Go mano-a-mano against a chimpanzee and the chimp wins, hands down -- and fingers, testes and face off.
But what happens when a group of humans goes up against a same-sized group of chimpanzees? For specificity, imagine it's a several-dozen-person tribe of bare-knuckle brutes versus a same-sized troupe of chimps. Who wins?
I seriously hope no one knows the answer to this, but it seems plausible to speculate that it would be a tough fight. The humans are physically weak in comparison, of course, but with language on the field of battle they can better organize their attack and defense. Perhaps language can help the brainy human team yank victory from the brawny jaws of defeat.
But wait. Isn't using language cheating? It depends.
If language is something we evolved via natural selection, then it is part of our intrinsic biology, and so it's fair game in a fight. But what if language is a technology? If so, then, given the ban on technology, the human warriors must leave language in the locker room.
So, which is it? Is language part of our nature, or is it a technology? We need to find out before we can start the ape fight.
And much more is at stake here than a fair ape fight. The question is one of the most important of our age -- today's biggest science silverbacks (Chomsky and Pinker, for example) were forged on it.
In my new book, released this month, "Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man," I make the case that language is a technology, not part of our nature at all. And I make the analogous case for music as well. Instead, language is a result of cultural selection, a kind of evolutionary process capable of "design" that occurs at lightning speed compared to natural selection. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the structure of speech came to sound like something the brain was really good at processing. I call this "harnessing."
In particular, speech was carved into the shapes of the fundamental physical event sounds that occur in our world. Speech evolved to mimic the sounds of nature, and thereby could be processed by human auditory systems that never evolved for speech comprehension. I call this "nature-harnessing."
In "Harnessed" I describe, more specifically, the sorts of natural physical event sounds that human speech culturally evolved to mimic. It is the most fundamental sort of sound occurring in the terrestrial habitats that matter for our evolution: namely, the sounds that solid objects make when they're involved in events. I work through the "grammar" of these solid-object event sounds, and ask whether spoken words across human languages have the same regularities. They appear to.
We humans have speech because spoken words have culturally evolved to sound like nature. We speak because we've been nature-harnessed, not because we evolved to speak.
And the same goes for music -- I make the case in "Harnessed" that music has culturally evolved to possess the fundamental signature sounds humans make when we move and behave and do stuff. Music taps into the auditory system competencies we evolved via natural selection for recognizing the behaviors of people in our midst.
But let's set aside music in this, because it would seem to provide little advantage in gladiatorial fist-and-teeth battle (although tribal dance certainly seems to signal tribal strength among real humans, such as this memorable case).
The key issue is that, because language is a technology -- one nature-harnessed upon us by cultural evolution -- language is against the battle rules. The human team must leave its speech at the door. In fact, just to play it safe, let's place onto the human team only humans plucked directly out from the long ago far away times, before we had gotten nature-harnessed in the first place.
These poor pre-language Homo sapiens schmucks are in for a severe chimp-schooling, because what makes us modern language-wielding humans formidable compared to chimps is not what's in our genes, but what's in our memes. It is the cultural artifacts that have evolved to fit our minds and transform ancient event-recognition software into communication software that makes us kick-arse.
The rise of the planet of the apes -- the first such rise, when we humans rose and took over the planet -- was due to culture having nature-harnessed us, and transforming us into a new kind of creature. Without it, the chimps win.
Mark Changizi is Director of Human Cognition at 2AI, and the author of "The Vision Revolution" (Benbella Books, 2009) and the upcoming book "Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man" (Benbella Books, 2011). This piece first appeared at his Forbes' column, "Unconvoluted."
Follow Mark Changizi, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markchangizi
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Origin of language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Hominization or walking Upright Stage, which includes hand manipulations, sensual characteristics and function.
Symbolization or the Speech Stage, which includes language, time measurement, art, science and sculpting.
Thanks all for the thoughtful comments.
-Mark
Of course sexual intercourse is not a technology but using contraceptives is.
I disagree with the author's claim that language is not innate but I don't agree with your example. That children raised in America and Germany speak differently proves nothing. If its genetic you would have to prove that a German child raised in the US (and in an environment where no one spoke with the German accent) still had the German accent.
In fact I believe that experimental data would contradict your claim. There is little or no evidence that I know of that things like accents are genetic. The evidence I know of about language would indicate just the opposite that accents are learned behavior.
The evidence for a genetic component to language is more subtle. Too complex to go into here but here is a link to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_Instinct
1) physical injuries to specific parts of the brain cause very specific types of language dysfunction
2) studies of identical twins raised apart in different environments show that such twins have remarkably similar scores on various tests of language ability
3) studies of languages such as Japanese and English show common underlying patterns. For example things like noun-verb word order and verb-adverb word order will be different but the differences follow a pattern, i.e. if noun-verb order is X then verb-adverb order is X as well, indicating that there are some underlying rules and parameters that all languages follow
Pinker's books The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate have many fascinating detailed examples.
Obviously apes have sound boxes too as anyone who has ever heard a gibbon can attest. Do different apes speak different languages or can they understand one another?
I have seen experiments which demonstrate that chimpanzees can learn to understand what humans say to them. They cannot answer in our language but they can make sounds. That tells me that making sounds is genetically controlled but that the actual "content" of the sound making could be "learned".
There is a mountain of evidence: identical twin studies, analysis of commonalities across languages, analysis of the way languages differ, the kinds of mistakes children make when learning language, ...
All of this evidence (well documented in Pinker's books The Blank Slate and The Language Instinct) overwhelmingly support the idea that there is a built in genetic capability for language in humans. If you don't deal with this evidence you aren't really making a scientific argument but just some pop science.
To provide evidence for this "nature-harnessing" hypothesis requires going into the structure of language (and an analogous story for writing and music) and showing how it possesses the fundamental signature of proposed aspects of nature. That's what I do in my research, and new book.
I'm sorry but you seem to be contradicting yourself. In your original article you said:
"So, which is it? Is language part of our nature, or is it a technology? ... The question is one of the most important of our age -- today's biggest science silverbacks (Chomsky and Pinker, for example) were forged on it."
Doesn't that imply that language is either "part of our nature" or "a technology" and not a little of both? And then later in your article you say:
"In my new book, ...I make the case that language is a technology, not part of our nature at all. "
Again, its a technology not part of our nature at all. That certainly seems to indicate to me that you are staking out a claim contrary to Chomsky and Pinker that there is a definite genetic aspect to human language.
I think that comment severely underestimates the impact of Chomsky and Pinker. You make it sound like they are just showing that language isn't completely a learned behavior. Just a reaction for example to the strict Skinerian behaviorists. Its much more than that -- there are many complex implications for how language can be learned and processed that follow from their results.
As one example, early work in computer science spent a lot of effort on what were essentially brute force techniques attempts to understand language via things like statistical analysis. Chomsky's Language Hierarchy proved that it wasn't just a question of needing more powerful computers that doomed those attempts to failure but that they were simply theoretically impossible.