have to resist this temptation, on pain of postulating miracles. Language must have gone through many evolutionary stages once the earliest forms were off the ground, just as limbs, eyes, and teeth did.

3 Human Prehistory

1. I say “virtually” to allow for some primitive tool use, as with contemporary apes that use stones to crack nuts and stems to fish for termites. I see no radical discontinuity between such tool use and human tool use, just a (big!) difference of degree. Nor do I see any radical discontinuity between primitive tool use and earlier forms of behavior, such as swinging from branches: both involve purposefully utilizing the resources of the environment. I discuss tool use later.

2. This use of “we” will not seem stretched if we remember that species boundaries are quite vague, with many intermediate forms. I am, of course, not suggesting that the species Homo sapiens ever lived in trees (except for contemporary humans who choose to live in tree houses). Members of our extended species were tree dwellers—that distinctive zoological form. We might indeed have been able to interbreed with our arboreal ancestors had we existed then. In any case, the point is that our primate ancestors lived mainly in trees.

3. The liberation was not all or nothing, because the prehuman arboreal hand would be free in the sitting position, and apes today use their hands for tool use in that position. But the bipedal posture allowed for far greater liberation, so that tools could be used while walking—hence all the time. Also, the adaptation to other uses of the hand would not interfere with its use in locomotion, as it would for a quadruped. The bipedal ape could therefore dedicate its hands to nonlocomotion tasks and adapt them accordingly. Hands with a dual use (locomotion and manipulation) will be more limited in one of these uses than manual specialists.

4. If our hands had failed us on the ground, proving unsuitable for tool use and verbal signing (see chap. 8), we would probably have gone the way of the dodo, because the rest of the human body is not well adapted for competitive survival on the ground, compared to other ground-living mammals. In particular, if the thumb had lacked rotational mobility we would probably have been over with as a species. Even today, if we all lost the use of our hands it is doubtful that we could survive as a species. Other living arboreal primates would surely go extinct if forced down from the trees to which they are adapted.

5. Napier says the following of post-arboreal life: “Food would be less easy to come by than in the forest; predators would have abounded and escape would no longer be a matter of fleeing at breakneck speed through the security of treetops high above the ground. If, in addition to these hazards, our early ancestors were in the process of adapting their gait from quadrupedalism to bipedalism, then it is difficult to see how they could have survived the transition” (The Roots of Mankind, 172–173). Yet survive we did—the question is how.

4 Characteristics of the Human Hand

1. A large thumb is an impediment to a habitual brachiator because it is apt to interfere with the hook grip used to grasp branches. Only when no longer employed for this function can the thumb comfortably lengthen; and this proved our salvation on the ground.

2. The lobe-finned fish, as opposed to the ray-finned fish, is now extinct for the most part (the lungfish still exists). Its special fins enabled it to propel itself on dry land, thus leading to an amphibious form. The bones in the fins of these fish resemble the leg bones of contemporary tetrapods.

3. See Napier, Hands, chap. 2, for a detailed description of the structure of the hand. Since the hand is “metabolically expensive,” both in itself and with respect to its brain machinery, we can only suppose that its remarkable capacities have strong evolutionary significance—they are not mere ornaments, but vital organs. The fundamental abilities displayed by a trained pianist are part of our biological inheritance, not mere cultural luxuries. The evolutionary importance of the hand can be measured by its acrobatic powers: we need good hands, strong, agile, and sensitive.

4. I don’t mean that the hand literally remembers—its owner does. I am speaking of the brain resources dedicated to memories we express by the hand. Still, the hand can often seem like a source of agency in its own right, so the anthropomorphic metaphor is apt.

5. It would be interesting to conduct cross-cultural studies of possible “hand universals” and other evidence for innateness, as well map out the child’s sequence of maturing hand skills. One can envisage a “poverty of the stimulus” argument here, as well as lack of explicit instruction in hand skills combined with a uniform acquisition of such skills. The functional abilities of the hand are likely to be as innate as its anatomical structure, as we would expect for the hands of other primate species (as well as feet, fins, claws, etc.).

6. I doubt that we can make such a strong claim for any other part of the human body, say, the feet. In humans the body is, so to speak, always cocked for hand action, which is pretty constant. Nor can I think of another species in which so much of the body is so patently geared to serving one part of it, though I suppose the jaws of a predator come close. The hands are where the action is and the body knows it.

7. But not the best nose or ears or eyes or jaws or legs—here we are outclassed by many other species. We are quite mediocre with respect to these endowments, but when it comes to the hands we are in a class of our own, the clear gold medalist.

5 Hands and Tools

1. See McKee and Poirier, Understanding Human Evolution, and Gibson and Ingold, Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human Evolution.

2. It is hard to think of another species that had to make such a large adjustment and survived; in this we see that man is adaptable. Since he was poorly adapted to savannah living, he had to compensate with adaptability. Thus man is a maladapted adaptable in his biological being. His major adaptation is adaptability, which is a variable, not a constant. In tool use we see man’s flexibility, not his naturally given expertise. Man is the first and only evolutionary nonspecialist. The hand is the organ through which his adaptability is expressed.

3. The point then is not that human tool use is qualitatively unique—it does have instances in other species—but that the important distinction is between animals with a certain cognitive configuration and animals without it. It is the tool-using mentality that is crucial—this is what has enabled us to become what we are today, not certain kinds of external manipulation as such.

