lisarea

Continued from the "I hate idiots" thread in RRP.

(I hope I'm putting this in the right place. I just know this sideline doesn't belong there anymore.)

I don't think we can find this. What physical evidence could there possibly be? We do have evidence of increasingly complex religious belief systems throughout human history, and we can trace the roots of modern religions such as Christianity, but we have yet to locate the fossilized thought bubble where the idea of deities originated.

Isn't it most likely that, with the advent of critical and abstract thought abilities, the human mind was overwhelmed with curiosity about the world and thus invented religion to provide plausible, if simplistic, answers? As we accumulate knowledge as a species, we answer these questions scientifically and adapt our religions to phase out the obsolete questions, and to address our increasingly advanced curiosity.

Abstract reasoning abilities seem to replace instinctual behaviors. That is, as we become capable of understanding the world around us in an abstract way, we begin to lose our abilities to follow our instincts, maybe just because we analyze them too much. But we still have them. Babies suckle instinctually, and before a certain age, curl up their feet when they're touched. Even as adults, we still experience surges of adrenaline, or fight or flight reactions, in inappropriate situations; and extreme anxiety can still cause us to evacuate our digestive systems, even if the stressor is something as physically benign as public speaking.

I expect that we are still in the process of evolving beyond these reactions, and that, if we continue to evolve, these reactions will either disappear or become more finely tuned over time.

Human language is innate. That is, every human with a normally developed brain is not only capable of language, but compelled by it. Language is an enormously complex system that its native speakers do not understand consciously. Natural language processing and computational linguistics are still in their infancy. We cannot yet begin to replicate human language in all its complexity through modeling. But even the densest among us can use it.

However, language is dependent on social interaction. Feral children, for example, who are cut off from human communication, do not learn language if they are socialized after the critical period for learning, generally before puberty. People in dual-language communities develop pidgin languages of their own accord, although the grammars of these languages are not complex, and do not develop real language constructs until they are learned as a native language (at which point they are no longer pidgins).

Written language is an artificial construct, and doesn't appear to be innate. It must be taught and studied consciously.

The primary difference that we are aware of between human and other animal communications is that humans can express abstract concepts, where animals don't appear to.

But as others have mentioned, a great deal of work has been done with Koko the gorilla, and she has shown the ability to grasp abstractions by lying, for example.

Another animal who's been the subject of a great deal of research is Alex, the African Grey parrot.

<a href="http://www.alexfoundation.org/index.html" target="_blank">The Alex Foundation</a>

As to why they're using human languages rather than communicating with us in their own, I'd reckon that's because they're being taught by humans.

While it's true that we do not have evidence that other animals have yet developed structured languages of their own, this could easily be because humans have evolved further than other animals. It certainly doesn't seem inconceivable, at least to me, that other animals would be capable of developing these abilities, given sufficient time and motivation. They've certainly shown the abilities for limited abstraction.

And anecdotally, virtually any devoted pet owner could provide examples of animals displaying some fairly abstract and complex behaviors, which indicate attachments and emotions that go well beyond simple survival or pack instincts. Granted, anthropomorphism is a big factor in a lot of these things, but it goes beyond that.

It's been observed that more intelligent species of animals display juvenile, or play, behavior throughout adulthood, likely as a result of lifelong learning patterns. Humans, of course, display this; but so do apes and domestic dogs and birds and other animals as well.

In short, no, we don't have evidence of animal languages that express abstractions, but how would we know if they did? We are not native speakers of animal languages. (I'm not actually suggesting that they do. I just don't think we can point to this with any true authority.)

And we do have evidence that some animals are capable of both understanding and expressing abstract concepts. Koko and Alex have shown greater abilities in this area than many feral children.

To me, this argues that we have these advanced abilities due to evolution and the cooperative efforts of our forebears and our community, not through some unique gift from a benevolent creator.

Well, I can certainly see where that misunderstanding arose.

<a href="http://pw1.netcom.com/~druxy/Chevalier.htm" target="_blank">France's Mitochondrial Adam</a>

lpetrich

If one looks far back enough, to about 400 million years ago, our ancestors were indeed fish. If you want your memory refreshed, check out <a href="http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu" target="_blank">The University of California Paleontological Museum site</a>, which has a family tree of life with most of the major branchings.

Also, while there is a good reason to suspect the existence of a "language instinct", it is clear that a large part of the details are learned. Simply consider the numerous variations in grammatical features. English has subject-verb-object as its default sentence order, and that order is a common one, but subject-object-verb is also common. Adjectives can be either before or after the nouns they modify. Etc. etc. etc.

However, this adaptation is most direct for spoken language; written language is more difficult to learn -- there are numerous people who are reasonably competent in spoken language yet grossly incompetent in written language.

As to the origin of religion, that depends on what one means by "religion" and what aspect one has in mind. And one must keep in mind that people have believed in lots of different religions and sects over the centuries.

The idea of a single creator to be worshipped is not very evident -- and sometimes absent -- in some religions, just to name one example.

Mageth

Note that the person who posted:

PS: I was taught in school in France that my ancestor was indeed a fish!

had previously indicated that the Coelacanth was our ancestor, to which I replied that no one (to my knowledge) claims this, to which the person posted the above reply.

lisarea

I'm sorry. I knew that, and was just being flip. (My feeble excuse is that I decided to gloss over that because I'd rambled too much already, but references to France just automatically turn me into a wise guy.)

Absolutely. In fact, languages worldwide differ much more so than even that. The roles of word order and inflection, for example, show some of the broad range of language structures being used.

The language instinct itself, however, is a constant throughout human civilization. It's been years since I've kept up in the field, so I don't know anything of recent scholarship, but Noam Chomsky's Transformational Generative Grammars describe a core language instinct that is independent of the vagaries of individual languages.

Clearly, language must still be learned on an individual basis, and children growing up in English-speaking households will not spontaneously speak Yiddish or Italian, but the theory is that the core language instinct is intact in every normal brain, and that language cannot be learned consciously.

If it were learned consciously, most people couldn't form anything beyond a simple declarative sentence. This is actually illustrated by cases such as feral children, who've passed their critical language acquisition period, and often, in adults attempting to learn a foreign language.

lpetrich

I've had a hard time figuring out what that is supposed to be; I gather that it's some ability to recognize some canonical underlying form among different sentence structures. I'm not sure how widely-accepted that notion is outside of Noam Chomsky's followers, however -- I don't see much mention of that beyond Chomsky's work.

But it is correct that spoken language is a human universal. No full-scale human society has ever been discovered to lack a full-scale spoken language, however interesting such a discovery might be. I mean by "full-scale" that one could translate English into it with appropriate adjustments for vocabulary differences.

In fact, children pick up lots of complicated grammar with remarkably little formal instruction. At least it seems complicated when it's not one's native language.

Or worse, short phrases and incomplete sentences.

[ October 23, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>