Human Traits: Biological Plasticity, Senses, and Cultural Evolution
Human Characteristics
The traits that typify the human being are four:
- The first is standing, which has its pros and cons. It frees our upper extremities and allows for the relocation of the vocal cords to produce speech and also relocates the brain. The disadvantage is that it leaves our most sensitive parts exposed.
- The second feature is prehensility, which is the ability to grasp with the hand.
- The third feature is neoteny. This means that our species is born prematurely. When we are born, our brain weighs about 400 grams, both for boys and girls. At one year old, it weighs 1000 grams.
- The fourth characteristic is biological plasticity, i.e., our adaptability of behavior and habits.
Biological plasticity and neoteny have made us the animal whose maturation process is the longest, but this serves to acquire all the capabilities we need to adapt to the environment. It means that without human culture, we would not survive, especially in the cultivation of feeling.
Our culture has given us six things throughout our evolution:
- The first is language, i.e., the combination of concepts, attractiveness, social organization, and especially a collective memory.
- The second is the control of fire and light metals.
- Housing and clothing is the third, as a defense mechanism against the environment.
- The fourth is the domestication of animals.
- The fifth is agriculture, especially when we become sedentary.
- The most important is a political, economic, and cultural organization that covers all the above.
We can conclude that the human being is a social, cultural, and historical being.
Human Senses and Intelligence
The way we learn and adapt to reality requires insight, intelligence, and unique consciousness. Human beings, unlike other animals, have a special development of the senses as we face a reality that is not only physical but symbolic, against which we can give different answers. For example, we can experience thirst without drinking because we can control the desire for a while or assess if the water is drinkable. Therefore, the exercise of will collaborates with discernment, i.e., reality forces us but offers various possibilities of behavior toward reality.
The human senses are grouped into several levels:
- Exteroceptors: These perceive stimuli from outside.
- Interoceptors: This group of senses gives us internal information about our body, including the kinesthetic sense, which tells us everything about our position in space. This can involve muscle, tendon, and articular information.
- Kinesthetic: This tells us the overall state of our viscera.
- Labyrinth-Vestibular: This is focused internally and informs us of the balance of our body.
Based on these senses, our intelligence works in two directions: in theory, to disclose the structure of reality, and practically, to adapt our behavior to the ecosystem in which we are immersed.
The theoretical dimension performs the following functions:
- Abstracts, discerns, defines, and symbolizes.
While the practical dimension analyzes or makes a list of the few chances we have to survive, picking the best.
In addition to the theoretical and practical dimensions, we can create new ones because we can discuss, especially from emotional intelligence. What flows in society with its culture influences how we know reality through perception, i.e., we have a hyper-visual culture. Also, our culture orients abstraction, indicating what deserves and does not deserve our attention. So, we’ve developed a huge repertoire of linguistic and numerical categories that pursue the accuracy of data, definitions, and measures. Finally, our society offers us techniques of introspection, i.e., how to know our unconscious mind through mind-altering substances or abolishing it.