4. We might even say it was the introduction of imagination, or its large expansion, that enabled humans to cope with their new world by the use of tools. It was physical tools plus imaginative thought. This mental faculty must have had its precursor in the minds of our ancestors, but it was powerfully selected for in our new terrestrial lifestyle. When things are not ideal as they actually are, it is necessary to imagine alternatives and bring them about: this is what we are good at.

5. Here as elsewhere we have a continuum of abilities, not a sharp cutoff point. We can say that human tool use differs from ape tool use quantitatively, not qualitatively, but some differences of quantity can be enormous. Apes will never invent and build the automobile, but they do have a solid grasp of the mechanics of fishing rods. What they mainly seem to lack, in comparison to us, is the ability to invent complex multipart tools that require assembly and maintenance.

6. Of course, I am speculating, as I promised I would. Tool cognition itself leaves no trace in the archaeological record, unlike tools themselves, so I am inferring early man’s psychology from what is left physically. Aside from behaviorist prejudice, I think there is little doubt that the range and type of tools found in archaeological sites provide strong evidence for the kind of instrumental cognition I am describing. I suggest that we should not be shy about forming psychological hypotheses based on physical finds—after all, this is really just a special case of knowledge of other minds. I would say the same about the cognitive capacities underlying the tool use of contemporary apes.

7. Many ancient tools appear designed for cutting and scraping carcasses—so that these tools were developed in the service of butchery. Early man was a butcher by trade, before the division of labor set in. One wonders how this has shaped man’s sensibilities: he was a butcher before he was a baker or a candlestick maker. Any squeamishness he may have felt had to be suppressed.

8. This early “tool-philia” has reached its apotheosis in modern man, whose outlook is so thoroughly saturated with instrumental thinking and tool mania that we find it hard to conceive the world in any other way. Nature for us consists in raw materials for tools. The passion for consumer goods is in the same vein. Perhaps some of the driven quality of our tool acquisitiveness derives from the urgency of tool acquisition in early human societies.

9. Just as the hands make tools, so tools make the hands—both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. Our hands are formed by the tools we use, of necessity. We have the hands we have because of the tools we use. This is not true of other parts of the body, though they may operate tools to a limited extent; nor is it true of other species—apes do not have tool-created hands.

10. We are still very impressed with feats of the hand—hand amazement is commonplace. Thus we marvel at concert pianists and guitar “shredders” who move their fingers at lightning speed, or jugglers and prestidigitators.

11. Many fossilized skulls show the imprint of big cats’ teeth, as the slaughtered human is dragged off for leisurely consumption. The production of fire may have made all the difference in fending off predators, which is also an achievement of the hands. Fire has been one of our most effective tools. Fire may also have been an important shaper of the human hand, as we evolved hands that could manipulate fire without getting burned.

12. I know of nothing in the philosophical literature on language that makes any connection between language and tool use—apart from Wittgenstein’s later comments on words as analogous to tools. The governing image has been that of a mathematical structure or an act of speech, not practical tool using. But anthropologists routinely put the two together, as we will see in the next section. We need to see language as more grounded in the body than we are accustomed to.

6 Hands and Language

1. Two useful collections of papers on this are Gibson and Ingold, Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human Evolution, and d’Errico and Backwell, From Tools to Symbols. It is notable that there is no philosophical contribution in these books; I am trying to fill the gap.

2. The question then is how inner reference and predication become externalized, embodied in a public communicative system. They need an apt basis in something external—that is, something with the right intrinsic properties. It needs to be perceptible, voluntary, and highly versatile—the eyelids or knees would not do.

3. The gestural theory of primordial language has been around a long time. For a recent endorsement see Armstrong, Stokoe, and Wilcox, Gesture and the Nature of Language; for a more popular discussion, see Wilson, The Hand, esp. chap. 10.

4. Probably it was a hybrid system combining vocal emissions and gestures, with gestures dominating. The human vocal tract developed relatively late in the hominid line: apes don’t have such a tract and prefer gesture as a means of communication.

5. See Armstrong, Stokoe, and Wilcox, Gesture and the Nature of Language. A study of gesture is McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought.

6. This kind of bimanual action would characteristically occur during toolmaking. It is essentially a triadic structure: right hand, left hand, and tool. It is important that two actions occur simultaneously: one of gripping, another of acting on the gripped object. Even one-handed exercises display this duality: first the spear or axe is gripped, then it is hurled or brought down. Similarly, a cup is gripped and brought to the lips—one action presupposes the other. Since many, though not all, hand actions display this duality—we could call it the “grip-and-do” pattern—we can see how the duality might underpin the duality of reference and predication, with gripping as referring and doing as predicating. We grip in order to do, as we refer in order to predicate.

7. Remember that we are seeking merely a precursor structure, not a conceptual reduction. Gripping by the hand must be converted to reference by modification; it is not already reference. Supplementary factors must be brought in. At best, gripping is a kind of proto-reference—scaffolding, not the completed building. In the next chapter I discuss in more detail how the transition might be effected. For now I am just trying to isolate a precursor trait that might be upgraded to reference of a simple kind. It is not, then, that referring is seizing; rather, it derives from seizing, when supplemented in various ways. Referring evolves from prehending, suitably supplemented.

