- #281
Pythagorean
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I think you're right; I think on the way down from very very hot, there was some fusion going on.
They basically argue that this uniquely human part of our language faculty (FLN-see links for details) having the properties of recursion (also found in our mathematical abilities) emerged in human brains for “physical” reasons yet to be fully comprehended; but unlike most innatists/ nativists (e.g. Pinker/Jackendoff) the reasons suggested are not due to “natural selection” but instead are guided by principles of elegance and compactness (not “tinkering” in Pinker’s sense, I guess). So to give one example, “why did Helium evolve after Hydrogen in the evolution our universe”, etc. It wasn’t for reasons of “natural selection” in any sense of the term. There were physical laws dictating it that it occur. Same with this uniquely human abstract abilities in language and mathematics (or so, it is argued by this position).
Due to such constraints, selection for localized shape change in a single part of a structure can produce widespread morphological changes because relative constraints deflect the evolutionary response in a direction of morphological space that differs from the direction of selection...Because relative constraints can produce substantial deflections of the evolutionary response from the direction of selection, inferring the selective pressures from observed changes in the fossil record is fraught with difficulty. It is conceivable that the derived characters of modern humans may not have arisen independently by adaptive evolution in response to separate selection pressures, but that the origin of one trait may have facilitated the evolution of the entire suite of characters.
"As much as possible, we simulated each of these changes as a localised shape change limited to a small region of the skull. For each of the simulations, we obtained a predicted response that included not only the change we selected for, but also all the others. All those features of the skull tended to change as a whole package. This means that, in evolutionary history, any of the changes may have facilitated the evolution of the others."
bohm2 said:I thought this recent analysis seems to offer some support by the scheme outlined by Gould/Chomsky/Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, I think?
apeiron said:Given that fossil endocasts suggest very little evidence of significant brain reorganisation - local or global - it seems more likely that the telling change was a redesign of the vocal tract for articulate vocalisation.
Chomsky thinks language should be seen as a “spandrel” of some other structural change. The
“answers may well lie not so much in the theory of natural selection as in molecular biology, in the study of what kinds of physical systems can develop under the conditions of life on Earth and why, ultimately because of physical principles” .
Though he does not deny that evolution played a role in the development of language, he stresses that it possibly emerged only via a small mutation and that ultimately only unknown operations of “physical laws applying to a brain of a certain degree of complexity” could explain the origin of the language faculty and its properties...The only speculation he expressed before his Science paper with Fitch and Hauser was that
"It may be that at some remote period a mutation took place that gave rise to the property of discrete infinity, perhaps for reasons that have to do with the biology of cells, to be explained in terms of properties of physical mechanisms, now unknown...At that point evolutionary pressures might have shaped the further development of the capacity, at least in part. Quite possibly other aspects of its evolutionary development again reflect the operation of physical laws applying to a brain of a certain degree of complexity. We simply do not know. (Chomsky 1988: 170)...
With the rise of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program this view became more concrete: if only few principles ultimately comprise Universal Grammar (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 219),
“one does not need to advance incremental, adaptationist arguments with intermediate steps to explain much of natural language's specific syntactic design”.
Langauge can of course be used for communication, as can any aspect of what we do: style of dress, gesture, and so on. And it can be and commonly is used for much else. Statistically speaking, for whatever that is worth, the overwhelming use of language is internal – for thought. It takes an enormous act of will to keep from talking to oneself in every waking moment – and asleep as well, often a considerable annoyance. The distinguished neurologist Harry Jerison (1977:55) among others expressed a stronger view, holding that “language did not evolve as a communication system…. the initial evolution of language is more likely to have been…for the construction of a real world,” as a “tool for thought.” Not only in the functional dimension, but also in all other respects – semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological – the core properties of human language appear to differ sharply from animal communication systems, and to be largely unique in the organic world.
Anatomically modern humans are found in the fossil record several hundred thousand years ago, but evidence of the human capacity is much more recent, not long before the trek from Africa. Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall reports that “a vocal tract capable of producing the sounds of articulate speech” existed over half a million years before there is any evidence that our ancestors were using language. “We have to conclude,” he writes, “that the appearance of language and its anatomical correlates was not driven by natural selection, however beneficial these innovations may appear in hindsight” – a conclusion which raises no problems for standard evolutionary biology, contrary to illusions in popular literature (Tattersall, 1998). It appears that human brain size reached its current level recently, perhaps about 100,000 years ago, which suggests to some specialists that “human language probably evolved, at least in part, as an automatic but adaptive consequence of increased absolute brain size” (neuroscientist Georg Striedter, 2004).
