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Polycausal Adaptations: Precursors of Hominid Cognition and Culture

Utilizing a mixed methodology that synthesizes the best of all applicable scientific fields and theories we can attempt to create a holistic model in an effort to contribute specifics on the formation of human specific culture and cognition. Through primate, hominid and modern human developmental evidence, we could argue that there are many variables that might have worked together to form the function of a whole, and a model that explains the many functioning parts of the whole might offer some clarification that best explains how the whole of a certain function and its ultimate role and characteristics came into existence. I speculate that it will and must take a model that intergrades a methodological holism to exemplify the complexities of how advanced human cognition and culture developed. Modern research contends that what is distinctive about humans is their capacity for social acquisition and transmission of culture. Current research on the polycausal adaptations and precursors of hominid cognition and culture as a means of solidifying a unifying singularity of relationships between that of human cognitive capacity, semiotic assimilations and projections, and the linguistic transmission of semiotics into the manifestation of a human cultural specific phenomenon will be a daunting endeavor, nevertheless much Scientific inquire and novel understandings will ultimately result from the research and will be evident in its models.

Primates are less cognitively advanced when compared to humans, but are able to use representational gestures to effectively communicate with each other and create group cohesion through non-language means like grooming behaviors. Though primates are limited to this episodic culture, the ability for primates to create bonds based on these gestures could support memetic capacity as a needed variable for the evolution of human language, and thus complex cognition and culture. This can be an important observation because this demonstrates that gestures alone can be an effective communication method. The use of gestures by our primate ancestors to communicate sets up the cognitive architecture for the development of more complex communication through the intermediate steps of memetic evolution that the hominid line may have used to develop cognitive culture. Evidence from hominid development for this model is the ability, starting from the late Australopithecines, to create kinship bonds without the use of language. Hominin ability to create these bonds is evidence of effective communication, which occurred without the use of language. Language was most likely not used to facilitate vocal communications as of yet because even as recently as the

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Neanderthals, the morphological structure of their larynx and their hyoid bone most likely would not contribute the anatomical structure necessary for language. Though these hominids were most likely unable to communicate through language, they were still able to create the complexities of a proto-culture based on the increasingly varied and more complex material culture, starting from the simple Oldowan toolkits to the complex and varied Mousterian toolkits. The increasing complexity of the toolkits is evidence because it demonstrates that complex and symbolic ideas can be transmitted through non-language means, and thus, that effective communication can occur without verbal language.

The documented patterns of cultural adaptation presently available within the scientific community is losing creditability and needs to be readdressed with modern scientific findings and our new knowledge of the fossil record, human evolution and that of anthropological-neurobiological-Genomics and social psychological findings. I predict a model which should consider the primary evolutionary traits selected for ancestral man’s mind/brain as a functioning cognitive architecture of advanced organic machinery that might have been built upon an existing cognitive architecture. Memetic capacity and its prolonged use throughout human cultural and linguistic evolution would of probable been one such form of cognitive architecture generating an entangled neurobiological relationship between one or more cognitive modules. The emergence of novel forms of semiotic representational systems such as language, writing, mythical and theoretical cultural constructs, in theory would have likely been by-products of some unit of memetic capacity, and one that must have had an already existent hardwired template. Blank slate mentalities and the many models of explanations therein must consider and or embrace the possibility that multiple modules of multifaceted cognition where functioning bilaterally to produce a specific outcome long before the earliest environments of man’s evolutionary adaptivness.

Increased complexities in human social interactions is likely to have been a dominant force on the evolution of the human brain, and thus a prerequisite for complex linguistics , technological innovations, abstract art and other such expressive skills observed within homo sapiens. This may have been a direct consequence of our hominoid ancestors being selected to be more and more sociably adept for survival and thus a fitness enhancing trait that would have been favored by the laws of natural selection, but also one that would have had to have a preexisting neurobiology capable of such higher order cognition, thus hominoid cranial encephala ratios in the fossil record are suggesting a linguistic "bio program within the human brain and

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expressed by the mind via innate linguistic capacities. A theory of the mind, or the ability to vicariously approximate the thoughts of others tendencies, intentionality, deceptions or possible actions in regards to a specific context of man’s early environment might also serve as one such cognitive device that evolved in response to the demanding pressures and complexities associated with increasing sociocultural interactions. Both concepts are ultimately selfish in a genetic sense in that humans do not do anything if it is not fitness enhancing, and in this sense altruism can be reduced down from a seemingly group selection perspective.

