Unlike the ancient one, modern man is developing much faster, and this year, from the point of view of evolution, is equal to the previous century. The population of the Earth today is much more diverse than before. People differ by race and nationality and by physical and intellectual level, preferences, tastes, habits, and type of social organization. Man is a sociobiological being who has two components – biological and social. All these significant changes in the development of humanity and its formation became possible due to anthroposociogenesis. It is anthroposociogenesis that explains the dichotomy between biology and culture and the connection with human evolution.
Anthroposociogenesis is a historically long process of human development from a biological being into a social and cultural one. It represents the unity of two parallel processes: anthropogenesis, the formation of man, and sociogenesis, the development of society (Larsen 90). In other words, it is a transition from a biological form of matter movement to a socially organized one. The content of anthroposociogenesis is the emergence and formation of social patterns, the restructuring, and the change of the driving forces of development that determine the direction of evolution. The central issue of anthroposociogenesis is the problem of driving forces and patterns (Larsen 96). Since the driving forces of evolution are not fixed, they can only be studied in action, that is, at the moment, based on extrapolation. The general picture of anthropogenesis is reconstructed based on geographically and chronologically incomplete data, and the gaps are filled with more or less probable hypotheses.
The information defect stems from the uniqueness of the finds in each location. Individuals are very different from each other, and only based on data on many of them is it possible to get a group portrait of a local group. The latest paleoanthropological data indicate the multi-direction and unevenness of the hominization process (Larsen 105). Individual elements of the hominid complex can be traced already in the most ancient fossils. The formation of later variants of the consolidation of sapient traits could occur for a long time in parallel in different territories. The morphological criterion remains the main one in modern interpretations of paleoanthropological materials. Still, with further progress in biochemical and genetic research, the role of the genotypic principle will increase in hominid taxonomy.
Human history is a progressively accelerating process and cannot be understood outside of it. Human nature includes:
- The evolution of life, because man is a living organism, depending on the instincts embedded in him for millions of years of evolution;
- The history of society, since everything that is embedded in a person’s consciousness and everything that acts on consciousness, depends on a community;
- The individual fate of each person.
The first two phenomena are decisive because the third entirely depends on them. Inanimate, inert matter in the course of its development leads to the appearance of living matter. The development of living forms took place under the influence of directed mutation and natural selection. With the advent of man and society, the evolution of life ceases to play a decisive role, and the evolution of the mind, as a higher form of the movement of matter, comes to the fore. The conditions and signs of each stage arise in the depths of the preceding one as a consequence of progressive development. For some periods, the two processes go in parallel with the gradual displacement of the less progressive one. Then the dominant influence of new factors becomes inevitable and necessary, and a new stage begins.
The prerequisites for the formation of the human mind appeared about 5 million years ago. Then the development of life led to the appearance of Australopithecines, and there were special ecological conditions. Under their influence, the adaptation of Australopithecines followed the path of using natural objects as additional organs and complicating behavior (Larsen 115). The transition to meat food and a lifestyle changed Australopithecines’ morphology, physiology, and psyche. Thus, about 2 million years ago, a more progressively developed form, Pithecanthropus or Archanthropus, began a new stage – the formation of the mind (Larsen 121). Tool activity as a necessary condition for the life of Pithecanthropus, the emergence of thinking and speech, and the use of fire can be considered signs of the emergence of a new factor determining development – the noosphere.
A new driving force is biosocial group selection, which is determined by how effectively a team of emerging people will adapt the environment to their lives. This new form of struggle for existence gradually reduces the effect of the old driving forces – mutations and natural selection. Further growth in the number led to increased cultural contacts and the expansion of knowledge and experience in general. These processes have significantly accelerated the development of humanity, such a phenomenon as science appears in the sphere of public consciousness, and technology appears in the noosphere (Larsen 315). In the beginning, the growth of knowledge was stimulated by the socio-economic level of society, then scientific achievements themselves began to influence socio-economic development and determine political processes. There was a qualitative leap in the XX century – a scientific and technological revolution, which gave rise to a new contradiction.
It currently exists between the rapid progress of technology and a backward worldview and psychology that is almost at the level of the appropriating economy. Nevertheless, it is impossible and pointless to solve this contradiction by limiting some technologies. All social movements and state programs aimed at this will not achieve their goal since the essence of progress is an increase in the mind’s capabilities and a decrease in entropy. Not slowing down progress will solve the problem, but on the contrary – it’s further acceleration (Larsen 1138). Thus, the relationship between biology and human culture is characterized by the following phenomena:
· As the forms of development become more complex, the driving forces first only affect the object, then the mutual influence of the object and those factors that affect it consistently occur and determine its development (Larsen 1168).
· The categories’ interdependence determines the driving forces: the noosphere is generated by the natural environment, which causes public consciousness. They affect history in parallel and depending on which sphere is the highest at this stage, the impact of the other spheres goes through this, the main one. For example, with the advent of the noosphere, the natural environment remains decisive to the extent that it manifests itself in the sphere of activity of the mind (Larsen 1170).
With the beginning of developed social consciousness, the noosphere depended on how the surrounding world would be reflected in the public consciousness. Scientific and technological progress as a consequence of sociogenesis and at the same time its driving force should lead to a change in the biological nature of man; that is, the social has accumulated factors for changing the biological. From this point of view, the whole history of humankind is anthroposociogenesis.
Work Cited
Larsen, Clark. Essentials of Biological Anthropology. 5th ed., W.W. Norton, 2021.