Albuquerque said:A correct Reductionist approach must account for the dynamic unfolding of functions when making the bottom up stack of parts onto a system as means of explaining it...in turn the Holistic approach cannot give up a mechanical exact account on the phenomena it tries to describe.
bohm2 said:But he doesn't think it has much to do with the vocal tract for some reasons that can be found in these passages:
apeiron said:I agree and have always argued that reductionism and holism are complementary views of reality. Both are "right". Although it is also clear which is the simpler model, which the larger model.
Albuquerque said:(...I apologise for the messy amateurish "free form thinking" presentation of would be ideas, as for my unforgivable bad English, hope nevertheless there is some content to explore around...)
Albuquerque said:(above edited)
...in sum, in neither case, human like or god like, regarding minds, one can account for valid full agency..."agency" here, is seen as more of an illusory effect and not so much as a thing in its own right...as I put it and timely speaking, all there is is process, and curiously the process is done !
apeiron said:It would indeed help if you could supply a reference that explains your epistemological position here. If your ideas are based on anything, it won't be to hard to cite the relevant source.
But as far as I can make out what you are saying, you seem to be muddling the map and the territory.
Both reductionism and holism are formal styles of map-making. Reality is always going to be something else, complete and entire, and not actually divided in any of the ways we may talk about.
Reductionism is indeed a subset of the master set of holism, I would argue. But both then stand apart from reality as our models.
apeiron said:Can you state what you actually think Chomsky's theory is here? Summarise its essentials? To be honest, I felt I was always chasing shadows when trying to deal with what Chomsky believes. He had a description of the structure of grammar. Fine. He had a critique of Behaviourism and associative learning. Again fine. But has he ever had a sensible theory of the evolution of human language and thought? I have always felt most definitely not. I can't even see an actual theory there, just some hand-waving coupled to a grumpy refusal to engage with the actual science that has been going on.
apeiron said:Again, reality is certainly "done!". But our models of reality are another matter.
This goes to the OP in that our minds are models of reality. And that modelling keeps progressing. The shift from the informal modelling of speechless animals to the formal modelling of symbol-handling humans is a significant step in the history of reality modelling.
The mind-body "problem" as traditionally posed focuses on the fact that there is "something it is like to be" to be modelling reality. Well, surely it had to be like something . The real question is how has that process of modelling evolved? And once the basics of modelling are understood, the apparent distance between mind and world is no longer a problem but a necessary quality.
If reality is "holistic", then the only way to be an observer of reality is to (pretend) to stand outside it. A separation - an epistemic cut - must be manufactured.
Albuquerque said:...even squids and octopus are capable of symbolic representation through mental mapping of their surroundings, I would say our uniqueness is more related with complexity then with any emergent extra feature...
In symbolic systems of other animals, symbols appear to be linked directly to mind-independent events. The symbols of human language are sharply different. Even in the simplest cases, there is no word-object relation, where objects are mind-independent entities. There is no reference relation, in the technical sense familiar from Frege and Peirce to contemporary externalists. Rather, it appears that we should adopt something like the approach of the seventeenth and eighteenth century cognitive revolution, and the conclusions of Shaftesbury and Hume that the “peculiar nature belonging to” the linguistic elements used to refer is not something external and mind-independent. Rather, their peculiar nature is a complex of perspectives involving Gestalt properties, cause-and-effect, “sympathy of parts” directed to a “common end,” psychic continuity, and other such mental properties. In Hume’s phrase, the “identity, which we ascribe” to vegetables, animal bodies, artifacts, or “the mind of man”—the array of individuating properties— is only a “fictitious one,” established by our “cognoscitive powers,” as they were termed by his seventeenth century predecessors. That is no impediment to interaction, including the special case of communication, given largely shared cognoscitive powers. Rather, the semantic properties of words seem similar in this regard to their phonetic properties. No one is so deluded as to believe that there is a mind-independent object corresponding to the internal syllable [ba], some construction from motion of molecules perhaps, which is selected when I say [ba] and when you hear it. But interaction proceeds nevertheless, always a more-or-less rather than a yes-or-no affair.”
Albuquerque said:...and of course holism and reductionism regard map making, I just accessed the real constrains each approach presents as its implications regarding my own perspective upon minds, there are no citations to be made here...
apeiron said:Unfortunately, this forum does expect you to be able to provide references to back up opinions, to stay on topic, and to write in understandable fashion to boot.
Your choice if you want to play by these minimal standards.
bohm2 said:What science? I thought there is very little science in this area.