8. I am alluding here to the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, with his “picture theory” of meaning. As a man trained in engineering, Wittgenstein would have been very familiar with handheld tools, and with the congruence between tool and grip that they entail. The grip is isomorphic with the tool, yet different in kind from the tool. Could this have subliminally influenced his thinking?

9. Mimicry is actually very common in nature, from the octopus and cuttlefish to human impersonators. Some species even mimic other species, usually for protection. Primates in general are very prone to imitation. The hands make the perfect vehicle for more abstract kinds of mimicry: instead of copying with the whole body, the digits can be used to symbolize objects. All mimicry involves representation, but hand mimicry takes it to a new level. Thus we see a continuum from simple duplicative mimicry to more structural forms of mimicry.

10. It is important to be open to the possibility that the thing we call “language” and assume to be unitary is really a patching together of disparate traits antecedently existing in the human line. There was not a single preadaptation that led to language but a converging collection of prior traits. Language has many seeds—though the hand is the soil in which they all grow. In its origins, language could be quite messy. Always remember, in evolution nothing is preconceived—things just happen for multifarious reasons. It is always coincidence and confluence, chance and the lucky break. Language was not intelligently designed but randomly hit upon; and its roots are likely to be multiple and unconnected.

11. If there is a language of thought, as many suppose, then language was already installed in the head before it found a home in the hands. It might have stayed in the head, if it were not for certain historical contingencies, such as enforced terrestrial living and an adaptable hand. In any case, linguistic structures were already exemplified in the human brain, if Mentalese exists; the problem was how to get them out into the observable world beyond the brain.

12. It may well be that without the prior adaptation of the hand in tool use and construction it would not have been capable of acting as a means of linguistic communication. First, tool use led to brain expansion and hence greater intelligence, which was required for language to originate. Second, tool use led to enhanced motor powers in the hand, especially the fine-tuning of the fingers. Thus man could not have skipped the tool-use stage and progressed straight to language; he had to do his apprenticeship in the tool shop. Without millions of years of natural selection for tool use humans might never have reached the anatomical and cognitive threshold for language to develop. We might have been stuck at the symbolic level of the smartest apes. Here we see that evolution is a complex, unpredictable, opportunistic process, in which it is only possible to achieve one advance by going through another. It was the tool-hand nexus, developed over countless generations, which laid the foundation for language to develop, which itself was a complex multilayered process extending over millennia. Language did not descend from the sky fully formed one bright morning.

7 Ostension and Prehension

1. The cupping grip is intermediate between the occlusive closed fist and the flat open hand—it displays while stabilizing the held object. But for a live insect or small animal, or even for a piece of fruit while on the move, something more forceful is needed—hence a tightening of the hand around the object. Here the hand acts like forceps.

2. The notorious blindness of even quite intelligent animals to the pointing gesture might then be put down to a deficiency of imagination. Apparently chimps understand pointing, so they must be capable of imagining the extended index finger, according to the theory proposed here. Without imagination, reference is impossible, on this view. In other words, meaning and imagining are intertwined—a not unfamiliar thought.

3. Note that the preadaptations for pointing form a suite of preexisting traits that are united in the new adaptation. Thus we have imagination combined with prehensive action; but also teleological thinking, tool use, and social cooperation. Pointing may look simple but it rests on a constellation of coordinated factors.

4. If we wanted to refer to things and events in the past or future, we would of course need time-traveling arms—a tall order. Alternatively, we could resort to deferred ostension, whereby a present entity standing in a suitable relation to something in the past or future is exploited—as with pointing to a man in the past by touching his present footprint.

5. There is a whole subject here that will remain unexplored—imaginary gripping and touching. We certainly do imagine gripping and being gripped, sometimes compulsively; but we also imagine forms of gripping that are not exemplified in the real world—satanic or godlike gripping, say. In addition, we imaginatively extend the notion of gripping to things that do not literally grip—as when we speak of the “grip of gravity.” We seem quite expert in imagining variations and transformations of the empirically perceived grip, so our understanding of pointing might well incorporate such imaginings. Maybe early man had a vivid mental image of an extended index finger when one of his fellows pointed at a distant object, but now this has faded to a kind of implicit imagining.

6. All these actions have a kind of ostensive intentionality built into them—an object of reference. The air kiss has a certain target, as does the fist pump, as does the wave or beckon. This is possible only because of a certain cognitive background that surrounds the physical action, possessed by both agent and audience. One needs to have a certain object “in mind.” By themselves, the physical actions are just meaningless movements in space. I am classifying ostensive pointing along with these other object-directed intentional acts.

7. What is called the causal theory of reference tends to model referring on perceiving, because perceiving is a causal process, whereby the external object impinges on the senses. By contrast, the haptic theory of reference emphasizes the active nature of touching by means of the hand, not just the passive receiving of sensations. This fits with the fact that referring is a type of action. I take the haptic theory to be of a piece with the “real naturalism” that I advocate, as opposed to the usual reductionist efforts.

8 From Signs to Speech

1. See Armstrong, Stokoe and Wilcox, Gesture and the Nature of Language, esp. chaps. 1–3.

2. Darwin made this point in The Descent of Man, 32–33.

3. The hands are more honest and forthright than the voice—more “transparent.” The whispering voice can be more devious and cunning. I would not be surprised if the desire to whisper had a greater role in the transition to vocal language than we might naïvely suppose.