There seems to be many selected environmental pressures influencing cognitive mechanisms that generate fitness-maximizing behavior within most contexts. The idea of invariant behavioral predispositions and the conviction that they yield behaviors that make adaptive sense only in isolated past environments may also exemplify a contemporary evolutionary mismatch. Universal adaptations could produce substantial behavioral variation in different ecological environmental contexts and the relevant inputs to the cognitive mechanisms that have evolved in the past are necessarily absent in modern environments. Environmental mismatches with evolved psychological mechanisms might underpin specific human behaviors. Although cognitive mechanisms are complex and evolve rather slowly, can the cultural norms of tastes, preferences, and other such tendencies and biases determine the behaviors generated from such mechanisms, and can they possibly be altered by single genes? Although many non-adaptive mismatched environmental factors exist many more adaptive ones happen to be expressed and functioning to maximize inclusive fitness. Humanity rests on the cultural components produced by and acting on the evolution of the human brain/mind and the cognitive machineries therein, thus higher levels of social complexity may explain our unique human cognitive capacities. Inclusive fitness argues that for altruistic behavior to be beneficial to an individual, the benefits for the recipient have to be greater than the cost for the actor. The relatedness of the individuals is also measured in altruism and cooperation within kin groups, but it does not help when dealing with fictive kin or completely unrelated individuals. So the manner in which to explain seemingly altruistic acts is through a mutualistic arrangement of reciprocal altruism. Evolutionary selected biology evolved cognitive adaptations and culture might all work together as a means of producing theses human social and cultural specific characteristics.

Rising hominin population and finite resources would modify environmental carrying capacities and result in increased sedentism and niche constructions, hominoid individuals would need to rely on

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the aforementioned evolutionary concepts in order to foster a greater number of inter and intra social relationships. This would utilize Hamilton’s rule to distinguish a selfish gene and prisoner’s dilemma within our human evolutionary game theory which has exemplified that forms of coalitional psychology and social bonding with fictive kinships is essential for the coordination and cooperation of prosocial behaviors within human systems. It is also postulated that a selection pressure for minimizing possible predation from the nonlocal kin group during the middle to late Pleistocene and the relationship between kinship affiliation webs competing for space and resources suggest that there was a need to place greater emphasis on the social interactions between groups and the cognition necessary for predictions of others actions, potentialities of risk prevention and a cost and effect analysis of the increasing influences from information assimilated by the brain.

Consciousness domains of human awareness and the ability to infer and predict, as well as convey knowledge in the present and the future, or in a cognition of displacement, could have been one variable responsible for generating complex patterns of communication which paved the way for semiotic cognitions and proto linguistic abilities, and the conscious awareness of a modern human mind. All these capacities could be linked to our neurocognitive communicative abilities for the purpose of transmitting information from mind to mind beyond the confines of existence and between the individual of the group and the universe as a whole. Prolonged capacity and utilization of nonlinguistic memetic production would have allowed for a neuroanatomical evolution that was not just Darwinian but a novel neo Lamarckian inheritance of a specific muti- modularity of cognitive abilities working in tandem to produce a specific out come within the range of space and time. Pre human mammalian perceptions must have evolved the necessary mental architecture able to manifest an internal representation of others memetic gesturing’s and symbolic expressions; that is that gestural memetic forms of communication coupled with a working internal episodic memory where working together to form the action. These cognitive semiotic transmissions would have paved the way for a need of linguistic capacity and could be postulated as a selective pressure for the evolution of the specific anatomical perquisites we observe in the hominoid fossil record (i.e. elongated larynx, haploid bone, as well as genetic findings such as the foxp2 gene and the mirror neuron system and the cognitive proponents of the HAR genes, or human accelerated regions that exemplify a divergent system that distinguishes us from the ape and primate lines of evolution.

