How children pick up a language: new comment (Humans)

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 01, 2017, 22:41 (2669 days ago) @ David Turell

Another review of Thomas Wolfe's book:

https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/reviews-of-tom-wolfes-kingdom-of-speech-actually-...

"The Kingdom of Speech is an extraordinary display of intellectual independence.[1] This is a book that treats Charles Darwin as a toplofty prig and Noam Chomsky as a haughty fake—which is to say it aims to harpoon two of the biggest whales of modern secular thought.

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"But there is a gap between “capacity to speak” and actual speech, and it is a gap that has proven devilishly hard to bridge.

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"The gap between mere vocal expression and human language differs in profound ways from the gaps filled by all the micro-adaptations that shaped the human foot, knee, pelvis, or hand. The jump from “woof woof” to “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” is not just larger than the switch from tree-climbing to walking upright; it is different in nature.

"Wolfe, who knows a thing or two about expressive language, dives into this subject. He writes not so much as an anti-evolutionist than as a scourge of intellectual arrogance. His starting point is a sentence in a psychology journal to the effect that the experts can’t really explain the origins of human language.

"Why not? Didn’t Charles Darwin settle this long ago? And suddenly we are off on a clever retelling of how Darwin stole credit for the idea of evolution by natural selection from the itinerant South Seas bug collector, Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace had come up with natural selection independently and confided his discovery to Darwin in the hope of getting the older man’s help in publishing it. Darwin did help, but artfully announced it as coincident with his own version of the idea, long mulled but never announced.

"Darwin was comfortable and socially connected: precisely the kind of person that Wolfe has made a career of skewering in his essays and novels. Darwin, of course, treated Wallace with patronizing generosity, and poor Wallace never realized he had been had.

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" Language, however, presented that chasm of difference that natural selection even augmented by sexual selection could not seem to bridge. Darwin’s last attempt to make human speech conform to his model was to treat human speech as just an elaboration of animal vocalization. Wolfe has a pleasant time recounting the disdain with which linguists treated the “bow wow” hypothesis.

"Wolfe’s takedown of Chomsky involves an elaborate parallel of Darwin’s patronizing and sometimes dismissive treatment of Wallace. The Wallace figure in Chomsky’s life is itinerant South American ethnographer Daniel L. Everett, who found a human language that differs in fundamental ways from what Chomsky claims to be the unalterable basics of human speech. A key issue is that the language of the Amazonian Pirahã (the name is pronounced something like PEE-da-HA) lacks a feature called “recursion”—the embedding of sentences within sentences. Everett’s analysis has been met with skepticism by Chomsky loyalists, but Wolfe is convinced that the skepticism is merely a power play. The skeptics set out “to carpet bomb, obliterate, every syllable Everett had to say about this miserable little tribe.”[3] But wonderful to say, Everett outmaneuvered them both in scholarship and appeal to the general public.

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" Wolfe has no inhibitions on that score, nor need he. The Kingdom of Speech is a can opener, not a treatise; a harpoon, not a nail file. Some reviewers have been aghast at his temerity, and nearly all have gasped at the bravado of his closing sentences: “To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo’s David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.”

"The light that illuminates Wolfe’s book is the idea that humans invented speech, the way we invented so many other things. Evolution doesn’t explain the invention any more than it explains kaleidoscopes or microprocessors. That we can and do invent tools, luxuries, games, and cultures testifies to capacities that set us apart from animals. Where those capacities came from is a question still worth asking." (my bold)

Comment: The sentences in bold raise an issue that fits my theory about human brains. We were given the capacity in our large complex brain to invent language, which is immaterial. As such it is our invention, not a product of evolution which deals in the material. It is a product of time. We had to learn to use our giant brain from its time of appearance 300,000 years ago until the time language theoretically appeared 50-70,000 years ago. Language then speeded up the further development and use of the brain.

There are two other reviews at the website along with other commentaries. All worth reading.