'If
there had been no speech, then right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and
bad, attractive and unattractive would not have been made known. Speech makes
known all this. Worship speech' (Chandogya Upanishad, VII-2-1).
'A mostly
Lamarckian process whereby evolution of a transformational nature proceeds via
the passage of acquired characters, cultural evolution, like the stellar
evolution before it, involves no DNA chemistry and perhaps less selectivity
than biological evolution. Culture enables animals to transmit survival kits to
their offspring by nongenetic routes; the information gets passed on behaviourally,
from brain to brain, from generation to generation, the upshot being that
cultural evolution acts much faster than biological evolution' (Eric Chaisson (2002), Cosmic Evolution).
Story-telling
or spoken language was the first major invention of humans that enabled them to
represent ideas with distinct utterances. And when written language was invented,
we developed distinct shapes to symbolize our ideas. The evolution of language, speech, and culture are some of the causative
factors in the rapid evolution of the size and capacity of the human brain. The
emergence of human language has been a major milestone in the relentless
evolution of complexity on our planet.
We 'know' what our thoughts and memories mean. But if we want to share
them with others, they have to be translated into language. Our neocortex
accomplishes this using what Kurzweil (2012) calls 'pattern recognizers', which
have been trained with patterns that we have learnt for the purpose of using
language.
According to Kurzweil (2012), language is highly hierarchical and it
evolved to take advantage of the hierarchical nature of the neocortex, which in
turn reflects the hierarchical nature of reality. Noam Chomsky wrote about the
innate ability of humans to learn the hierarchical structures in language. This
ability reflects the structure of the neocortex. Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002) cited the attribute of 'recursion' as accounting for the unique language
faculty of the human species. Recursion, according to Chomsky, is the ability
to put together small parts into a larger chunk, and then use that chunk as a
part in yet another structure, and so on, iteratively and hierarchically. That
is how we are able to build the elaborate structures of sentences and
paragraphs and sections and chapters from a limited set of words.
According to Richard Dawkins (1989), ‘most of what is unusual about man can be summed
up in one word: “culture”.’ Of course, one must make a distinction between
‘culture’ and ‘society’. ‘A society refers to an actual group of people
and how they order their social relations. A culture . . . refers to a
body of socially transmitted information’ (Barkhow 1989). The term ‘culture’
encompasses ‘all ideas, concepts and skills that are available to us in
society. It includes science and mathematics, carpentry and engineering
designs, literature and viticulture, systems of musical notation, advertisements
and philosophical theories – in short, the collective product of human
activities and thought’ (Distin 2005).
It is notable that, on the biological evolutionary time scale, there has
been an exceptionally rapid expansion of brain capacity in the course of
evolution of one of the ape forms
(chimpanzees) to Homo sapiens, i.e. ourselves. This has happened in
spite of the fact that the genome of humans is incredibly close to that of
chimpanzees. The evolution of language, speech, and culture are believed to be
some of the causative factors for this rapid evolution of the human brain. Let
us see how.
Homo sapiens was preceded by Homo heidelbergensis, which also had a fairly
large brain, but was not very effective as a hunter. He was not able to
establish ecological dominance over other animals, even after two million years of evolution. Our
human advantage is believed to have arisen from the emergence of language. ‘No
topic is more intriguing and more difficult to address concretely than the
evolution of language, but … [it] is almost a kind of sixth sense, since it
allows people to supplement their five primary senses with information drawn
from the primary senses of others. Seen in this light, language becomes a kind
of “knowledge sense” that promotes the construction of extraordinarily complex
mental models, and language alone may have provided sufficient benefit to override
the cost of brain expansion’ (Klein and Edgar 2002).
The reference to ‘the cost of brain expansion’
here is to the fact that in humans the brain takes up ~20% of the metabolic
resources of the body, and the brain tissue requires 22 times more energy than
a comparable piece of muscle at rest.
Deacon (1997) emphasizes
the big difference between human language (talking) on one hand and the various
modes of communication among other live entities: ‘Although other animals
communicate with one another, at least within the same species, this
communication resembles language only in a very superficial way - for example,
using sounds - but none that I know of has the equivalents of such things as
words, much less nouns, verbs, and sentences. Not even simple ones.’
Deacon (1997) continues: ‘Though we share the
same earth with millions of living creatures, we also live in a world that no
other species has access to. We inhabit a world full of abstractions,
impossibilities, and paradoxes … We tell stories about our real experiences and
invent stories about imagined ones, and we even make use of these stories to
organize our lives. In a real sense, we live our lives in this shared virtual
world. … The doorway into this virtual world was opened to us alone by the
evolution of language, because language is not merely a mode of communication,
it is also the outward expression of an unusual mode of thought - symbolic
representation. Without symbolization the entire virtual world is . . . out of reach: inconceivable . . . symbolic
thought does not come innately built in, but develops by internalising the
symbolic process that underlies language’.
Homo heidelbergensis had a big brain. But was he also a great symbolic thinker? Probably
not. Deacon argues that probably a single symbolic innovation triggered a
coevolution of language and brain-size. Greater brain power resulted in a
greater capacity to symbolise, speak, think. The cascading effect led to more
complex languages and more complex brains. But all this required social
interaction and support: ‘Language is a social phenomenon. … [and] … The
relationship between language and people is symbiotic’.
I shall continue with this narrative in the
next post.
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