Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Lull is a distinguished authority on the impact of mass media, communications technology, and popular culture. The author of twelve books, he has appeared as a commentator on such media outlets as CNN, the BBC, and NPR; has written essays for the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others; and lectures worldwide. He is professor emeritus of communication studies at San Jose State University. Visit the author online at www.JamesLull.com.

Eduardo Neiva is a leading authority on how visual images influence culture. He is the author of two books in English on communication, culture, and images, and many books in Portuguese. He was a Fulbright research scholar at Indiana University in Bloomington and is professor of communication studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

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THE LANGUAGE OF LIFE

Prometheus Books

Contents

Introduction....................................................9Chapter 1. The Great Chain of Communication.....................19Chapter 2. Communicating to Survive.............................37Chapter 3. Communicating Sex....................................73Chapter 4. Communicating Culture................................101Chapter 5. Communicating Morality...............................125Chapter 6. Communicating Religion...............................149Chapter 7. Communicating Change.................................183Glossary........................................................211Notes...........................................................227Bibliography....................................................259Index...........................................................279

Chapter One

Vast chain of being! which from God began, Natures ethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, which no eye can see, No glass can reach; from infinite to thee ...

Heaven's whole foundations to their centre nod And nature trembles to the throne of God. All this dread order break—for whom? for thee? Vile worm!—oh madness! pride! impiety! —Alexander Pope, Essay on Man (1734)

In his celebrated work Essay on Man, the eighteenth-century British poet Alexander Pope expressed what had become the guiding philosophy of the day—unshakeable belief in a fully ordered and stable world ordained and supervised by God.

The evocative metaphor Pope uses repeatedly—the "Chain of Being"—derives from essentialist conceptions of nature and the universe. Everything fits into a strict hierarchy that descends from the highest possible metaphysical standing: en perfectissimum, God. Ranked below God are celestial beings (angels); then humans (sorted men over women, royalty over peasants, masters over slaves); then animals; then plants; then rocks, minerals, and soil. The Chain of Being is true and complete. In this world there is no mutation, no adaptation, no evolution. Whatever changes take place on the earth reflect only the actualization of a predestined order, the projection of an essence. The logic of the chain is self-evident, and, as Pope warns, only a mad, arrogant, and impious worm would dare to challenge the divine authority that rules over it.

Charles Darwin spent his life inspecting and reflecting on the Chain of Being. The astounding conclusions he would eventually draw, both scientific and philosophical, were not entirely original. Early biologists—especially Georges Buffon, Carl Linnaeus, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, all of whom influenced Darwin's thinking in one way or another—also invoked the idea of an orderly arrangement of scaled components in their systems of scientific classification. But as they worked, they began to modify the imagery. Instead of a descending chain, the biologists regarded the vast network of relationships that connects living organisms more as a "Tree of Life" that grows upward toward complexity and diversity, not downward toward simplicity and uniformity. God may be present, they thought, but much must also be explained about how the flora and fauna function and change right here on the ground.

Darwin likewise did not readily dismiss the idea of God. The chauvinistic Chain of Being idea even led him to consider at first that indigenous peoples must represent a species that is closer to animals than to white Europeans. Indeed, some of the tribal peoples Darwin encountered on his journey aboard the Beagle themselves struggled to mark clear differences between their own people and the animals around them. Slowly, Darwin rejected the idea of an unverifiable deity ruling autocratically from the top of a rigid hierarchy in nature. He expanded the biologists' alternative Tree of Life metaphor in his discussion of natural selection in On the Origin of Species and illustrated the new diversifying picture of life graphically.

As he developed the theory of natural selection, Darwin also came to believe that the Tree of Life represents not only direct interconnections among living things—existing roots, trunks, limbs, branches, twigs, and buds—but also the relation of contemporary life-forms to other forms in the past and future. Time, thus, became a primary consideration. He wrote that the Tree of Life "covers the [earth's] surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications" in the magnificent present. But it also "fills with its dead broken branches the crust of the earth" (the evolutionary past), while "buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch" (the evolving future). Darwin was imagining the radical idea of deep time.

Darwin's theory of natural selection would render any idea of fixed positions along the traditional Chain of Being obsolete. Biological entities would never again be understood as immovable links. Even rocks and minerals could rightly be considered dynamic parts of the chain because they reveal the nature of environments where life existed before and serve to sustain life now. The hierarchy represented in the Chain of Being had things exactly backward; life springs naturally from the bottom up, not the other way around. The idea of the prescientific Chain of Being seemed like an overly determined implement planted firmly in an undetermined world. The metaphor was wrong. A sturdy ladder or stairway to heaven would have been a more appropriate image.

Darwin and many of his fellow naturalists saw a new image of life emerging. Evolution does not proceed by divine intervention from the top, and it does not develop willy-nilly from the bottom. A much more complex and delicate set of factors and processes is at work. Nature is characterized by interconnectedness, movement, and change with no designer directing the action. Life can be sustained only by the production of interactions that work to the advantage of the organisms involved in the particular contexts they inhabit. In the process, the natural world is being made and remade constantly. But what underlies, facilitates, empowers, and regulates the incessant change?

We suggest an answer to that question in the following pages by giving the chain new meaning and relevance. Living things are linked to each other, yes, but the links don't materialize as solid entities. If life processes can be symbolized fruitfully as the links of a chain, then the chain should not be thought of as a series of domains that in any way freezes the elements into place or constrains their potential. The links can best be understood as flexible spheres of robust connectivity that flow within, between, and among biological agents, unifying all of nature in the process. Only one word accurately describes the ground on which such processes unfold: communication. Organisms survive and flourish in this world because they have the ability to communicate effectively.

EVOLUTION: BORN OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

As a parent explained to a psychologist at the University of Maryland when asked if she believes in evolution, "I don't know what to believe ... I just want my child to go to heaven." Her case is typical. Far less than half of the American public believes in evolution, and more than 90 percent believe in a...