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A fast-evolving region in the human genome was found by Dr. Pollard, who has identified through research that this genetic area distinguishes humans from other mammalian life forms. Known as HAR genes a recent discovery now yielding a plethora of data in support of the epigenetic nature nurture symbiosis theory. Human accelerated regions (HARs) are a set of 49 segments of the human genome which were preserved throughout vertebrate evolution, but they are observed functioning extremely different in humans when compared to other species. They are named HAR1 through HAR49 according to their degree of difference between humans and chimpanzees. Found by scanning through genomic databases of various species, some of these vastly mutated areas are now thought to have contributed to the development of human neuroanatomical structures necessary for linguistics, and the uniquely human capacity for complex thought and written languages. More than half of these fast-evolving electrical impulse switches are near genes that are active in the human brain, either in the developing embryo or in the fully developed adult brain. This makes logical sense because our brains are essential to the unique properties that make us human, such as our language, our culture, religion, and even our capacity to implement scientific inquires. Human culture is an intergraded pattern of adaptations and Darwinian evolution over time and is expressed by the operations of cognition generated by the neocortex of the brain and expressed by the primitive mammalian and reptilian sensations of the mind.

Based on the research of Olaf Liszkowski and postulating ideas from Sapir and Whorf it appears that the ability to make reference to absent entities and project possible future events displaced from present reality is a distinctive function of human communication. Primates utilize certain forms of communication towards the outside world such as pant-hooting and communal expressions; however these displays tend to demonstrate localization and dominance hierarchies within a group rather than a theory of mind intentionality, or a projection of mental thoughts into a virtual/potential event.

One evident discontinuity between human and nonhuman cultures is that human cultures are semiotic and utilize language as a medium of transmitting fundamental ideas, this capacity for human cultural acquisition and transmission is mediated by this unique human symbolic language capacity. The neo-cortex ratio of humans (ratio of neo-cortex to the rest of brain) strongly correlates with several indicators of sociality and social cognition. Humans give the impression to have 1000 times more spindle cells which help connect emotional and higher cognitive neural structures, such as between parts of the limbic system when compared to primates such as

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chimpanzees and other apes. Human lateral speech circuits were possibly built upon a pre-existing neural substrate similar of this type, and have been observed in the macaque mirror neuron system, which also reinforces the ties between gesture and speech. Research in this compelling and widespread neural system is providing fascinating insights into the mechanisms by which we acquire social skills and ultimately communicate our intimate emotional state and internal intentions to others. Symbolization as a phylogenetic precursor and the emergent properties of communication is now genetically strengthened by the novel findings of fox p 2 genes, mirror neuron systems and the critical time of development by which environmental factors interact with such alee frequencies and their change over time. Endo-Phenotypes, human genetic information, epigenetic transference, the novel behavioral symbolic functions working within the memory of the premotor cortex and the prolonged recognition of motor actions can now be used to further known models the biology and evolution of language and the evolution of cognition and culture.

CONCLUSIONS

The best model to explain the formation of complex culture and cognition should follow a standard social scientific evolutionary model that incorporates what we know about primate and early hominid brain development, language development and teleological communication in children, and individuals with acute brain deficiencies, all while taking into account the selection pressures that genetically drove the creation of culture. Epistemologies concentrated on the underlying cognitive machinery of the human brain and mind will take an innovative model with more experimental approaches in order to be clearly defined and statically significant. Recurrent structures of cultures could be explained by the faculty properties of the human mind, unwavering cultural manifestations such as collective ritualized behaviors, coalitional psychological acts of group cohesion and gullibility, or other A-typical patterns of social exchange, which can be reduced to evoked features of the human mind. To reduce behaviors like this to a specific form of genetic markers and their correlating sections within the brain will be required to empirically explain how culture and cognition work to form the human mind.

A cross cultural data set could be analyzed by an anthropological methodological holism, combing the economic modeling of behavioral ecology, optimal foraging theory, known evolutionary psychological templates and fussing it with current sociobiological data sets as a means of accounting for the multivariable affiliation that exist with such research parameters..

