a super(b) paper on human evolution
Lise Menn
lise.menn at colorado.edu
Wed Aug 10 22:08:25 UTC 2005
I think a major reason for the failure of people to 'not understand
the methods' of science is that science teachers up until graduate
school (and even then) - that is, the overwhelming amount of teaching
received by the population - teach students about the FACTS - which
is what they will be tested on - and pay at most a little lip
service to how those 'facts' were discovered and how they came to be
accepted as facts. We (that is, Funkfolk) all know how roughly far
the earth is from the sun, but I for one have never read anything
about how that number, or rather range of numbers, was established,
whether people argued about the methods, whether the first person who
proposed that it was about 93 million miles was expelled from his
professional society (or if it was a woman, what happened when she
tried to get that number taken seriously) and so on...
So if science (including our own) is generally taught by tacit
appeal to authority, how could anyone not in the game see a real
difference between science and professions of faith?
Lise Menn
On Aug 10, 2005, at 11:12 AM, Tom Givon wrote:
>
> I think the argument is really not about ID, nor about evolution.
> It is about
> science. And having heard an earful about ID I cannot, try as I might,
> differentgiate it from the general, concerted, well finance attack
> on science in
> this country (US). This attack is not only on science, but on the
> Enlightenment's rational methods of inquiry in general. And makes,
> on occasion,
> for some strage bedfellows: Fundamentalist Christians, rabid Jihadis,
> relativist-humanist academics; and occasionally, sad to see,
> scientists who may
> know some or even many facts but don't understand the method by
> which, over
> time, laboriously, haltingly and never infallibly, hypotheses
> gradually acquire
> the firmer staus of 'facts'. In science nothing is in principle
> forever. But
> repeated failures to falsify is what makes facts, like 'this table'
> or my
> 'left-hand's thumb', appear solid. Y'all be good y'hear. TG
>
> ====================
>
> Noel Rude wrote:
>
>
>> 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
>>>
>
>
Lise Menn Office: 303-492-1609
Linguistics Dept. Fax 303-413-0017
295 UCB
University of Colorado
Boulder CO 80309-0295
lise.menn at colorado.edu
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