4. Apparently there are close connections between cortex devoted to the voice and cortex devoted to the hand, so that aphasia and apraxia are often correlated: see William Calvin, “The Unitary Hypothesis: A Common Neural Circuitry for Novel Manipulations, Language, Plan-Ahead, and Throwing?” in Gibson and Inghold, Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human Evolution.

5. Language leaves no fossil traces, so the time of its origin is moot. However, it is quite wrong to assume that human language began when the specialized human larynx formed, which is a fairly recent event (the Upper Paleolithic, about 50,000 years ago). For language may have existed in gestural form for hundreds of thousands of years before this anatomical development. My own speculation, for what it is worth, is that language goes back at least as far as the Neanderthals. The more we learn about the Neanderthals the more sophisticated they appear, contrary to the popular myth; and given their social nature and capacity for bodily decoration, it is surely likely that they could exchange a word or two with each other. Maybe they were speaking well before Homo sapiens.

6. We can clearly imagine a tactile form of communication in which “speech acts” are performed by touching the recipient in specific ways. Ants touch each other in order to communicate, as with “antennae tapping.” In principle, any sense could be the receptor for acts of communication.

7. Heidegger, Being and Time. Although he speaks a lot of the “ready-to-hand,” Heidegger never really places any emphasis on the hand as such; he just discourses generally about instrumentality in relation to human Dasein.

8. A very naïve view of how language evolved would propose that we had lots of interesting and profound thoughts that we felt compelled to share with others, so we just began blurting them out one day, as a form of entertainment. The more realistic view is that language developed in a context of biological necessity and was based on anatomical and cognitive structures that had evolved earlier for other purposes, specifically tool use and hand development, along with social cooperation. We learned to communicate because we needed to in order to survive, not as a luxury. The origin of language must have been surrounded by fear and anxiety, as well as physical labor, not by a desire to have stimulating conversations. Language was born in conditions of biological catastrophe, with extinction always looming. It was an act of desperation, not aspiration (as if our ancestors thought, “What a fine thing it would be to be able to speak”). I say all this because it is easy now to think of human language as a source of pleasure and culture, as a sort of gift from on high. But the more realistic picture is that language was forced on us by the tragedy of being driven from our ancient arboreal homeland into alien and threatening new territory. We resorted to language in order to cope with our new circumstances as deracinated refugees.

9 Hand and Mind

1. Other forms of advanced intelligence are conceivable. Some alien species elsewhere in the universe may have no talent for tools but be very intelligent at philosophy or mathematics or psychology (though it may be hard to tell a convincing story about how they came to be so). It may even be that our specifically tool-oriented intelligence, with its particular origins and purposes, ill equips us for some areas of intellectual inquiry. Tools may have liberated our brain in one direction but inhibited it in other directions. Ecological niche always constrains brain function. We have the brain of an artisan, basically; but not every conceivable form of intelligence has to be of this limited type.

2. Jean Piaget’s many studies of intellectual maturation in the child make a lot of the role of sensorimotor activity, and such activity centers on the hand.

3. On enactive theories, see Alva Noë, Action in Perception.

4. Is it an accident that G. E. Moore held up his hands while endeavoring to prove the existence of the external world, in his “A Defence of Common Sense”? Our hands are certainly very real to us.

5. The accuracy of perception by the hand is obviously very important for survival: you can’t afford to be wrong about what you are gripping (snake or spear). Delicate manual perception is also advantageous. Things in the hand can easily damage the hand. It is not so with the eye: you can misperceive a thing and the eye is unlikely to be damaged. Touching sharp pointy objects is a different matter from seeing them. We have to be careful with our hands, as we employ them perceptually.

6. Obviously, I am being a little simplistic here: vision also plays a major role in determining how we conceive of things. The empiricist tradition enshrines this primacy of vision. I am trying to find a place for something that tradition ignores: the role of the hand in shaping our conception of the world. Gripping and touching up close plays at least as large a role as seeing from a distance in forming our concepts of material things, I contend. The idea of solidity surely comes from touch, not vision, and our egocentric space is a haptic space above all.

7. A canine psychoanalyst might detect anxiety centering on the jaws and teeth: impotent jaws that have lost all prehensile power, crumbling teeth, muzzles. A dog’s anxiety dreams likely concern catastrophes of the mouth area, where its prehensive powers are concentrated.

8. The philosophical problems contemplated by a specific type of species might vary according to its own makeup. Abstract beings (if such there could be) would be troubled by the concrete; disembodied beings (ditto) would be perplexed by the notion of a body; divine beings (again ditto) might be baffled by evil and weakness of will; beings made of Platonic universals (double ditto) might find the notion of a particular unintelligible; beings with both minds and bodies might be puzzled about how their two sides interact. (Just to be clear: I do not take these possibilities very seriously as sober metaphysics—I am just trying to make a point about the role of the body in shaping one’s sense of things. The same applies to the previous note.)

9. See Broad, “Some Elementary Reflections on Sense Perception.”

10. Here is a linguistic oddity: we can say “x grasps that p” but we can’t say “x grips that p”—“grips” only allows the direct-object form. We have the same contrast with “holds” and “seizes.” I am not sure why this is.