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With all else being equal and with Occam’s razor applied it should be reducible to certain objective correlations and possible subjective causations. I would implement a polycausal model to account for altruistic activities on the group level, as well as a cost benefit analysis in regards to individual choice and cultural biases that may exist within the inter and intra transmission of such choices, i.e. prestige bias rates, transmission levels of certain imitations, preference bias, inputs of diffusional influence over time, and so forth. Once this was established I would compare and contrast the data to regional and cultural specific variables in order to isolate a prospected causation. I would also utilize a retrospective and prospective approach, such as gathering ethnographic data of the past, as well as genomic testing of ancestral lineages and comparing it to the present genotypic, phonotypical and cultural behavioral traits. Once this contrasting method of past biosocial factors is compared to the present data I would hold one variable isolated and control for specific data sets that over the course of a few generations should reveal a positive amount of pertinent information necessary to infer a possible ultimate causational agent. I would also use gel emergent karyotyping of relevant archeological and paleoanthropological remains and compare it to the present living members as to find certain frequencies that are related with the cultural behaviors in question. Once established I would further run neuron magnetic response imaging of individuals to isolate possible pathways in the brain associated with the behavior. Once I found the underlying genes and areas of the brain responsible within the control group and compared it to the other groups through a model of time and inheritance I would then be able to posit the epigenetic influence of specific cultural traits on the human genome and as well I would be able to show that differences exist between cultural groups in their cognition and the degree of expression on which cultural selection acts on the malleable nature and nurture processes of cognition which could then be used with paleo archeological evidence to support theories on the evolution of the human mind and on the origin of things such as language and cognition

Nearly all words signify their meanings symbolically, symbols represent themselves as an internal semiotic representation of the human cognitive process, as well they tend to have an arbitrary ,imitative or iconic component that may make them easier to learn. Could this be a component to the costly information hypothesis, does it pay to be gullible and could this be fitness enhancing? It seems reasonable to suppose that there is a more uninterrupted symbiotic relation between signs and the thoughts they express than there is between words and their underlying meanings. This is but one reason why some researchers suggest that language may have originated from memetic gesturing of manual signs rather than in vocal

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phonemic and morphemic sounds. Many human characteristics clearly depend not on the genetic code, i.e. fox2p gene, but on the culture we happen to be part of. Speech is sometimes regarded as an enculturated self-replicating paratasising dawkins ‘meme’, rather than a biological constitution. I think there may be some accuracy to this premise. The relative inter and intra subjective interpretations of visible signs to social behavior, vision, movement, and brain function can explain one of the most difficult problems in language evolution, the quantum change from identifying to language; that is, from words to sentences and the specific way by which individuals internally decode and re -transmit the knowledge beheld by the input to a coded output. The selective pressures of certain environments and the life history trajectories of certain cultures can influence the way certain individual groups interpret and utilize language.

Aspects of Memetic use as a mono-causal effect on the evolution of cognition and episodic cultural progressions, such as memetic, mythic and theoretical culture is but only a singular element of influence. Criticisms could be that we need to account for polycausal adaptations as a percussive aspect of modern human cognitive capacities, i.e., systematic adoption of fire use and cooking, anatomical correlates, life histories and the evolved human psychology of the mind as to propose a formal domain general model for the processing of human traits, such as linguistics, and posit an emergentism of self-organizing and self-replicating systems of cultural construction as a first step. Memetic gestural propagation was most probable an important factor in the course of human evolution. It was an underling factor of impulse for archaic pedagogical and allegorical semiotic transmissions of inter and intra communication systems documented among the hunting and gathering groups of humans that existed in the past, but this phenomena most certainty did not evolve independent from other such mechanisms, thus it was probably built upon other systematic modulations of the brain/mind.

Cognitive capacities are utilized as a means to parse the complexities of the world and to navigate within the sea of cultural informational inputs. Post processual archaeological data can posit that Pleistocene younger Dryas environmental pressures could have marginalized certain traits by gene flow and the geographical isolation of some groups of people, meaning that current ethnographic data could vary cross-culturally, thus criticism can be made in regards to the arguments account for cultural variations. Universalities of human cognition are confounded by regional and socio-cultural specific adaptations, therefor anomalies will exist when analyzing any monocausal memetic model of explanation. A multidisciplinary approach needs to bridge the information and data gaps in order to

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ever truly distinguish what accounts for the phenomena we call cultural cognition and how it relates to the evolved human mind.

