Have you ever wondered and marveled at a spectacle of a (human, of course) political or religious speaker standing on a platform, addressing tens or even hundreds of thousands of spectators who listened in rapt attention and silence, except for occasional thunderous echoing of certain words or slogans used by the speaker (Nazi gatherings where Hitler kept his audience spell-bound. Similarly, Khomeini held the Iranian Shiites in rapture. Given all the talks about individualism in men, humans are herd animals and easily manipulated), a spectacle only occurs among humans, and no where else in the animal kingdom? I do. Such a spectacle takes place only among humans because only humans possess language, which is much more than an animal communication system utilized by lesser organisms. As I was getting into the twilight years of my life, I discovered that I was a theorist by inclination. I gravitated toward knowledge and predictive, explanatory modes of thinking, and naturally looked down upon simpletons and ignoramuses who pontificated out of sheer laziness, ignorance, and phony pride.
After tackling all kinds of intellectual (not social, unfortunately) problems and issues, humans finally are turning to the area which is near and dear and familiar, and yet far from being understood: language. Language is not the same as linguistics. Philosophers in the Anglo-American world examined language as a philosophical issue in the first half of the 20th century. Then an Austrian engineer turned philosopher Wittgenstein, student of Bertrand Russell, devoted his formidable intellectual powers to it, gaining fame and admiration for his efforts.I tried to read these philosophers (Russell, Ayers, Wittgenstein) and didn't understand a thing. But the subject remains intriguing to me, a student of several languages, a talker, a writer of incisive prose and almost irrefutable logic and far-out, soapy, romantic verse in a borrowed tongue , a jokester, a punster, a student of the human brain, and a searcher for facts and truths.
Recently psychologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists are trying to speculate on the origin of language. Derek Bickerton's book "Adam's Tongue..." was an effort in that direction. The following are notes taken verbatim from the book for my own reference.
Speech and language are not synonymous.
You can have speech without it meaning a thing; lots of parrots do. Speech is just a vehicle for language. So is structured manual sign of the American Sign Language.
Language evolution is part of human evolution. Language origin is considered "the hardest problem in science" because language leaves no fossils.
Niche construction theory:
Evolution is no longer selfish genes mindlessly replicating themselves. By impacting on the environment (goats cause deforestation, worms enrich soil, beavers flood valleys), organisms guide their own evolution. Human culture is niche. It's the way we adapt the environment to suit ourselves, in the same way the complex worlds of ant nests or termite mounds are the way ants and termites adapt the environment to suit them. We do it by learning. They do it be instinct. We can do it by learning only because we have language. And language itself is a prize example of niche construction.
ACS (Animal Communication Problem)
Almost all animate organism communicate with one another somehow.
Information conveyed by ACS falls into 3 broad categories: for survival, mating and reproduction, and social needs. With humans, language serves varied needs. No ACS can be used to talk about the weather, or the scenery, or a neighbor's latest doings, let alone to plan for the future or to recall the past.
ACS have three basic features:
-they grew from behaviors not originally intended for communication
-they respond only to situations that directly affect fitness
-most importantly, signs of ACS are indexical, not symbolic
Levels of Intelligence:
According to Euan Macphail, there are 3:
-there are organisms that could associate a stimulus with a response.
-there are organisms that could in addition associate a stimulus with another stimulus.
-And there are us, humans, who have language.
Bickerton asserts that language makes us more intelligent. Brains don't grow by their own volition. They grow because animals need more brain cells and connections to more effectively carry out new things they are beginning to do. We didn't get a bigger and better brain that then gave us language; we got language that gave us a bigger and better brain.
Levels of Language:
Phonology: meaningless sounds
Morphology: meaningful sound sequences
Syntax: meaningful utterances
Pidgins and Creoles:
A pidgin is what people produce when they have to talk to other people but don't have a common language.
A creole is a language that has evolved from a pidgin but serves as the native language of a speech community
Informative and Manipulative:
ACS is primarily manipulative and secondarily informative, whereas the reverse is true with language.
Language units are symbolic because they're designed to convey information. Information can be past, present, or future, here, there, or anywhere. But to a very considerable extent, its value lies in its novelty, it had better not be about the here and now.
But the preceding paragraph is no help in explaining how anything could have come to be symbolic in the first place
Kinds of Signals:
-indexical: signals are irredeemably bound to the here and now since they must point directly to whatever they refer to.
-iconic: something that resembles what it refers to: it can be part of the thing referred to, or a picture of it, or part of it, or the noise it makes---anything that somehow evokes an object in the real world (or even an abstract class, as symbols do, it turns put).
-symbolic: most words are symbolic. Without symbolic words, we couldn't have language.
Homology and Analogy:
Whenever a biologist finds a trait that's shared by 2 or more species, his first thought is likely to be, is this a homology or an analogy.
Homology is more common than analogy. Evolution seldom throws stuff away. It works, in Darwin's phrase, through "descent through modification," so any feature of a common ancestor is likely to show up in some form or another in species that descend from that ancestor.
Niche: 3 components:
-Habitat: a particular type of environment that can be both macro (savanna) and/or micro (topsoil)
-Nourishment: a particular kind of food.