11. If we want a slogan, we could try “psychology recapitulates anatomy”—a variant on Freud’s “anatomy is destiny.” More cumbersomely, we could adopt “psycho-type mirrors phenotype.” Or we could go very old-fashioned with “the soul is shaped by the body.”

10 Selective Cognition and the Mouth

1. There is a general problem of terminology (and conceptualization) here, because our psychological vocabulary evolved mainly to describe our own psychology, not that of other species, present or past. Our terms and concepts are therefore parochial and fail to fit neatly with the minds of other species. But this does not mean that other species lack a determinate psychology—only that our means of description are inadequate. The variety of minds is not well captured by our anthropocentric psychological vocabulary. This applies a fortiori to ancient species long extinct.

2. Methodologically, the argument goes from the abstract morphology of the two capacities to a thesis of derivation—the reason for the coincidence of form is that one came from the other. Thus there is no saltation. It is just like arguing that hands and feet came from fins because of their morphological resemblance. Note that this is not deduction but inference to the best explanation: the best explanation of the similarity is derivation, though this does not of course logically follow from the similarity. Derivation is a hypothesis about the reason for the similarity.

3. The notion of being “subject to the will” in application to thought is explored in McGinn, Mindsight, chap. 1. We are trying to explain (inter alia) the transition from passive perceiver to active thinker, with active oral prehension playing a key role.

4. A more familiar example of exaptation is provided by bird feathers: feathers originally evolved as a means of thermal regulation and only subsequently were co-opted for flight. And notice that in this case the underlying brain machinery is co-opted too, because the wings need instructions from the brain to induce them to open, close, and flap when performing either function.

5. Once a trait evolves it can become detached from its earlier function, so that selective cognition might become quite independent of oral prehension. Oral prehension could even wither away, leaving behind the new trait that evolved from it long ago. But perhaps for the earliest possessors of selective cognition there was always an association with the mouth—thoughts of an object were always accompanied by oral sensations of the kind involved in holding an object in the mouth. Maybe in an intermediate species selective cognition was always accompanied by salivation! It would be fascinating to discover that concentrating on an object in thought is regularly associated with an imperceptible clenching of the jaw.

6. I came up with this theory by asking what bodily trait was more or less coextensive with cognition in the animal kingdom, and then conjecturing that this trait was the preadaptation for cognition. I reasoned that cognition is extremely widespread, though not universal, and the bodily correlate seemed to be advanced oral prehension. Then I noticed the abstract similarities between the two—hence the theory.

7. In the pop song “Hold Me Tight” (written and performed memorably by the Beatles) the sentiment is not “Apply X pounds of pressure to my body” but something a lot more personal, involving the action of one agent on another. Similarly, when we say a person has grabbed something, we don’t just mean that his hand has abruptly clamped around it.

8. See McGinn, Mindsight, chapter 1, for a discussion of the general concept of the visual.

9. When Frege speaks of grasping a sense, one gets the idea of the mind curling around the sense, as if encircling it in thought, apprehending its inner structure. The sense is an articulated entity, according to Frege, and the mind’s grasp of it mirrors this articulation—as the shape of the grasping hand mirrors the shape of the object grasped. Thus the mind acts on the sense and the sense acts back on the mind, just as with grasping an object in the hand. That, at any rate, is how one is apt to envisage mental grasping.

10. To say that bird flight evolved from thermal regulation by means of feathers is not to say that flight is reducible to thermal regulation. It is to say rather that the mechanism of flight, viz. feathers, had its precursor in feathers used to regulate temperature. Feathers served both functions, as the brain circuits underlying oral prehension might also serve selective cognition (suitably supplemented).

11 The Origin of Sentience

1. Panpsychism is an old view and perennially attractive. I don’t care for it myself, but for expository purposes I shall take it as given. For one defense see Nagel, “Panpsychism,” in his Mortal Questions.

2. As is often noted, the brain is metabolically costly, so sentience will be too, since it needs brain tissue in abundance. So sentience will not evolve unless there is a pressing need for it. My question is what the pressing need is for sentience among organisms on Earth: for it cannot be a mere luxury. Sentience is a costly adventure in high upkeep technology, liable to drain the organism’s energy resources. Plants and microorganisms don’t bother with it, so it is not essential to life as such—so why do so many animals take on such a costly burden?

3. This is what happens with the tails of many lizards: one tail gets bitten off but another one grows to replace it. This is quite a costly adaptation in terms of lizard hardware, but it is presumably worth the price (lizards with it do better than lizards without it). Being able to grow another head on demand would be equally adaptive, but we must assume that that is beyond the technology available to lizard genes.

4. I don’t mean logically sufficient, because predator detection could occur without real sentience—it could be wholly robotic. But it is sufficient in the sense that evolution on Earth seems to have chosen this particular way of registering information. I doubt there are any higher organisms equipped with predator-detecting senses that are purely robotic on Earth (their brains are all made of much the same material). So we must assume that on Earth, sentience is the optimal way to register information about the environment.

5. This means that the existence of highly developed brains and consciousness itself traces back to predation. Everything we value in life thus depends on the existence of predation—no predation, no mind in any meaningful sense. In a way, then, everything good has its origin in something abhorrent—including the moral sense that rebels at predation. It was only when predators troubled our heretofore peaceful planet that sentience was born—and hence brought about the products of consciousness. We are conscious because we might be eaten; we think because we might become food for big cats. Those feared predators are what lifted us to the level of conscious beings.