If his papers and that of people like Ian Tattersall, Hauser, etc. aren't convincing then it's unlikely that a non-expert like myself can do justice to their arguments but two very good papers giving these arguments are the following:
Apparently the major biological reorganization at the origin of Homo sapiens involved some neural innovation that “exapted” the already highly evolved human brain for symbolic thought. This potential then had to be “discovered” culturally, plausibly through the invention of language. Emergence rather than natural selection is thus implicated in the origin of human symbolic consciousness, a chance coincidence of acquisitions having given rise to an entirely new and unanticipated level of complexity. This observation may undermine claims for “adaptedness” in modern human behaviors.
What exactly this change was, is beyond my expertise to speculate, although numerous suggestions have been made: one intriguing suggestion is that a neural system linking the basal ganglia and other subcortical structures with the cortex, and initially adapted for motor control,
was coopted to cognitive functions (Lieberman, 2006, 2007); another possibility is of a mutation affecting working memory or phonological storage capacity in the prefrontal cortex (Coolidge and Wynn, 2005).
apeiron said:So did you see something critical in the Tattersall paper that I've missed? It's certainly not an argument against the possible importance of the vocal tract as a new constraint on expressive communication, or the likely fine-grain and cumulative nature of any related "brain reorganisation", or the need for the later cultural evolution of language itself, as far as I can see.
The language faculty is one component of what the cofounder of modern evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, called ‘‘man’s intellectual and moral nature’’: the human capacities for creative imagination, language and symbolism generally, mathematics, interpretation and recording of natural phenomena, intricate social practices, and the like, a complex of capacities that seem to have crystallized fairly recently, perhaps a little over 50,000 years ago, among a small breeding group of which we are all descendants—a complex that sets humans apart rather sharply from other animals, including other hominids, judging by traces they have left in the archaeological record. The nature of the ‘‘human capacity,’’ as some researchers now call it, remains a considerable mystery. It was one element of a famous disagreement between the two founders of the theory of evolution, with Wallace holding, contrary to Darwin, that evolution of these faculties cannot be accounted for in terms of variation and natural selection alone, but requires ‘‘some other influence, law, or agency,’’ some principle of nature alongside gravitation, cohesion, and other forces without which the material universe could not exist. Although the issues are framed differently today within the core biological sciences, they have not disappeared (see Wallace 1889: chap. 15, Marshack 1985).
Restriction to this case yields the successor function, from which the rest of the theory of natural numbers can be developed in familiar ways. That suggests a possible answer to a problem that troubled Wallace over a century ago: in his words, that the ‘‘gigantic development of the mathematical capacity is wholly unexplained by the theory of natural selection, and must be due to some altogether distinct cause’’ (1889:467), if only because it remained unused.
Still, it is far more likely that the neurological underpinnings of the human symbolic capacity were born in the major genetic/developmental reorganization that resulted in the physical entity Homo sapiens as we know it today – but that the expression of this underlying capacity had to await release by some cultural (White, 1982) rather than biological acquisition (Tattersall, 2004). This, of course, begs the question of what this cultural acquisition might have been; and it is hardly original to suggest that the prime candidate for the cultural releasing agent of the human symbolic capacity is the invention of language, facilitated by an already existing neural substrate.
apeiron said:Why do you think that? There are journals, conferences, turf battles over whether you belong to paleolinguistics, biolinguistics or historical linguistics. Every semblance of an active academic domain
The most direct potential approaches to such investigation lie in the examination of the fossil and archaeological archives of the human past. Sadly, though, cognition in itself leaves no imprint in the tangible record. As a result, in trying to understand the evolution of our unusual cognitive mode we have to seek proxy systems.
bohm2 said:What confuses me (and maybe I'm mistaken), is if evolution of these abstract faculties was not guided by natural selection but due to natural law, might this explain why we seem to have a much deeper understanding of mind-independent reality than other animals? This is more in line with Peirce's argument and not Chomsky's (e.g. "and if man's mind has been developed under the influence of those laws, it is to be expected that he should have a natural light, or light of nature, or instinctive insight, or genius, tending to make him guess those laws aright, or nearly aright..."). But maybe I'm way off the mark and direct access to some aspect of mind-independent reality is not possible (as Chomsky argues), even if evolution is guided directly by such laws.
apeiron said:I don't think you give near enough weight to the impact of cultural evolution. Langauge opened up an entirely new realm of world-modelling for the human mind. And if you don't find a way to factor this in as part of your view of epistemology, then indeed you may jump to more fantastical reasons why humans are so good at world-modelling.
Humans from ~50k years ago, yes.bohm2 said:You're probably right. Do you think that as species we've evolved at all in the past 50,000 years despite major changes in culture (and I'm not talking about things that are environmental like increase in height/weight, etc.)? I mean if I was to take a human infant from ~50,000 years ago and bring him/her up in today's society would he/she be pretty well like any other human being? Take a Neandethal or a pre-human ancestor and do the same.
Evo said:Humans from ~50k years ago, yes.