SemioticsStrategic modeling arises from the circumstance of species

forced to embody specific systems of adaptation for their ultimate survival. Because the traits of an organism co-evolved and are co-adapted they constitute an expressed system of observable features that work together in an interconnecting fashion. The constrained nature of co-adaptation can provide us with a sound basis for empirical implication. Observed traits interpreted by an applicable theory of co-adaptation and solidly developed may yield empirical data to support our claims. Humans have made a unique and major innovation in this co-evolutionary relationship by an innovation of the mind and its cognitive features which are distinguished as our most distinctive characteristic. The human mind consists of a set of evolved information-processing mechanisms beheld in the human nervous system. These mechanisms, and the developmental programs that produce them, are adaptations, produced by natural selection over evolutionary time in ancestral environments. Many of these mechanisms are functionally specialized to produce behavior that solves particular adaptive problems, such as mate selection, language acquisition, family relations, and social cooperation. To be functionally specialized, many of these mechanisms must be richly structured in a content-specific way.

Content-specific information-processing mechanisms generate some of the particular content of human culture, including certain behaviors, artifacts, and linguistically transmitted representations. The cultural content generated by these and other mechanisms is then presented to be adopted or modified by psychological mechanisms situated in other members of the population. This produces epidemiological and historical population-level processes; and. these processes are located in particular ecological, economic, demographic, and intergroup social contexts or environments. On this view, culture is the manufactured product of evolved psychological mechanisms situated in individuals living in groups. Culture and human social behavior is complexly variable, but not because the human mind is a social product, a blank slate or an externally programmed general-purpose computer lacking a richly defined evolved structure. Instead, human culture and social behavior is richly variable because it is generated by an incredibly intricate, contingent set of functional programs that use and process information from the world, including information that is provided both intentionally and unintentionally by other humans. This social dimension to the cognitive niche constitutes the basis for culture, which is the transmission between individuals and generations of the information

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necessary to pursue fitness in a particular social and ecological habitat. As intelligence, learning, consciousness and motivational systems progressively become more sophisticated, they still will serve the same strategic ends according to the same evolutionary principles

Many researchers argue that semiotic cognition should be conceived as a distinctive form of cognition, one which evolved out of earlier forms of non-semiotic cognition, such as linguistic reference and memetic gesturing. Semiotic cognition depends on the utilizations of symbolic representations displaced from present reality, but beheld by a metaphoric meaning of sorts, stemming out of the brain and finally manifesting within the mind. This dual ontology is that which will manifest the semiotics of symbolic reference that forms the unities of the conscious collective called the semiosphere. The brain and mind can be referred to as distinct from one another, which is that the brain is an observable organ endowed with domain specific modules of cognitive capacity, devised as a means for navigating the complexities of the observable world and the mind a metaphor for how the brain functions in a specific environment within the context of space and time. With this conceptual frame work a symbol is not a specific factor of form, nor holds any meaning other than the collective consciousness of the agent that implants the meaning into the arbitrary valuableness of the object, thus the name given to a specific organization, or structure, of the cognitive process, is one diffused out of the human brain and manifested in the collective psyche of the social human mind.

Post semiotic cognition presently available to humans and its

domain specific structures may have provided in the past the specific elements for an evolutionary development that was no longer strictly Darwinian, but followed its own semiotic logical progression of reasoning. Semiotic cognition thus confronts humans with a difference that cannot be eliminated, and it is in the behaviors in which this difference is dealt with that we may determine the novel logic of the cultural evolution that governs the course of long term cultural transformation and its ultimate function of transmission. Invocations of a trait through a nature nurture symbiosis and thus further filtered expressions of the trait by an epigenetic template seems to be a reasonable hypothesis that can be postulated and supported by the contemporized research rapid evolving sequences are not genes, the parts of our genome that encode for proteins. The pieces that have changed the most in our DNA look like they are electrical impulse switches, switches that turn nearby genes on and off in accordance to selective pressures of the environment. Organic life seems to have evolved to become part of this ancient meta- physiological intelligence which is nuclear-gravitational in structure

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and which creates unified morphogenetic force-fields, infused with a transformative vast resonance of nurturing influence on the agent of an environment, through it is mechanically quantum in nature and quasimystical in terms.. Rather than twisting meaningless statistics to represent possible proxies of correlation I will posit Anthroposemiotic causations, and it will be further supported by an evolutionary ecology of adaptivness that functions from an epigenetic socio-biological model.