-Means: a particular way if obtaining that food.
Genes and Environment
Except perhaps for the very simplest creatures, genes do not mandate behaviors. They simply make them possible. Circumstances will determine how far, if at all, those possibilities are realized. When genes and environment pull in opposite directions, environment win. It has to. It makes sure that those who don't obey its demands die, and their genes die with them.
Evolution and Speciation:
-"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", said Dobzhansky. And speciation lies at the heart of evolution, be it the evolution of language or evolution of anything else.
-According to Robert Foley and Marta Lahr of Cambridge University, speciation, far from an event, is a process that may span as long as a million years or more. Confirming their conclusion, genetic findings made since their paper at a meeting suggest that human and chimp ancestors went on interbreeding for more than a million years after their original split
Theory of punctuated equilibrium and niche construction theory:
TPE proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972, but lacked explanatory mechanism until niche construction theory came along, which neatly explains the otherwise inexplicable stop-go-stop of evolution. A species goes merrily along its way, happily settled in its old niche. Then something in its environment changes; survival demands that a new niche be constructed, real fast. But once that niche lasts, you stay the way you were, as long as the niche lasts.
The NCT also explains why, since the last common ancestor of humans and apes, there have been so many speciations in our line and so few in ape line.
The Challenge from Chomsky:
-Biology vs culture: Chomsky is in the camp believing that human nature is largely determined by biological factors. The opposing camp believes that human nature is largely determined by human culture, which in turn has broken free of biological constraints.
-In 2002 appeared in the "Science's Compass" section of the prestigious journal Science a paper titled "The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did it Evolve?" by Marc Hauser, Norm Chomsky, and Tecumseh Fitch
* Hauser and Chomsky had been on the opposite sides of two of most crucial issues of language evolution: 1) Hauser believed that language developed out of a prior ACS. 2) Hauser regarded natural selection as the principal driving force in evolution in general and language evolution in particular. Chomsky argued against any role for natural selection in language evolution.
* The paper was a compromise between H and C.
The compromise was possible by the partition of the territory of language. Language was now officially divided into two parts: FLB, the faculty of language (broad sense), and FLN (narrow sense), which formed part of the FLB. FLB was everything in language except the "internal computation system"---whatever drives syntax---and that, at least as a first approximation, was simply recursion (the capacity to embed one linguistic structure within another of the same kind---one phrase, clause, or sentence inside another). FLN was the only part of FLB that was both (a) limited to humans and (b) specifically dedicated to language. The rest of of LB either had antecedents in other species or, if developed by humans, was I Italy developed for purposes other than purely linguistic ones.
*HCF's position is far from the position of Bickerton since it didn't address human evolution. B holds that the evolution of language forms part of the evolution of the human species, and to think of one is to think of another. B thinks that humans started with only a prerequisites of language, and developed the rest as it went along constructing the niche.
* It is a fallacy of thinking to think in terms of human unique when talking about evolution because we then would see evolution the wrong way. We would see how like or unlike other species to humans. We would make the human species the centerpiece of evolution while evolution doesn't have a centerpiece, or even a center. And even if it did, it would look too self-serving to out ourselves there. We should try to find out what happened and how and why it happened in the period between us and the last common ancestor of chimps and humans
-Comparison between C and B's model of language evolution
B C
Time 1: Animals have concepts that Time 1: same
won't merge
Time 2: Protohumans start talking Time2: Typically human concepts,
which will merge, appear
Time3: Talking produces typically Time 3: The brain gets wired.
human concepts
Time 4: Merge appears and starts Time4: same
merging typically human concepts
Time 5: The brain maybe gets rewired Time 5: Capacities for complex
(plausible but not certain) thought, planning, etc. develop
Time 6: Capacities for complex Time 6: People start talking
thought, planning, etc. develop
Brain and Thinking
Online thinking/RAM thinking/Subhuman and Pre-language human thinking
According to Gary Marcus of New York University, the brain does its job in a series of steps, along a one-way trajectory:
* Receive info from senses.
* Send it to be analyzes for identification.
* Choose a course of action based on the analysis.
* Send an order to execute that action.
Offline thinking/CAM/language human thinking:
What happens when we think even the simplest of thought, say, "Roses are red."
* Think of "roses."
* Think of "red."
* Connect the two.
You may, or may not, have a visual I age of a red rose. If you do, you will say, "I think in images." If you don't, you will say, "I think in words." In both cases that's like the sun crossing the sky---not what's really happening at all. There are no images in the brain. There are no words in the brain. All that's there are neurons and their connections and differential rates and strengths of electrochemical impulses. These provide a subjective sense of words and images. The metamorphosis may seem magical but it's no more magical than the "changing colors" of mountains at sunset, likewise produced by processes in your brain.
Concepts are not the same as Categories
A concept is something you can "think about" and "think with," whereas with categories, all you can do is to say whether something belongs in them or not. That's the difference. The similarity is that both terms refer to some kind of class into which things can be stored---leopards, or tables, or grandmothers, anything at all. Because of that similarity, concepts and categories are sometimes treated as different names for the same thing. But if we don't distinguish between them, we'll never understand why humans differ from nonhumans because humans have both concepts and categories while nonhumans have only categories.
