This summer, I taught Sociology. One lesson was that of Herbert Mead and Symbolic Interactionism. His theory of microsociology focuses on the meaning we ascribe to our individual interactions. Without going further into his theory, Mead relies on the tenets of Evolutionism, which states that language and self-consciousness are what sets human apart from animals.
Today, there was an NPR piece titled, What Makes Us Mentally Modern. Without mentioning Mead, it is an excellent exemplar of the importance of symbolism in our daily lives. Rather than researching when we become bipedal, the piece asks, when did we development symbolic thought? "Museums are full of bones under glass — fossils that can tell us when we became physically modern. But how do you find a fossil of a symbolic thought?"
Sociologist or not, it is worth a listen.
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In the Aug. 16, 2010 Time magazine an article by Jeffery Kluger, "What Animals Think",shows evidence that some animals can comminicate with as many as 400 different symbols and show a great amount of self-awareness. Yet these bonobos, a type of great ape, are not completely bi-pedal and upright like humans. There has to be much more than than language and self-consciousness that makes us human.
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