Babel's Dawn

Footprints In The Sands of Time

Big paleontological news tonight at the release of a report on the finding of 1.8 million year old human-lineage footprint from Homo ergaster/erectus. (Press release here) It confirms the supposition that the human line was already walking very much as people do today. It is too bad we cannot hope to find a fossilized voice print somewhere.

Oh For Pete's Sake

I’m sure some readers of the latest Newsweek are sneering at an essay/book review (here) on the evolutionary basis of artistic activities. I can imagine critical thinkers wondering if they really have to put up with this dorm-room speculation, lest they be thought yahoo creationists. Equally irritating, I feel the splash of their wheel landing on my own efforts to understand something uniquely human—speech—in evolutionary terms. So I’m making a short post to say, hey, I’m trying to steer away from such stuff.

 

Evolutionary theory seeks to explain the origins of biological traits in specific lineages. It is useful in examining the origins of feathers, which are biological, but has nothing to say about the mini skirt, which is not biological. In the case of art, it is up to anyone proposing an evolutionary explanation to first prove that artistic behavior is biologically rooted. I feel confident that speech is biologically rooted, and point to Eric Lenneberg’s book The Biological Foundations of Language.  

 

But the Newsweek essay devotes no effort to establishing the biological foundations of art. It is widespread, but not universal. The focus of the essay is a search (very superficial) into what art has to offer. Why do we value it? It is not enough to show that a survival advantage goes to the person or group with artistic abilities. Scientific thinking gives a great advantage to groups whose rivals are steeped in superstition, but that edge does not prove that scientific thinkers are biologically different from superstitious groups. There is more to a search for origins than what is implied in that essay.

Narrowing Down the Suspects

A Neanderthal man, as depicted at the American Museum of Natural History. If we put this fellow in some clothes and sent him on his way, how would he do?

As reported previously on Babel’s Dawn, the draft version of the Neanderthal genome was presented in Chicago last week (press release here) and it confirms the earlier finding that Neanderthal’s share the same FOXP2 gene found in humans. FOXP2 is the most important gene known to support language. Without it in its human form, rapid speech and the ability to learn speech sounds is limited. The gene’s presence in Neanderthals is very strong evidence that the human lineage was speaking fluently before the Neanderthals split from the line that became Homo sapiens.  The original dating of the appearance of the FOXP2 gene in its human form put it between 200 and 100 thousand years ago. Many arguments about the recency of language have claimed authority based on that date, and now find their cards are very weak.

Presidents' Day

Abraham Lincoln knew how to woo an audience, and it was not just by adding a tall hat to his already impressive stature.

The past week saw the 200th anniversary of both Darwin and Lincoln’s birth. The coincidence of having two of the greatest men of the nineteenth century born within hours of one another seems like an astrologer’s dream. (Although as Cassius pointed out, a few cats were born then as well.) This blog has already noted Darwin’s birth and contribution to our efforts (see: Darwin’s Contribution), but I want to recognize Lincoln as well. Lincoln was the president who approved creation of the National Academy of Sciences which, I am very proud to say, published my book about Einstein. Relevant to this blog, Lincoln’s success with language helps illustrate the peculiarities of the human species, and how we are radically unlike other primates. I’m not so concerned with what the language tells us about Lincoln the speaker, but the insights it offers about us, the audience.

Art's Crafty Birth

The Venus of Tan-Tan. Is this object the earliest known example of human craftsmanship? Or is it a stone that happens to look like a human figure and happened to lie amongst many 400 thousand year old tools? The delicate detail of the hands is what leans me toward accepting the work as an artifact.

We all remember the grilled cheese sandwich with the face of Jesus on it. Suppose that grilled cheese was 400 thousand years old and somehow survived for archaeologists to find. What would they make of it? Was the face a human artifact or a quirk of nature? The question is not entirely whimsical. Consider, for example, the “Venus of Tan-Tan,"  a stone found by Robert Bednarik among some 400 thousand (plus or minus 100 thousand) year old tools. The tools are plainly tools. The stone looks like it could have a crude human figure carved into it. So is it an artifact or a prehistoric grilled cheese? And if an artifact, so what? Answering that last question depends on how you understand what is peculiar about being human.

Busy Week

During the past week, daily traffic on this site has quadrupled because of a sudden interest in a post from last November about dolphins and language (see: Why Only Humans Talk). The web resource called stumbled upon has enabled many people to tell one another about the post and the word keeps spreading. If you, o reader, are not a user of the stumbled upon system, you might want to check out the post anyway, to see what the fuss is about. The phenomenon also explains why most of this week's comments have been about that post and of a somewhat more whimsical nature than usual.

Extry! Extry! Big News Coming Next Week

I might as well steal a technique from the 24 hour news networks and report that there will be news. Next week, in Chicago, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science the entire genome of the Neanderthal is expected to be reported. On a blog like this where hard facts are so difficult to come by, this kind of breakthrough in prehistoric genetics is likely to be a source of plenty of information, some of it maybe even relevant to Neanderthal speech ... although it is already clear that Neanderthals spoke something or other. For the preview discussion check out Nature's news here. (Thanks to Carl Zimmer who mentioned the news on Twitter.)

Could Language Modules Have Evolved?

Unsynchronized clocks were spotted by a New York Times photographer (story here) this week, providing a handy visual metaphor for the way biological and linguistic evolution are out of synch.

Language changes too rapidly to permit the biological evolution of the kind of language module in the brain proposed by Steven Pinker and perhaps the co-evolution of language and brain as proposed by Terrence Deacon, according to a paper published this week in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Nick Chater, Florencia Reali, and Morton H. Christiansen. (See "Restrictions on biological adaptation in language evolution," abstract here.) I did notice, however, that their calculations do not exclude Noam Chomsky’s anti-communication theory of language origins.