Comment by brockf
15 years ago
If that was true, then why did humans evolve to speak at all? Why, if speech is simply a reaction to statistics we are tracking and behaviours that have been rewarded, would the first utterances have been made? And how do we make completely novel utterances that attempt to express our otherwise abstract thoughts?
> Why, if speech is simply a reaction to statistics we are tracking and behaviours that have been rewarded, would the first utterances have been made?
Why not? Look at it from the bottom up:
Communication is a fundament of life, from intra-cellular to inter-cellular to inter-organism interactions (another fundament is the ability to keep oneself in a low entropy state, at the expense of the rest of the world).
Human speech is an evolution of mammal communication. It grew up in complexity, from grunts and other basic noises, along with our way of living, up to what we have now.
> And how do we make completely novel utterances that attempt to express our otherwise abstract thoughts?
Speech is a big collage. New is either the result of
* a recombination of the sub-parts of past speech
* the definition of a new word in terms of older words, or sometimes arbitrarily (for proper nouns).
Nothing fancy AFAICT.
There's a big difference between "grunts and basic noises" and language. Or at least, that's my opinion. In this same line, I don't believe dogs/monkeys/birds/bees have language, despite the ability to communicate.
This view is just to simplistic to hold its weight when you really look at the intricacies of language and its evolutionary history which, by the way, I would suggest comes from manual gesture and not grunting.
> There's a big difference between "grunts and basic noises" and language. Or at least, that's my opinion. In this same line, I don't believe dogs/monkeys/birds/bees have language, despite the ability to communicate. This view is just to simplistic to hold its weight when you really look at the intricacies of language and its evolutionary history which, by the way, I would suggest comes from manual gesture and not grunting.
Mu![1]
But you're probably right about gestures.
Wild chimps have a vocabulary of about 66 signs. We can also observe tribes with languages more primitive than ours (no pronouns, for example). But there's a missing link of several millions of years of evolution between both.
What are the (known) intricacies of the evolution of our ability to communicate?
There's no definitive proof for the statistical argument, but a growing amount of (neuro)scientific evidence points to it. What's (are) your alternative hypothese(s)?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21533821
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Why, if speech is simply a reaction to statistics we are tracking and behaviours that have been rewarded, would the first utterances have been made?
That criticism can be lobbed at all abilities that we claim came about due to evolution - which, to be clear, is all of them. The statistical model would be the mechanism, but it wouldn't be the reason why it evolved. That answer is relatively boring, and is the same one as all evolutionary processes: it appeared randomly from mutation, and it provided benefit to those that had it.
"That answer is relatively boring, and is the same one as all evolutionary processes: it appeared randomly from mutation, and it provided benefit to those that had it."
Not just boring, but a totally banal and useless answer.
What kinds of mutations? In what sequence? How did it provide a survival benefit? What were the earlier forms of language like, and how did they become the languages spoken today?
Just saying "evolution did it" is about as informative as saying "God did it."
Excellent questions! That I hope someone will investigate. But brockf seemed skeptical that it was even possible for there to be an evolutionary process that produced humans with a statistical-learning-engine in their brains for language. Which I find curious, since - and this is my point - the same can be said for everything that is a result of evolutionary processes. That is, his complaint has nothing to do with language and statistical processoes. The same complaint could be lobbed at eyes.
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