The Baldwin effect concept of phenotypic plasticity can give rise to genetic adaptability, and/or Lamarckian concepts fused with Darwinian natural selection and epigenetic development is the contemporized frame work by which explanatory mechanics of cognitive functions will be realized. The emerging field of epigenetics, or properly the ontogenetic epistemology of how a gene's purpose or expression can be altered without affecting the gene's fundamental structure is the definition utilized within the context of this paper. This is a perplexing anomaly that has forever changed the way we contemplate our genetic make-up.Epigenetic processes are part of the ordinary developmental processes that occurs during cell division. The scientific community now empirically know that single dietary nutrients, post and pre fetal origin teratogen toxins and prenatal or postnatal environmental exposures to selective pressures can either silence or stimulate a gene to express itself without altering its individually unique genetic code. No longer must we debate over which has the larger impact on human behavioral traits, genes or the environment, because both are closely linked by random environmental events that can spontaneously generate biochemical changes that ultimately dictate human gene expression, whether at conception or years down the telomerase path.

Culture can minimally be defined as the existence of interspecies group differences in behavioral configurations and ethological selections, which are not indirectly determined by ecological circumstances, such as the availability of particular resources active in the differing behavioral ranges and which are learned and transmitted across generations. Also, culture functions as an institution of shared ideas that bind the group in an adaptive form of cohesion, Durkiemian nature of the sacred and profane and totemic laws that are propagated by the social institutions of the human brain mind interval. On this classification, there is an abundant indication of cultural difference in subsistence strategies, tool use, ideological and social behaviors in humans supposed closest living relatives, the chimpanzees such a definition also exemplifies epigenetically learned interspecies dialect differences culturally transmitted behavior/information transmitted through a medium of enculturation.

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Again, this does not mean that there is no cultural foundation for uniquely human cognitive capacities; rather, it suggests that human culture, from an evolutionary and developmental psychological point of view, should and must be viewed as a symbiotic vessel that further facilitates cognitive abilities by means of semiotic transmission.

In the recent scientific past it was supposed that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and that the ontogenesis of an individual organism mirrored the phylogenesis of its species. This view not only follows directly from a neo-Darwinian emphasis on evolution through small or minor gradually accumulated changes in the germ line over time, but also exemplified a false unilineal progressive form of cellular function. However, the degree to which ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is now being reconsidered and reconstructed by a novel scope of understanding presently revealed within the modern field of developmental Psycho-social- biology. Culture is thus the by-product of language, which is thus the outcome of, and or the functional references to the cognitive meanings of the sign beheld in the mind, and that proceeds out of the brain, thus manifesting into a group transmission of understandings.

Phenogenotypic Bio-Cultural ComplexThe nativist modularity interpretation such as the likes of

Chomsky’s innatist theory of language capacity presupposes its impression within the vastness of the human genotype. An alternative account, along the lines of the dualistic evolutionary theory of Leland, views the human language capacity as phenogenotypic phenomena. Language viewed in this account is an artifact of a specific evolutionary environment of adaptivness. Thus the capacity to acquire and use it involves the evolution and replication of a human based phenogenotypic bio- cultural complex. Such an account does not require the organism to possess an internal model of the grammar of a language to account for language acquisition and use, any more than the building of a habitat requires an internal model of the habitat. The semiotic grammar of the language is in the language, just as the structure of the habitat is in the habitat. The capacity for language is thus a cognitive–behavioral relationship between language user and the factorial constituents of the language, just as the capacity for building an environmental niche is a cognitive behavioral relationship between the builder and the constituents of the niche; and it is this relationship that in each case, has been selected for in human evolution. This account is thus compatible with recent, usage-based, cognitive functional theories of language proposed by the research of Tomasello.

The language artifact/niche is culturally situated, that is, dynamically fixed within a semiotic network bound by and infused with other symbolic and non-symbolic entities. The class of organisms with the language capacity normally developing in humans is thus a

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phenogenotypic replicator systemically associated within a wider bio cultural complex of symbolic and constructive cognitive capacities of a phenogenotypic nature; and individual language acquisition devises and usage is situated in the contexts of the activations of these interrelated capacities. This account thus justly also accords with the view that what makes humans unique is not an innate language accusation and causation devise, or acquisition device plus a variety of other species-specific innate cognitive modules, but a generalized semiotic or symbolic capacity epigenetically developed from a suite of cognitive capacities largely shared with other species but attaining higher levels of organization in humans.

