Babel's Dawn

Looking for a Unified Story

David Brooks is a New York Times columnist who for some time now has been pondering over the changing view of human nature which this blog has been reporting. Last week he had a column ("Nice Guys Finish First") that considered this issue again and concluded that "cooperation permeates our nature" and that "a rigorous 'scientific'" analysis of human origins or behavior cannot be based on selfishness alone. Brooks is a political conservative and his remarks are aimed chiefly at the free-market thinkers who favor unmitigated competition. They could, however, be aimed at this blog as well.

Social Networks Before Homo sapiens

The Inuit people are among the last surviving hunter-gatherers. They are much more modern than many anthropologists seem to have believed.

I once attended a ceremony in which a man from the Liguru tribe of eastern Tanzania was made a member of the Vindunda tribe from slightly farther west. It was a great and rare event and I was lucky to be on hand for its demonstration of how astonishingly fluid human identities can be. Of course, they should be fluid since the identity itself is invented. Linguists often dispute the extent to which language shapes human thought, but one area where it appears decisive is in matters of identity. It is hard to imagine how a person could understand himself to be Lliguru or Vidunda without language to name that identity. Apes may understand themselves to be members of a particular group, but without a name for the group there seems no way that two apes who are strangers can recognize that they share an identity. And since identities are crucial to so much of a person's behavior and thinking, this appears to be one way that language changes the way people think. Science magazine last Friday had a paper and an editorial that compares social networks among hunter-gatherer societies with ape networks and provides much food for this blog to chew.

This Century is Different

One of my first posts on this blog was titled Attention! It's a Revolution. Now that I have put a few more years blogging under my belt and put the results into a book length manuscript I believe that point even more intensely. The old idea that, at its core, language consists of a series of declarative statements to be judged by their truth value can no longer stand. At its core, language is a means of cooperation between people. It works by constructing shared perceptions through joint attention. More generally, it is a shared system that permits cooperative interactions between people. The various human sciences that don't now take cooperative interaction as the foundation of their subject will either adopt it or be left behind.

The Topic is Topics

The Think Triangle. Could this portrait of individual genius replace the more communal speech triangle as the key to speech origins? A thinker (replacing the speaker of the speech triangle) muses upon a topic and learns something. The thinker then informs the disciple (replacing the listener) of the discovery.

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One of the heroes of this blog is Michael Tomasello, anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute. He is a strong proponent of the idea that humans are uniquely cooperative. A forthcoming paper in Pragmatics & Cognition surveys Tomasello's thinking, and is available online now. Titled, "Cooperation and competition in apes and humans," it is by a French scholar, Anne Reboul. She raises a number of objections to Tomasello's work which deserve attention.