Marx and Engels saw labor, speech, and brain development as mutually reinforcing evolution
Evidence
In The German Ideology Marx speaks of “a material result, a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor … is, indeed, modified by the new generation, but also … prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a specific character.” It is this which distinguishes men from the animal kingdom. Engels (in his “Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man”) accords the dynamic elements in this process “first” to “labour, after it and then with it, speech.… The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of judgement, gave both labour and speech an ever-renewed impulse to further development.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 884
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- QUESTION: Worth checking how much of this ‘first labour, then speech’ sequence survives modern evolutionary anthropology.