6. By contrast, I think there are clear psychological relics of our arboreal past, as I suggest in chap. 14.

7. This is hard to verify, of course. I suppose we could check to see if the brain of the fetus goes through a stage resembling the brain of a fish. It is quite true that the fetus must have oceanic sensations as it floats in the amniotic fluid, but this may not be much like the experience of your typical fish. At any rate, it is nice to imagine that I once knew what it is like to be a fish—in the embryonic days before my brain matured to mammalian proportions. (What if the fetus went through a bat-brained stage?)

8. Suppose we could compute a “prehensivity index” that enabled us to measure and quantify a given animal’s degree of prehensive accomplishment, so that a ranking of species could be established. It seems a reasonable conjecture that there would be a lawlike correlation between the prehensivity index and an animal’s degree of psychological sophistication. We would then have a very general “psychophysical law” relating one magnitude to another: maybe intelligence would be a logarithmic function of prehensive power, as with some laws of psychophysics. I suspect we humans would come out highest on both measures, mainly because of our abnormally prehensive hands. But none of this would be hard science, needless to say.

12 The Meaning of the Grip

1. Pushing the thought experiment through requires prescinding from the kind of feet we have and from breathing air and even from the way the body envelope keeps a grip on the inner organs—for these are all (quasi-)prehensive matters. To imagine oneself as comprehensively nonprehensive is no easy feat. Still, the idea of it can be contemplated.

2. There is thus a deep difference between merely perceiving an object, say visually, and actually gripping it in one’s hand: the perceiving is not itself de-alienating, just revealing of an objective plane of being, but the gripping is an active incorporating engagement (people get “engaged”). It is a hitching together, a physical fusion, an act of synthesis; but seeing by itself is still remote and unengaged—a mere positing. Gripping is warm intimacy; seeing is cool detachment. (Smell is somewhere between the two, because it is a distance sense that involves holding emanations from the object in one’s nose.) There is therefore something a little off about describing sense perception as “prehension”—almost, but not quite.

3. The one part of the body we cannot grip is the gripping hand itself—a hand cannot grip itself as it grips. I suppose the hand can be said to be able to get a partial grip on itself, by pressing the fingers into the palm or clasping the index finger with the thumb, but it cannot grip itself as it grips other objects (try gripping the back of your hand with the fingers of that hand). The hand is the ungripped gripper. But this prehensive isolation is mitigated by the fact that one hand can grip the other, and this simple act brings prehension of the body full circle. It would be odd not to know what it feels like to grip one’s own hand—as must be the case for those with only one hand. I imagine it is a funny feeling, as if part of one’s body is slightly “other.”

4. Sartre, Being and Nothingness. His famous example of bad faith involves a woman’s hand: she renders it inert and thinglike as her suitor hopefully clasps it. She has tried to transfer it from the domain of the for-itself into the domain of the in-itself, as if her hand is not free. (The hands are free agents par excellence.)

5. Hume described causation as “the cement of the universe”: the grip is the cement of the social universe. And isn’t causation a “grippy” matter itself? It holds the universe together, in Hume’s image—the causing object reaches out to the effect object and seizes it. Here we see the glimmerings of “prehensional metaphysics,” whereby the universe is conceived as one big theater of prehension, even down to elementary particles. Just such a metaphysical system was propounded by A. N. Whitehead in works such as The Concept of Nature. I don’t myself subscribe to prehensional metaphysics, despite my enthusiasm for prehension, because I think only organic entities can literally grip or grasp: but I do appreciate the motivation.

6. Even a “harmless” tool, such as a paper clip or a book, can prove deadly in certain circumstances: the clip can be swallowed, the book used as a cudgel. Kitchen knives are clearly dangerous implements, to be used with care. Even the innocuous teaspoon can be used to gouge out an eye. These objects all perform a job for us, like obedient servants, but they can turn against us in a flash. They are for us but they are also against us. Strangling with a shoelace provokes a peculiar shudder of recognition.

7. The entire digestive tract is a grip-release mechanism: swallowing is an act of extreme gripping (like Jonah and the whale). After digestion, the body holds on to the derived nutrients, while letting go of the waste.

8. Two of the main proponents of this school of child psychology are Melanie Klein and John Bowlby. Interested readers might wish to consult Klein’s The Psychoanalysis of Children and Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss—though my use of their ideas requires no detailed knowledge of their theories. My summary of their views in the text is intended only to provide a sketch of the relevant material, so as to illustrate the role of prehension in interpersonal relations.

9. We might speculate that humans (and other animals) have an innate prehension program designed to establish emotional relations over the course of maturation—and this program must not be thwarted. The notorious work by Harry Harlow and associates on maternal deprivation in rhesus monkeys illustrates the importance of physical attachment to affective attachment. But I cite this work reluctantly, because of the complete lack of ethical restraint involved in these obviously cruel experiments.

10. Educating people in the use of tools and implements of all kinds should emphasize the importance of the grip involved. The pleasures of the grip should also be highlighted, so that it doesn’t seem so much like work—tell people to take a moment to feel the object in their hand. In tennis, say, it pays to attend to the precise way the racquet is gripped, especially because of the necessity to switch grips without looking, as well as for other reasons (Eastern grip, Western grip, semi-Western grip, etc.).