Epigenetic developmental processes are those in which the developmental trajectory and final form of the developing behavior are a consequence as much of the environmental information as of the genetically encoded information. A genetically specified initial behavioral range is subsequently elaborated through experiences of a relevant pertaining environment, yielding a cloak of potential paths and outcomes. The process of elaboration is directional, and once it has taken place the initial plasticity of the range is largely lost. In other words, epigenetic impulse involves a developmental transition from relative organismic plasticity and outward informational openness, and ultimately ending in relative inflexibility and informational closure.

The integration argued in the past by biologists on the study of human culture and its influence on biology is turning out to be more of a duality of processes than was ever imagined by sociobiology and other fields of rational thought therein. Far from eliminating culture by absorbing it into the genotype, biological science is progressively acknowledging the role of culture in influencing the evolutionary process at the genetic level, by the construction of novel selective environments. This point is essential, because it positions the role of culture in evolution within a wider class of processes involving adaptation to behaviorally induced changes in selective environments such as nests, dams, mounds, and even human made living structures. A particular role of culture is addressed in this theory by genotype/niche combinations labeled as phenogenotypes as replicators functionally equivalent to organisms: phenogenotypes are thus seen as a class of organisms in a bound, though not genetically determined relationship with some aspect of a self-constructed ecology, including the culturally constructed environmental niche.

Increased epigenesist impulse is therefore advantageous for organisms in which phenogenotypic organism and niche symbiosis are both frequent and variable. This is an appropriate general description of the human cultural organism and the possible underlying switches that activate the dormant semiotic potentialities of the human

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cognitive capacity. Regulatory genes expanding epigenetic openness can therefore be expected to have been phenogenotypically selected for in the human genome, thus allowing further adaptive selection for domain specific modules of learning and cognition within the semiotic bio- cultural complex

Semiosphere/Dual-Ontogenesis

The semiosphere is comprised of the electrical neuro stimulation of symbolic thoughts and acts as a functionally inherent being immersed in a specific semiotic continuum, which is thus occupied with multi-variant semiotic representations situated at a range of ordered stages. Such a continuum by analogy with the concept of biosphere which was introduced by V. I. Vernadsky, semiosphere is the account of all the inherent interrelated symbolic functions that revolves around the suggestion that there is an evolutionary explanation and epigenetic stabilization of the phenogenotypic semiosphere. Once presented, the discontinuity characterizing both human culture and human cognition becomes prevalent. The isolated nature of the semiosphere is bound by the fact that it cannot be attached to any one specific extra-semiotic manifestation, textual or non-textual order intensities and so on. In order for these to be recognized by the agent, they must be translated into one of the many diverse language systems of earths internal space, in other words, the actualities must be semiotic bound. In this way, the specific points of the semiosphere may be connected to specifically adapt human neuro-sensory receptors, which transfer the external stimuli into the language patterns of our nervous system. These processes then can give rise to a unit of translation, which adapts to the external actor to a given semiotic sphere and thus integrates upon the biological genetic processes of human physiology. Once this process is propagated further it can thus blossom as an emergent epigenetic phenomenon fused within space and time.

Space and time may be regarded as a unified mechanism, or viewed as an active observable organism. In this case, prevalence does not lie in one or another symbol, but in the greater systemic holism of the interrelated parts of reference attached to the symbol, namely the semiosphere. The semiosphere is the basis of the structural creation of the semiosphere as the intersection of a three-dimensional symmetry /asymmetry and the mechanical conversation of intensity and reduction of temporal processes, which generates a specific human quality of discreteness. We can reduce these two theoretical models of cognitive quantum actions to one: the development of a right left lobe of synaptic informative exchange; a dual ontological dichotomy, by which, from the genetic-molecular level to the most complex information processes, forms the basis of

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mental dialogue and consequently the basis of all semiotic implication for processes.

From the theoretical model of a dual-ontogenesis born out of the electromagnetic semiosphere it can be realized that this same semiotic space, outside of which semiosis itself cannot exist, functions in a mirrored dualistic ontological flow through the semiosphere. Signs and symbols are therefore both transformative cognitive devices that exert impulsive pressures and shape functional intentions, both internal and external to the stimuli in question, and constitutive of specifically human cultural psyco-socio- bio-networks. The semiotic capacity is hypothesized to have triggered transformative effects across all or most cognitive domains, thereby potentiating human symbolic cultures, which further constitutes and enhances the communicative aptitude complexes by which human cultural innovation and transmission ultimately occurs. The semiotic capacity is the explanatory link binding what is ultimately unique to human cognition with what is specifically unique to human culture. The comparative studies of the evolution and development of symbolic use in comparisons to human and nonhuman species is therefore, a fundamental connection for connecting the biological with the social and human sciences in regards to the evolutionary and developmental science of human cognition. In conclusion, the supporting evidence beheld by this can offer the following reflections on the role of the human semiotic capacity by integrating epigenetic development, human language evolution, and the complexities of a uniquely human cultural cognition.

