Evolutionist: “Marriage” Is The First Human Act

Terrence W. Deacon, 1997, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. W. W. Norton & Company.

Deacon believes that language is not just communication. Bees and dogs communicate but they do not use language. The argument is large but can be reduced to this: symbolic reference, where a “word” represents something other than the concrete thing there, is only a human thing. You can teach some primates simple language with a great deal of effort and not a lot of success. You do not see it arising naturally in primates in the wild.

Simple animal communication is different. Animals have developed very complex communication schemes but none of them, except for humans, have developed language.

Humans developed (evolved, really) language because of a simple thing: reproduction. And it has to do with needing to have humans live in tight social group where males and females pair in such a way to provide them with assurance that the children are theirs (for males) and that they will be supported (for females). “Marriage” arose, which is a symbolic thing. It is different from mating, some type of commitment. While other species have permanent pair bonding, humans have it when it is difficult to keep males and females on the porch, so to speak. Because they had to hunt for meat (and meat is a major part of the human evolution, my vegetarian friends) they had to do it packs. Which required groups. Groups make it more difficult for a male to know that the child is his. Males need this knowledge to put in the reproductively costly time and effort to support it. Chimps males don’t have this paternity assurance, for example, and the males aren’t all that supportive of particular chimp babies.

Since males that knew that the children were theirs would support them, but the groups made it difficult to know this, pre-human primates who developed something that would ensure pair-bonding had better survival chances. This something was the idea of, for lack of a better term, marriage.

If Deacon is right, pair-bonding rituals where the two deny all others for each other go back to the dawn of homo prehistory.

Anti-evolutionist Christians should take note. Marriage, according to this evolutionist’s thinking, is the fundamental piece of all symbolic reference, the basis of all language. Marriage and family really is everything that conservatives make it out to be.

My own thoughts: Some cultures created symbolic realities that ensured paternity of a male’s children while also allowing him his randy appetites, mostly through sexual liaisons (exploitation, if you will) of younger males. This is still the case in many repressive societies across the world. Sex with a female not your wife is a grave societal infraction. Sexual gratification with another male is nothing at all.

He also argues that Descartes, while wrong, was a lot less wrong than people make him out to be about the nature of the “soul”. Deacon argues that the fact that we can think in symbols, that we have language, creates a “symbolic representation of the self” that is connected to concrete self but separate from it:

… We live in a world that is both entirely physical and virtual at the same time. Remarkably, this virtual facet [i.e., the symbolic representation of self] of the world came into existence relatively recently, as evolutionary time is measured, and it has provided human selves with an unprecedented sort of autonomy or freedom to wander from the constraints of concrete reference, and a unique power for self-determination that derives from this increasingly indirect linkage between symbolic mental representation and its grounds of reference. With it has come a more indirect linkage between mind and body, as well. So this provides a somewhat different perspective on that curious human intuition that our minds are somehow independent of our bodies; an intuition which is often translated into beliefs about disembodied spirit and souls that persist beyond death. The experience we have of ourselves as symbols is in at least a minimal sense an experience of just this sort of virtual independence — it’s just not an independence from corporeal embodiment altogether.

[pp. 454]

This is more interesting than what passes for ideas in the postmodernist literature. Deacon argues that we really do have this incorporeal self, and that we do live in a socially created reality that is truly “virtual”, something that isn’t physical, something that can only exist for other humans since it requires symbolic representation, and this allows us to think of others’ selfs in such a way that they exist even when they are not here.

Very interesting argument. Wonder how I didn’t see this book over the last decade. We evangelicals could make a much better argument over the sanctity of marriage using Deacon than by appealing to the Bible, which most people don’t really believe is an authority.