11. In these reflections I am influenced by Richard Dawkins’s The Extended Phenotype, in which he argues that the beaver’s genes as much build dams as they build beavers. The dam is really part of the beaver’s (extended) phenotype. You might protest that dams and some of the items on my list do not grow from the organism concerned: thus beards are part of the body but spectacles are not. True enough, but other examples show that growing from the body is not a necessary condition for being considered part of it—such as prosthetic organs and limbs, as well as organic transplants. Functional connectedness is what counts, not “growing from.” A transplanted kidney did not grow from its current owner but it is surely part of his or her body. Nor is the condition sufficient, or else your cut hair would still be part of your body. If you discovered that your heart is actually a parasitic organism in symbiotic relation to you, would you conclude that it is not part of your body? What does the job of a body part is a body part, roughly. The important point is that human tools play the same kind of role in human survival as human limbs or teeth or eyes—they are useful adaptations subject to natural selection.

13 A Culture of Hands

1. If our bodies were built according to the proportions of a cortical homunculus diagram, the hands would be at least the size of the rest of the body, not counting the grotesquely bloated lips and tongue—because so much of the brain is devoted to them. The hands are anatomically small but cortically large, owing to their great functional complexity (contrast the buttocks).

2. I advocate emphasizing the biological naturalness of writing in our schools. Writing is an aspect of our evolutionary heritage, a link to our ancestors, and a major factor in our species ascendancy. Writing is in our genes, in our blood—because speaking with the hands is (everyone gestures). I vaguely remember learning to write and finding it an absorbing and astonishing accomplishment (and I treasured fountain pens). Even today I love the feeling of a pen in my hand as I rapidly inscribe words and sentences on paper—so forceful yet so delicate, and so full of meaning! Writing is the perfect fusion of movement, tool, and thought. Steven Pinker should write a book called The Writing Instinct. Yes, we have to learn to do it, but it harks back to primitive manual abilities, linking thoughts with hands, cognition with prehension. For some people, concentrated thought is not possible without writing.

3. The connection between hands and disgust could use extended treatment. I neglected the subject in my book The Meaning of Disgust. The hands seem the focal point of our disgust reactions, second only to the mouth. Grasping the disgusting thing, with hand or mouth, feels especially loathsome, as opposed to simply perceiving it or even touching it with other parts of the body (say, the elbow). We especially don’t like disgusting material clinging to our fingers. Compulsive hand washing is part of this general repugnance. When, I wonder, did early man develop these fastidious feelings about his hands?

4. I mean that the hand demonstrates the remarkable creative power of evolution by natural selection. If natural selection can produce such an astonishing organ, what can it not produce? This should make it easier to accept that natural selection led to art, science, philosophy, morality, and so on—these being no more amazing or “above nature” than the hand (which made all these accomplishments possible anyway). The human brain, remember, is largely a by-product of the hand, coevolving with it in symphonic harmony (each conducting the other).

14 Arboreal Remnants

1. Just ask yourself what early humans would think if confronted by the accomplishments of their descendants. Do you think they would say: “Yes, just as I thought—we have become nature’s top guns”? No, they would be astonished at the future state of man: his technology, his life span, and his sheer numbers. In hindsight, perhaps, we can discern the seeds of future success, but primitive stone tools and a few hand gestures don’t look much like the stuff of world domination. Why aren’t the lions and tigers running the world?

2. You might suppose that we could just use our natural tool-using intelligence to make new tools and rebuild our world, but what if that part of the brain ceased to function and we no longer had tool-using abilities? Our big brain—good for science, philosophy, culture, and such—would not be much help in the struggle for survival without the use of tools. Profound thoughts do not keep you safe and fed. And matters would turn even more desperate if our hands became stiff and clumsy. We are lucky that no viruses target the hands. Dominant as we are, we are also inches away from wholesale destruction. We just happen to be good survivors (so far).

3. We can hold our hands above our head, we have a rotating shoulder girdle, a strong grip, and we have the right musculature on the back and arms. Of course, none of this is surprising, given that we are descended from apes and ancestral preservation is the rule.

4. As a psychological experiment, I suggest watching some film of gibbons brachiating and seeing whether you feel the urge to join them in the trees. As a physical experiment, we could train people in brachiation skills and find out whether they improve physically and mentally, compared to a control group. (Since writing the above about brachiation and the fitness industry, I have discovered a startup company called “Darwinian Fitness” that advocates brachiation and other tree-related exercises as better alternatives to standard muscle-building routines, based precisely on evolutionary thinking.)

5. Napier writes as follows: “Man is a product of a primary arboreal background and a secondary ground-living heritage. He possesses the ‘flight’ responses of forest living monkeys and the ‘fight’ responses of the ground-living baboons and macaques. His genetic ambivalence confronts him every moment of the day. Do I get in there and fight, or do I settle for what I have? Do I ‘twist’ or ‘buy’? Our uncertainty, the racking moments of self-doubt teetering on the precipice of indecision is a reflection, not of our ambivalent present, but of our ancient mixed-up past” (The Roots of Mankind, 220).

6. Some contemporary humans, though not many, still make their homes in trees: thus the Korowai and Kombai tribes of Papua New Guinea, who live in tree houses often very high above the ground. From all reports, they are quite happy with this domestic arrangement. Quite a few people living in the suburbs build tree houses in their yards (there is even a TV series about such people).