They'd have the same abilities, the modern human brain has been around ~50,000 years.bohm2 said:Do you think that an infant from that era that is brought up in modern society would not have the same language/math/science/music abilities/potential, etc as a modern human infant?
bohm2 said:Do you think that as a species we've evolved at all in the past ~50,000 years despite major changes in culture (and I'm not talking about things that are environmental like increase in height/weight, etc.)?
To the extent that new adaptive alleles continued to reflect demographic growth, the Neolithic and later periods would have experienced a rate of adaptive evolution 100 times higher than characterized most of human evolution. Cultural changes have reduced mortality rates, but variance in reproduction has continued to fuel genetic change (51). In our view, the rapid cultural
evolution during the Late Pleistocene created vastly more opportunities for further genetic change, not fewer, as new avenues emerged for communication, social interactions, and creativity.
bohm2 said:What science? I thought there is very little science in this area.
For example, the entire Indo-European language group, including Breton, Danish, Faroese, Gujarati, Hittite, Tadzik, and Waziri which exhibit huge variations in case systems, word order, and phonology, have diverged in just 10,000 years (33). Thus, the “environment” of linguistic conventions changes far more rapidly, and yields far greater diversity (34), than the typical properties of physical and biological environments to which organisms must adapt...
...Thus, a highly intricate and abstract language “module” (5), “instinct” (6) or “organ” (7) postulated to explain language acquisition (7, 39), language universals (7) and the species-specificity of human language (8) could not have arisen through biological adaptation.
Indeed, this conclusion is reinforced by the observation that, had such adaptation occurred in the human lineage, these processes would have operated independently on modern human populations as they spread throughout Africa and the rest of the world during the last 100 kyr. If so, genetic populations should have coevolved to their own language groups, leading to divergent and mutually incompatible language modules (40).
Linguists have found no evidence for this (6). For example, native Australasian populations have been largely isolated for 50 kyr (31), but learn European languages readily.
Although we have shown that arbitrary linguistic properties cannot be genetically encoded through adaptation, this does not preclude genetic adaptation to aspects of language held stable by functional pressures. For example, changes in the vocal apparatus may have arisen from functional pressures to produce more intelligible vocalization, although this point is controversial (48-50).
Although our simulations indicate that some biological adaptations for functional aspects of language could have taken place, we suggest that the close fit between the structure of language and the mechanisms employed to acquire and use it primarily arose because language has been shaped by the brain through cultural evolution. Indeed, the astonishing subtlety and diversity of patterns in human language (34) may for the most part result from the complex interaction of multiple constraints on cultural evolution, deriving from the nature of thought, the perceptuo-motor system, cognitive limitations on learning and processing, and pragmatic/communicative factors (40). Thus, as suggested by Darwin (64), the evolution of human language may be best understood in terms of cultural evolution, not biological adaptation.
apeiron said:Yes, some researchers argue there has actually been faster genetic change during the past 10k than during any earlier period!Gould was one of those who pushed the view that H.sapiens would have been genetically frozen since the cultural revolution 50kya. But the evidence is not supporting him.
apeiron said:This is a nice example of the kind of thing Chomsky has never done.
There is a field called Evolution of language, which has a burgeoning literature, most of which in my view is total nonsense. But anyway, its growing. In fact, it isn't even about evolution of language, its almost entirely speculations about evolution of communication which is a different topic. And its kind of natural topic to look at if your caught up in another myth, a misinterpretation of evolutionary theory, which holds that changes take place only incrementally. Small change, then another small change, and finally you get complex organisms. That was believed at one time, and you can find sentences in darwin... you can quote, that's the bible. But for a long time evolutionary biologists have understood it doesn't work like that. You can have quite sudden changes that, small changes, that lead to huge phenomenal difference. In the area of communication you can mislead yourself into believing that since every organism you can think of, from bacteria to humans, has some kind of communication system, so maybe our communication system us just a slight modification of primates' or whatever you like. But its undoubtedly not true, but at least you can delude yourself into believing it. On the other hand language seems totally separate. These nothing even remotely analogous or nothing at all homologous as far as anyone knows. Theres a few things that look similar, like say songbirds are at such a distance from an evolutionary point of view that its just got to be convergent evolution to the extent that there is a similarity. And there is interesting questions you can study, but only if you take biology in the last 50 years seriously. If you are back to the pop darwinism that you learned in 8th grade that's no good. Anyhow, the fact that there's been no evolution in 50000 years is interesting if anyone really wants to study evolution of language. It raises a lot of questions, but I don't want to get to far from the Poverty of the Stimulus...
bohm2 said:If brought up in today's society they would be able to surf the net and do pretty much everything we can do. Do you disagree with this?