{"id":7898,"date":"2016-03-02T06:27:44","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T06:27:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=7898"},"modified":"2016-03-02T06:27:44","modified_gmt":"2016-03-02T06:27:44","slug":"code-of-the-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/code-of-the-humans\/","title":{"rendered":"Code of the humans"},"content":{"rendered":"

New book by Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick explores how people acquired unique language skills.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\u201cWhy<\/a>
\u201cWhy Only Us: Language and Evolution\u201d (MIT Press), by Robert C. Berwick (top left) and Noam Chomsky (bottom left)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.<\/strong> —\u00a0For many years, researchers tried to teach other kinds of animals some human language. Chimps, dolphins, gorillas \u2014 it didn\u2019t seem to matter which animals they tried. Few experiments were regarded as success stories.<\/span><\/p>\n

Small children, however, learn whichever language they are taught, and abundant evidence points toward the universality of human language. Platoons of linguists have detailed strong syntactical similarities among the world\u2019s tongues. And biologists have begun to identify some of the genes involved in the development of speech and possibly language.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHuman language is a generative system that determines an infinite set of possible semantic objects,\u201d says Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at MIT.<\/span><\/p>\n

[pullquote]The hardest question to answer, it seems, is why humans should have a uniquely unbounded language.[\/pullquote]<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople don\u2019t realize how uniform the human population is,\u201d adds Robert C. Berwick, a computer scientist at MIT. \u201cWe\u2019re all very alike as humans, and this language capacity is incredibly uniform. If you take a baby from Southern Africa and put it in Beijing, they\u2019ll speak Chinese.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Now Berwick and Chomsky have collaborated on a new book on the topic, \u201cWhy Only Us?<\/span><\/a>,\u201d published on March 1 by the MIT Press, which explores the grand riddles of human language \u2014 what makes it unique, as well as where, when, why, and how humans acquired a distinctive, language capacity of nonpareil sophistication.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Out of Blombos?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The questions of when and where human language emerged are probably the simplest to grapple with. Like some other scholars, Berwick and Chomsky think the emergence of symbolic behavior is a guidepost indicating when human language developed. The Blombos cave artifacts in South Africa, comprising engravings and beads that are 80,000 years old, are a possible landmark. Modern humans arose about 200,000 years ago, so the development of our language capacity most likely falls in between those two points in time. Still, Chomsky notes how \u201cthin the empirical record is\u201d on this count.<\/span><\/p>\n

Precisely what evolved, Berwick and Chomsky contend, is what Chomsky calls \u201cMerge:\u201d the human cognitive capacity to take any two things that we now recognize as sentence elements, and combine them into a new, more complex, hierarchically structured phrase.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn its simplest terms, the Merge operation is just set formation,\u201d the authors write. But if it sounds simple, this operation is precisely what allows human language to be infinite; there is absolutely no limit on the number of sentences we can form.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are some other things that mark human language as distinct, so far as we know \u2014 for instance, our statements do not have to make reference to the external world. But the unbounded nature of language appears crucial at all times.<\/span><\/p>\n

If so, how did such a powerful capability emerge in people? Berwick and Chomsky suggest it resulted from not a giant evolutionary leap but a modest evolutionary step that turned out to be very useful.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re arguing is that there was probably a very small change which had large effects,\u201d Chomsky says. In the book as well, the authors suggest our language capacity was \u201cthe result of a minor mutation\u201d in genomic terms that had far-reaching changes in our capacities.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEvolution has [often] assembled lots of other parts that enable a whole host of other behaviors that you didn\u2019t have before,\u201d Berwick observes. \u201cIt [the language capacity] is standard in that kind of picture. It\u2019s fully compatible with what a Darwinian might have thought.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He adds: \u201cWe\u2019re getting more and more of an understanding of the genomic basis for some of these traits, but it\u2019s extremely challenging to work out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The real leap: intentional, conceptual thoughts<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The hardest question to answer, it seems, is why humans should have a uniquely unbounded language. Or, to put it another way, what purpose did language play that made it a useful trait in evolutionary terms?<\/span><\/p>\n

Berwick and Chomsky, following decades of work and theorizing by Chomsky, do not believe that language evolved primarily as a form of communication. Rather, it is an offshoot of the development of our cognitive capacities \u2014 an \u201cinner mental tool,\u201d as they write, at the interface of intentional thought and the ability to think conceptually.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this sense, \u201cMerge would be just like any other \u2018internal\u2019 trait that boosted selective advantage,\u201d they write, something that would be helpful in planning, making inferences, and other basic capacities.<\/span><\/p>\n

That said, Berwick and Chomsky readily acknowledge they do not possess a full hypothesis explaining how people developed the capacity for having those abstract conceptual thoughts in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no explanation of where those come from,\u201d Berwick says. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe nature of elementary human concepts, such as table or chair, is unknown, and what\u2019s striking about them is that they\u2019re radically different than anything in the animal world,\u201d Chomsky says. \u201cIt\u2019s very different from other animals.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And Berwick and Chomsky note that they hope to inspire further research, potentially integrating neuroscience to a growing extent, in addition to proposing answers to these scientific mysteries.<\/span><\/p>\n

Or, as they write, \u201ca vast array of language phenomena remain unexplained and even barely examined, but the picture sketched here seems to us the most plausible one we have, and one that offers many opportunities for fruitful research and inquiry.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many years, researchers tried to teach other kinds of animals some human language. Chimps, dolphins, gorillas \u2014 it didn\u2019t seem to matter which animals they tried.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":7899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-social-science"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",639,426,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",639,426,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",639,426,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",639,426,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",600,400,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",600,400,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",639,426,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",540,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",95,63,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",639,426,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/MIT-Why-Us_0.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Research<\/a> Social Science<\/a>","tag_info":"Social Science","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}