7. In some dystopian fantasies, humans are compelled to live underground by a catastrophe at the Earth’s surface, say nuclear devastation or total pollution. This is descending one step further down the ladder from the trees, and an even gloomier prospect. We certainly don’t want to live like moles (though moles don’t seem to mind)—as if banished completely from our arboreal past. We are climbers and swingers, not burrowers, or even browsers.

8. The domestic cat is an interesting point of comparison. Though a typical house will lack any indoor trees, cats will readily climb whatever is available—evidently retaining urges from their semiarboreal days. They are still physically equipped for climbing and psychologically they are inclined to it. We humans also display vestigial climbing urges, though tree climbing is a minority activity. People like to climb hills and mountains, stairs and steps, professional and social hierarchies. We are still partly a climbing species (unlike the elephant), despite our latter-day domestication on the flatlands. The desire to ascend still throbs within us, as a remnant of our professional tree-climbing days.

9. One of the primary cognitive skills required by any animal is the ability to recognize conspecifics, which involves recognizing members of other species as not of one’s own species. This is of particular importance when it comes to predator avoidance. It is probably innate in most if not all species. Humans are no different: we too have an innate ability to distinguish species, and hence harbor a deep sense of species similarity. Thus the recognition of our kinship with birds rests on an innate and heritable foundation. Perhaps our general fondness for birds reflects this inbuilt recognition of kinship. I suspect we have an unspoken ambivalence about eating birds in general because of this, especially if we view the species in question as quite similar to us (for some reason we make an exception for chickens). Eating talking birds feels a lot like cannibalism; and the Bird Man of Alcatraz could hardly eat his bird companions.

10. We could have become ground-dwelling quadrupeds after our descent, using our old gripping hands as mere feet, with the fingers losing their prehensive facility—which is what appears to have happened to some other primates that came down from the trees. But that was not a good route for us, because it was not an optimal use of our anatomical strengths—the hand was far too good to waste as a mere foot. The following counterfactual seems true: if we had become quadrupeds, not bipeds, we would now be extinct—and for a long time.

11. Napier tells us: “In the sense of the number of hairs per square centimeter of skin, man is as hairy as a gorilla but his hairs are so fine and colorless as to be almost invisible over most of his body” (The Roots of Mankind, 143–144). I take his expert word for it.

12. On the “scavenging hypothesis,” see McKee and Poirier, Understanding Human Evolution, 208.

13. Though even shopping can turn ugly when shoppers feel competition from other shoppers for bargains. This resembles nothing so much as scavengers converging on a nice juicy corpse and fighting each other for the best bits.

14. The fundamental reason for psychological remnants is anatomical ancestral preservation in the brain. The brain is the basis of the mind, and it is not totally scrapped and rebuilt when adaptation or speciation occurs; rather, it is modified and supplemented, with old structures left intact. The human brain does not relate to ancestral brains as a brand new building relates to the previous one that was totally demolished on the same site. It relates rather as a modified building does to a previous building—with the old cellars and outhouses left intact, though no longer used. In short: old brains never die, they just fade into the background.

15 The Future of the Hand

1. This is equivalent to the question of why the human brain became so large and complex. Why don’t other species have a brain as large and complex as ours, particularly other primates? Such a brain would be useful (though metabolically costly), but other animals have not evolved it. So: what did our ancestors have prior to encephalization that enabled encephalization? What was the impetus for the human cerebral cortex?

2. Pinker takes much the same line in How the Mind Works, in the aptly named chapter “Revenge of the Nerds” (see 197–198). Here is my wild estimate of the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, as opposed to less nerdy forms of life: if there are a million planets in the universe with advanced life, even life as sophisticated as primates, then there are no more than three with intelligent life. Nerds only emerge in exceedingly rare conditions (which is why we are the only nerd species on Earth).

3. Two factors clearly militate against developing Intelligence: (a) it needs a metabolically costly bulked-up brain that devours energy; (b) a brain that size needs a big skull to contain it, and this produces problems in giving birth because of the relative diameter of the birth canal. Given these two drawbacks, it is not surprising that the vast majority of species have been content with a more modest brain and hence less Intelligence. And it is entirely possible to thrive and multiply with a smaller head organ and nothing in the way of tools or language (consider insects). As an adaptation, Intelligence is just not that cool—despite being otherwise admirable. We tend to overestimate its adaptive value from our limited anthropocentric perspective. It has its great adaptive advantages, to be sure, but also some notable drawbacks.

4. Darwin comments: “It might have been an immense advantage to man to have sprung from some comparatively weak creature,” adding: “The slight corporeal strength of man, his little speed, his want of natural weapons, &c., are more than counterbalanced, firstly by his intellectual powers, through which he has, while still remaining in a barbarous state, formed for himself weapons, tools, &c., and secondly by his social qualities which lead him to give aid to his fellow-men and to receive it in return” (The Descent of Man, 93–94).

5. Imagine if the anti-hand zealots insisted on binding the hands of children, as the Chinese used to bind the feet of girls, thus rendering them deformed and dysfunctional. These ruined hands could never play an instrument, write a sentence, caress a loved one, play tennis, or do anything else manual. Doesn’t that sound like a truly terrible state of affairs?