a super(b) paper on human evolution

Noel Rude nrude at Ballangrud.com
Tue Aug 9 21:37:10 UTC 2005


Right on--agree!

Also ... real scientists are always optimists, as Sheldon Glashow eloquently
argues in a book I have--that is, scientists who actually construct great
theories always know instinctively, in spite of all evidence to the
contrary, that things are knowable and that beauty is a guide to the right
theory.  I count you as one of those real scientists.  But thinkers need
critics and so let me affirm my skepticism with the following four points:

1) Anthropic Phenomena--as many physicists are now coming to see and as
Martin Rees (as good an atheist as any) points out in "Just Six Numbers",
anyone who believes that the laws of physics are contingent (not Platonic)
has only two choices: Design or Many Worlds.  My physicist son-in-law jokes
that he sees the day coming when the teacher will say, "Now, Johnny, you can
doubt Many Worlds privately, but the Supreme Court has ruled that we may not
question the theory in physics class."

2) Origin of Life--need I say anything here?

3) Origin of Species--Darwin's theory was offered as a materialistic
explanation of evolution (which was discovered by creationists), but he as
most who have followed tend to argue that evolution has occurred and
therefore the theory is vindicated.  Many of us who doubt Darwin have no
problem with the age of the earth, the geologic record, genetics,
microbiology, or evolution.  We simply have profound doubts that the chance
and necessity of the Darwinists is adequate for the job.  As you know, it
isn't just the despised fundamentalists who share this view.  Quite a few
mathematicians have ruled it impossible, as at the Wistar Institute back (if
I remember correctly) in the late Sixties.  A fun critic is the agnostic
(and thus no adherent of Intelligent Design) David Berlinski.

4) The Mind--so far there simply are no credible theories of mind.  The best
we can do is declare that free will and consciousness are illusions, or that
they somehow "emerge" or "supervene" on a complex computational or
stimulus-response mechanism.  As Jacques Monod clarified in the 1960s,
epistimological materialism admits only chance (as in quantum uncertainty or
random mutations) and necessity (physical law, natural selection) as
explanatory.  The age old explanation of design must be rejected a priori.
But how long must we go with no credible theory of consciousness/free will
before we are allowed to invoke agency as elemental?  All scientific theory
hangs on metaphysical premises or "sky-hooks".  Design was one of these
until the Deists of the Enlightenment ruled it out of the cosmos and Darwin
proposed his theory.  A good argmnent can be made that it isn't logic and
empirical evidence that drives Darwinism but rather a profound fear of the
Religious Right.

Nevertheless I suspect that as more and more bright thinkers come to accept
design (and it is hard to deny that this isn't in the works--otherwise why
the hysterics?) we will see great breakthroughs across many disciplines in
science.

But I rattle on rather irritatingly, I'm sure.  Y'all take care and don't
dispair,

Noel


----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Givon" <tgivon at uoregon.edu>
To: <Mike_Cahill at sil.org>
Cc: "Orbell, John" <jorbell at uoregon.edu>; <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>;
"Heine, Bernd" <bernd.heine at uni-koeln.de>;
<funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu>; "Bickerton, Derek"
<derbick at hawaii.rr.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2005 8:07 AM
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] a super(b) paper on human evolution




Mike's question is to the point. When we discuss language evolution, we are
honor-bound to concede that  making testable predictions is--at the
moment--hard to come by, much harder than in physics or biology. Being an
incipient (if well-disguised)  optimist, I think that some day we will be
able
to make testable predictions. But they are not going to be exactly of the
same
kind (thus, perhaps, alas,validity?) as predictions one can make about
'hard-wired' bio-evolution. In biology, one can already manipulate  both
mutation & selection. In linguistics, one cannot, and maybe never will be
able
to. But predictions can also involve complex, indirect if-then inferences,
and
I think some day, with a bit more ingenuity (and a richer theory) we might
be
able to make test such prediction. At the moment we must concede we are at
the
hypothesis-formation stage, groping for a theory that WILL make predictions.
If you want to do science in the  complex area of culture, behavior and
cognition, you have to be a bit smarter than the physicists. The most
interesting potential science--of mind--is surely the most difficult. So the
odds of scoring big are lower, but the prize is surely worth it.  And since
when is difficulty a reason to quit?  Best, TG

================

Mike_Cahill at sil.org wrote:

> A question on Tom's hypotheses, repeated below:
>
> "Here are some quantifiable hypotheses:
>    (i) All other things being equal, typological features that are more
> widely attested
>         cross-languages may appear earlier in evolution.
>    (ii) Typological features that are more frequent in live communication
> may
>          appear earlier in evolution.
>    (iii) In Grammaticalization  Chains, earlier stages, those that tend to
> be 'source
>          constructions', may have also evolved earlier.
>     (iv) Likewise in morphemic development, concrete lexical senses have
> most likely
>           evolved before more abstract, metaphoric and/or grammatical,
> uses.
>     (v) Communicative behavior (function) most likely has preceded
> grammaticalization
>           (structure) in evolution."
>
> These may be quantifiable (in the sense that one might develop a
> hypothetical numerical model), but how can they be testable, given that
> we're talking about the emergence of language features that arose before
> writing, and are presumably undatable? And if not testable, then how
> valuable are they?
>
> Mike Cahill
>
> Tom Givon <tgivon at uoregon.edu>
> Sent by: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu
>
> 08/08/2005 01:42 PM
>
> Dear FUNK people,
>
> As some of you may know, I am a slow reader & live out in the boonies.
> So it took me a while to get to a superb (tho long & complicated) paper
> on human evolution that I would like to alert y'all to. It is of great
> interest first in term of general evolution (human or otherwise), but
> also in terms of its profound implications for an eventual
> undedrstanding of  language evolution. The full  reference is: S.
> McBrearty & A. Brooks (2000)  "The revoluition that wasn't: A new
> interpretation of the origins of modern human behavior", J. of Human
> Evolution, vol. 39, pp. 453-563. It is a careful, massively-documented
> re-evaluation of the henceforth prevalent model of  a "Modern Human
> Revolution", reputed to have occurred ca. 40k BC. According to that
> 'revolutionary' model (see summary in C. Li, 2002), all 'modern human
> behavioral traits' (complex tool btechnology, complex social structure,
> organized domestic space, expanded ecological range, sophistacated
> hunting, trade networks, art, symbolic behavior & by inference "language
> as we know it now") emerged suddenly, in Europe (Cromagnon Man) without
> apparent gradual development. The paper reviews the archaoeological
> evidence--skeletal, ecological, nutritional, artefactual--in  Africa and
> Europe, as well as the behavioral implications that can be drawn from
> the physical evidence.
>
> Some of the main conclusions drawn there are: (1) the development of
> 'modern human traits' already occured in  Africa, gradually, and is
> attested there as early as 300,000 BC. (2) The apparent discontinuity in
> the European archaeological records is due to repeated out-of-Africa
> migrations & subsequent extinctions (glaciation). (3) The graduality was
> not only a matter of cultural evolution, but also of the existence of
> many sub-variants of 'early'  homo sapiens in Africa. That is--as
> elsewhere in biology & diachrony--graduality & variation go
> hand-in-hand. (4) As elsewhere in biological & cultural evolution  (cf.
> many works by E. Mayr & the recent book by Boyd & Richerson), there was
> no firm boundary between biological (genetic) and behavioral (cultural)
> evolution. Rather (to paraphrase Mayr), "behavior is the pacemaker of
> evolution".
>
> The implications of the McBrearty/Brooks paper to the evolution of
> language are many & fairly obvious. (1) Out of the windows goes the
> Chomsky/Gould revolutionay model of sudden emergence. (2) Both lexical
> and grammatical development lend themselves quite naturally to a
> gradualistic model. (3) With a certain amount of caution (see critical
> article by Dan Slobin in our recent TSL volume "The Evolution of
> Language out of Pre-Language" [2002] and my  response to it in the same
> volume), one could infer from the non-evolutionary developmental data
> accessible to us now (child learning, pidginization, diachrony) some
> possible gradual courses of both vocabulary & grammar evolution. These
> inference may follow, in the main, suggestions made in Givon (1979) and
> Bickerton (1981) about the "fossils of language". But there is more
> possible room for treating gradual evolution seriously & responsibly.
> Here are some quantifiable hypotheses:
>    (i) All other things being equal, typological features that are more
> widely attested
>         cross-languages may appear earlier in evolution.
>    (ii) Typological features that are more frequent in live
> communication may
>          appear earlier in evolution.
>    (iii) In Grammaticalization  Chains, earlier stages, those that tend
> to be 'source
>          constructions', may have also evolved earlier.
>     (iv) Likewise in morphemic development, concrete lexical senses have
> most likely
>           evolved before more abstract, metaphoric and/or grammatical,
> uses.
>     (v) Communicative behavior (function) most likely has preceded
> grammaticalization
>           (structure) in evolution.
>
> Since abstraction and complexity in both vocabulary and grammar are a
> matter of degree, and since the semantic space (of vocabulary) and
> discourse-pragmatic space (of grammar) are complex & multi-dimentional,
> graduality in evolution, acquisition and diachrony is probably the norm.
> This brings language and culture back into line with the rest of the
> biologically-based universe, where variation, behavioral exploration and
> gradual emergence are the norm.
>
> I hope this is not too far out for y'all. But if we are ever to come up
> with a viable theoretical perspective on language, a
> developmental-diachronic-evolutionary framework is, it seems to me, the
> only way to go.
>
> Best,  TG



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