Without words we'd never have gotten into having concepts. Words are simply permanent anchors that most concepts have---a means of pulling together all the sights and sounds and smells, all the varied kinds of knowledge we have about what the concept refers to.
Two discontinuities between humans and nonhumans
We have language and no other species does.
We have seemingly limitless creativity and no other species does.
Language and creativity, for all practical purposes, are infinite. Is this mere coincidence?
For two independent discontinuities of such size to exist in a single species is too bizarre in evolutionary terms. So it's worth exploring the possibility that the two discontinuities spring form the same source.
Language involves the mind and creativity involves the mind---the mind being no more than the brain at work. So the likeliest cause of such a double discontinuity would seem to lie in a difference between the workings of human and nonhuman brains where humans have concepts and nonhumans have only categories. ,
From signal to word
In the initial, recruitment phase of protolanguage, there were neither concepts nor words. Recruitment signals weren't words. They were iconic and/or indexical signals that, to those who used them, were no different from all other ACS signals that they already had. Signals had to become words and words had to give birth to concepts before anything you could even all a protolanguage could be born.
The signals associated with recruitment were the only signals in the protolanguage ACS that had displacement, and in the beginning they were tied to what had happened or was about to happen.
Words didn't follow but preceded concepts.
Language was originally a combination of mime, signs and sound.
Language, like niche construction, is an autocatalytic process. Once it's started, it drives itself; it creates and fulfills its own demands.
There are huge similarities between ants and humans
-population: human population ballooned to numbers that hitherto had been achieved only by insects.
-animal domestication for food: just as ants domesticated aphids, pasturing them on plants, and stroking them until they exuded fluids, so did domesticate cattle, goats, sheep, yak, water buffalo, and reindeer, pasturing them on grass, and milking them.
-just as ants prepared beds, planted spores, brought in plant food, and harvested the resulting fungi, so did we prepare fields, plant seeds, fertilize, compost, manure them, and harvest the resulting cereals and other crops.
-just as ants built enormous underground cities, so did we build enormous aboveground cities.
Are the similarities coincidences? Not at all. Niche construction processes determine the kind of occupation a species will follow and the kind of society it will have to live as a result. Whether the niche is created slowly, by instinct, over millions of years or (in part at least) by cultural learning over mere thousands makes no difference. The niche makes the difference. The only question is, are we through yet, or is it still changing us?
Is our fate going to be like that of ant? There was a time when ants too were free-roving organisms. They are no more. They live in huge colonies now. It happened to them; why can't it happen to us? The degree of social control under which we already labor would have been both incomprehensible and intolerable to our hunting-and-gathering ancestors.
And do think about this: for ten thousand years, ever since cities and governments began, we have been selecting against the most independent, individualistic members of our species. Rebels, , revolutionaries, heretics, criminals, martyrs---all those opposed to the current norms of society---have been systematically imprisoned, exiled, murdered, or executed throughout the last hundred centuries. Since the vast majority of these nonconformists died young or spent their procreative years in monosexual jails, their contribution to the human gene pool has been negligible. But the passive, the stupid, the compliant, the loyal, the obedient---they prospered like weeds, spreading their seeds far and wide. Has this really had no effect on human nature?
Contrary to popular misconception, evolution in the human species is not effectively over. The advances of last few years in biochemistry have told us this is not the case. Evolution is still proceeding, genes are changing, in ways we still cannot fully understand. By the time we understand them, the damage may have been done. It doesn't take many generations to turn a wolf into a dog.
Already there have been signs and portents. During the past couple of thousand years, caste systems---systems like those of ants, where an individual's occupation and fate are predestined at birth---have come into existence in many parts of the world, most strikingly in India. To most of us, caste systems are just quaint and rather repellent aberrations. This view may be dangerously optimistic. The caste systems should be better seen as trial runs, precursors of which is to come once the last few kicks in our ape nature have been eliminated.
Ask yourself whether you are an ant, a compliant, passive, rule-conscious, law-abiding, chicken-hearted, ignorant human who believes in the bullshit peddled by your religious and political leaders, a lapdog, or you are a solitary wolf, a "strange" human (as a dumb and ignorant dude labelled me), an ornery ape?
Contrary to a nitwit's recent assertion, I was not bent out of shape, I was merely annoyed, at people's ignorance and stupidity presented as knowledge and wisdom. Most humans open their mouths in trying to impress or hurt others, instead of genuinely seeking a real dialogue in an honest search for facts and truths. As I pointed out to the nitwit, he didn't really understand me at all based on the choice of his words and the anemic, pathetic nature of his argumentation. He either lacked empathy and didn't know how to read English beyond third grade level or possessed stupidity in abundance.
On the other hand and to be fair to the nitwit, the fault may entirely lie in my inability to express my thoughts with grace and clarity. After all, English is not my mother tongue; the one I learned at my mother's knee and in her lap; the one I heard spoken around me in my formative years; the one whose music still drives me to paroxysms of nostalgia.
Wissai
July 12, 2013
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