Human Symbolic Evolution: A 7E Cognition Approach

Grounded in semiosis present throughout the living world, symbolism and the process of symbolization can be studied for how both evolve over time and space. Symbolism in human evolution underlies behavior, cognition, communication, language, social group formation, cultural worldviews, and the development of artifactual, artistic, and technological innovations. Human symbolism is not reducible to individual acts of creativity. Instead, symbolization is grounded in intersubjective and sociocultural group actions and practices that extend into material, conceptual, and virtual symbols and symbol systems expressive of we-intentionality. Most of all, human symbolism evolves, and it does so at the community level. Symbols are neither static nor uniform but dynamic and chimeric in space and time. Material, conceptual, and virtual symbolic evolution builds upon reticulate interactions between symbols and symbol users. These reticulate interactions underlie the learning, combination, blending, revision, rejection, expansion, innovation, enactment, and (re)interpretation of symbolic elements into spatiotemporal symbolic constructs. This chapter introduces the reader to evolutionary approaches to the study of human symbolic behavior as they are formulated in behavioral, neurocognitive, sociocultural, communicative, linguistic, and technological research fields, and introduces a 7E cognitive approach that recognizes cognition as embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, and as evolving extra-genetically by ensembles of individuals.