By Yamith Antonio Torres Romaña and Andrés Esteban Marín-Marín
According to anthropogenesis at the service of science, and with the intimate desire for the act of communicating, it has been demonstrated that, throughout history, everything that is considered as humanized and hominized communicative acts is generated, precisely, from the genesis of communication.
For Manuel Martín-Serrano (2011), “ hominization is the transformation of primate ancestors into human beings and humanization is the conversion of the nature of society, according to culture.”
Martín-Serrano investigates communication from a biological, genetic and zoological perspective, based on a humanized vision, which allows him to distinguish the natural processes of the species, rather than any indication of culture and, of course, values.
This distinction can be established from the interaction or from the explanation for biological purposes. Communication is the extraordinary process of evolution for the understanding of its nature and not of culture. It is a necessity of receptive and stimulating agents to ensure their existence, survival and reproduction.
Thus, the humanized approach to communication places the human being at the center of communication, while the hominized approach indicates a decentering of man, placing nature at the center of communication and including man in all its periphery, or at least with natural species as part of the environment.
Communication, before culture
For Martín-Serrano (2011), “the object of study of communication sciences is nature, it is culture.” For this reason, communication fulfills a biological need in species. “Communication becomes a support for culture, but it does not start with it,” adds the author.
While communication is not a consequence of culture, it is a selective inheritance , it is an inherent capacity of being. This is evident when looking at the origins of communication: when there was no culture, no society, no values. (Martín-Serrano, 2011).
Among other details, Martín-Serrano (2011) says that the appearance of communicators is an extraordinary result of evolution, because the ability to communicate would not have been possible if there had not been successive transformations of organisms and behaviors.
Therefore, communicators between species had the need to use signals in the interaction with informative uses and indicative uses before building culture, constituting and organizing themselves into societies and long before imprinting axiological behaviors.
“Communication theory makes room for evolutionary laws to understand culture; and the constraints of culture to understand evolution,” says Martín-Serrano (2007).
From this perspective, it is very clear that the mediation of the communicative uses of information is the connecting bridge between evolution and culture.
Precommunicative uses; informative uses
When informational competition takes place between the agents involved in communicative interaction, pre-communicative uses become informative uses in the process of constructing communication.
In other words, evolutionary changes show the successive steps of interaction between species; communicative behaviors that constitute informative and implicative signals, so that when the interaction between its stimulating and receptive agents come to make interactive uses of the information and these in turn show significant signals between their agents; it is when the transition is made to informative use in the process of construction of communication, while those receptive and stimulating agents of the signals become communicators.
For example, Martín-Serrano (2007) states that “male stickleback fish (R) recognize as a significant signal a red mark that other males (E) have when they compete for territory and females.”
According to Lorenz (1970), the application carried out by males leads them to identify as competing males any other fish or lure in which they distinguish the marks that for them have the same informative value.
From this perspective, informative and indicative signals give way to informative use because there is an interaction between agents through significant signals that have meaning and significance for them.”
References
- Martín-Serrano, M. (2007): Communication Theory. Communication, Life and Society. Madrid: McGraw-Hill.
- Martín-Serrano, M. (2011): “Publications by Manuel Martín Serrano on behaviors”, E-prints Complutense. Available at http://eprints.ucm.es/13288 Accessed on August 15, 2013.