Understanding the transformative nature and role of signs presupposes understanding the evolutionary logic of the sign itself. The distinction between signals in nonhuman communication systems; and symbols, hieroglyphic totemic icons, and other such signs possessing referential significance in inter-subjective fields proposes a capacity which is strictly in the human species. The hypothetical perception that human cognition is distinguished by a secondary signal mechanism can only be further developed by recognizing that the human semiotic capacity is an evolutionary and developmental acquisition which built and innovated upon other such acquisition abilities, and was fundamentally transformed by the human capacity to exploit such signaling. We shape our tools and in return our tools shape us. The human body therefore serves as such a material object; and to this extent, the body itself can be viewed as an artifact/tool infused with semiotic specific value, or as embodying symbiotically intermediated cognition that is extended by the epigenetic impulse markers seen in the resent scientific findings of the HAR 2 genes and the mirror neuron function.

It is increasingly recognized that human cognitive processes extend beyond biological and physiological functions (i.e.,

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shape determines function); consequently it is further confounded and extended by involving the inter-subjectively of collective mental states of consciousness and cultural-cognitive machineries. This can present a conceptual problematic confusion for evolutionary psychology, and its conventionally individualist assumptions, but also for biology, which adopts the notion that the organism as a behavioral and morphological entity reflective and identical to the organism and of its immerging genetic material. It is this general problem that the notion of phenogenotypes was designed to address and resolve this perplexing issue.

Another concluding factor specific to human evolution and developmental processes, can and should be taken. The human organism, by virtue of the semiotic position of the body and the normative modeling of its actions within a bio cultural context, has a dual ontology, culturally constituted both as a constituent of the semiosphere and at an epigenetic biological level. The body is part of the system that extends beyond the body resting like a fetus in the non-local consciousness of the morphogenetic- magnetic field, as well as being the originating impulse of that system. It is plausible to speculate that this specific dual ontology of the human biological and sociocultural integrations is, in modern manifestations, incorporated in to the genotype and expressed in the very early stages of postnatal epigenetic development, by environmental responsiveness to specific ecological impulse factors that influence the l inter-subjective semiotic circuits of human communicative existence.

The emergent social ontology of inter-subjectivity and normativity creates novel considerations for the selection of context sensitive and socially situated learning processes. Mirror neuron research has shed an innovative light of understanding upon this learning process. As well an assortment of scientific research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences revealed CREB gene and human response gene studies that have shown the specifics that distinguishes humans from their closest living relatives. The species-specific cognitive capacities of young humans are often conceptualized in terms of theory of mind. Such an internality and mentalist perspective can be revaluated for disregarding the epigenetically constitutive role of the semiosphere, and of its constituent factors, in the development of this uniquely human cognitive capacity. Specifically, it pays insufficient attention to the emergent ontological properties of innatist normativity reception processes which characterizes human institutions at both micro-socio and macro-socio levels

The influential cultural evolutionary construct of the term meme was demonstrated as serving a limited explanatory value for understanding the emergence of, as opposed to modeling the consequences of, the human semiotic capacity. The notion of meme,

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both etymologically and theoretically, is a semiotic specific one, and as a semiotic unit of analysis is seen as an analytical device, and as such is shrouded by uncertain cognitive validity, comprising all varieties of signals and signs, detaching semiotic assessment from communicative processes and contexts of situation. This may not undermine its current value in the explanation of human specific cultural transmission and epigenetic devolution at a phylogenetic level, but perhaps can be reestablished and seen as an advantage in future modeling methodologies. The ontogenetic and micro genetic analyses which are equally essential to the comprehensive understanding of cultural semiotic transformation and genetic impulse marker metamorphosis should and definitely will eventual give rise to a stronger and more precise model of understanding to the relationship of semiotic and epigenetic influences on human specific cognitive expressions.

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