Evolution of Language (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 23, 2019, 12:15 (1856 days ago) @ David Turell

I hope you won’t mind, but I have changed the title of this thread, as we have left Dennett and Egnor far behind us.

DAVID: The evolution of language requires a complex brain ready for it:
https://inference-review.com/letter/tough-luck
QUOTE: "A major difficulty here is that, as an abstract quality, language does not preserve directly in any material historical record. As a result, the use of language and of any of its putative precursors has to be inferred from indirect proxy evidence furnished principally by archaeology.”

It is indeed a major difficulty. The basic assumption seems to be that for 100,000 years, our immediate ancestors communicated with grunts and arm wavings, even though they had the anatomy to create the same variety of sounds we use today. I don’t buy it.

QUOTE: That potential had probably arisen in the neural rewiring that occurred as part of the radical developmental reorganization that produced anatomically modern Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago. Language acquisition would almost certainly have been biologically possible for members of any structurally recognizable Homo sapiens population.

Precisely. So why assume that the potential was not already in use 200,000 years ago? Obviously to nothing like the extent that it is used today, because language evolves. Indirect proxy evidence does not explain why the anatomy changed in the first place, and it certainly doesn’t provide one jot of evidence that 150,000 years ago our ancestors were not already using sounds we use today in order to communicate with one another.

QUOTE: "In our view, as well as in Berwick and Chomsky’s, the potential for modern human cognition was almost certainly born some 200,000 years ago with anatomical Homo sapiens. The archaeological indications are that this new potential lay fallow for upwards of 100,000 years, until it was activated by a cultural stimulus of some kind. The evolutionary phenomenon involved here is a routine one. The most plausible cultural stimulus was the spontaneous invention of language, which would then have been readily passed on among individuals and populations of this species that was already biologically enabled for it".

I wish they would be more specific about the “archaeological indications” (perhaps they are - I don't have time to read the whole article) but whatever these are, why should we not assume that they themselves were a “cultural stimulus” resulting from new ideas. It is new ideas that demand new language, not the other way around.

QUOTE: Much more likely is that mutual reinforcement occurred between symbolic thought and spoken language as, amid the climatic rigors of late Pleistocene Africa, members of a small isolate of Homo sapiens possessing language-ready brains spontaneously began to attach specific meanings to strings of sounds, and to combine them into organized thoughts and utterances.

All forms of “language” entail attaching specific meanings to sounds, gestures, chemical excretions, even if the organized thoughts and utterances are vastly more rudimentary than our own. The question is whether the brain, larynx etc originally complexified as a result of our ancestors endeavouring to organize their thoughts and utterances, or the changes took place beforehand via a number of random mutations, or via the hand of your God. I would say the first of these is at least as likely as the second and third.

DAVID: Full support for my view. When the material brain evolved to the proper complex form, humans could then learn to use it for language creation. Evolution of language is done by humans who are brain capable. The process of evolution did not evolve immaterial language.

Once the apparatus is there, of course humans will learn to use it – use is what leads to evolution, both material and immaterial. The pre-whale’s leg exists for walking, is used for swimming, and evolves into the flipper. The brain exists, pre-humans use it and other existing elements (larynx, tongue etc.) to communicate, and new demands lead to all the evolutionary changes that finally allow for human speech. Human speech exists, and produces language which evolves from comparatively simple utterances to increasingly complex structures as required by an ever expanding range of thought. (This process is of course mirrored by language learning itself, as children progress from the simple to the complex.)