Part 1 & Prologue: Just Another Species of Big Mammal

MadArchitect · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 5:28 pm Post subject: Re: difference

Along those lines (though not exactly pertinent), Michael Pollan mentioned that rats are useful in laboratory testing precisely because they're omnivorous, and thus have a lot of the same neurological and gastrointestinal dispositions as humans.

Loricat · Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2007 5:21 pm Post subject: Re: Grandparenting

Mr. P: Regarding the Neanderthal lack of innovation, can it be, as Diamond suggests (pg 44), due to their short lifespan, or was it lack of innovation that did not help to increase their life-span?

Both, I would say. I think the point he's making is that we ended up with long lives because we needed to live longer, to improve. Basic social structures -- care of each other, burial, basic control over fire -- would be ongoing needs. Why weren't they 'improved upon' over the generations? Maybe if you only knew what your mother could teach you, if she could only teach you what her mother taught her...maybe even the thought of innovation would be foreign. "This is the what we do" is a different thought than "This is the way we do it" -- leaving open the possibility of other ways... (I'm just playing with the idea here -- any thoughts?)

Plus, if an enormous challenge came along every second generation that had to be overcome, having the knowledge of a previous generation would enable the energy to be put into making a tool or procedure better, instead of just 'reinventing the wheel' each time. So, maybe the women found themselves attracted to the men who had had parents who lived just that little bit longer, who had just that little bit extra knowledge, who'd been able to pass something on from their parents...

Maybe that's why I find intelligence sexier than smoldering dark eyes and a broad chest. (Or as Ernie Cline puts it in his hilarious spoken word rant Nerd Porn Auteur, "Guys who know that the sexiest thing in the world is a woman who is smarter than you are!" Seriously, if you haven't checked this guy's stuff out, go and listen.)

"All beings are the owners of their deeds, the heirs to their deeds."

Loricat's Book Nook
Celebrating the Absurd

enjoyabled · Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 10:55 pm Post subject: Re: comments and responses

Hi everyone
I am new here but hope to be as curious and full of opinions as the rest of you.
:-)
Let me toss my few cents into the thinking well:

On Grandparents:
How would that have actually worked, especially if, as I understand it, Diamond feels that language has not been invented yet?
Do the grandparents free up resources?
Or are they able to tend to children or to make tools while the rest of the band is out and about?
Perhaps grandparents are a sign of success, an attainment of a life style that does not push the human body to the limit.
Or that the band has the Resources to care for them.
Or that the bands have achieved resistance to certain diseases?

On DNA matching:
I think all of this is in a scientific area undergoing rapid change.
The genome of the sea urchin was recently published, and it too shares a remarkable number of certain genes with the higher mammals, in spite of a huge difference in appearance.
I am not sure that percentage of genes shared by humans is by itself a good criteria.
An atmosphere poisoned by radiation might share 99.9% of the composition of a healthy atmosphere, but it is significantly different.

And, as Diamond himself points out (55), there are few facts on the ground.
We are in a world of fantasy and speculation.
Even a trained archaeologist does not have enough facts to determine the issue conclusively.
The facts provide the current fences for playground of our imagination.

But why do we even care?
We would not be as involved if this book were about the evolution of the sea urchin.
We think our evolution may provide us with insight into ourselves.
Given our spotty and completely irrational record on war and overpopulation, we need some understanding of our own irrationalities.
It is plausible to think there is a chimpanzee within.

Loricat · Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 8:45 pm Post subject: Re: comments and responses

Ah...our 'inner chimp' -- an idea that can excuse a lot of bad behaviour. $:\$

It's an interesting equation you brought up, enjoyabled. How much value does an older person have to provide to a group to allow for them to consume resources, and not be a drain?

I was just watching the BBC mini-series, Children of Dune, and among the desert people in Herbert's books, it's my understanding that those who become blind, or seriously infirm, are expected to go out into the desert to die. It's a common SF story line -- those who can no longer contribute are 'given the knife'...I wonder how/if it was played out with early hominids. Would we ever know?

"All beings are the owners of their deeds, the heirs to their deeds."

Loricat's Book Nook
Celebrating the Absurd

minority mandate · Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 12:12 am Post subject: Neanderthal innovation

Apparently not only the Neanderthal, but none of the predicessors of modern man, including his immediate ancestors, were very innovative. There were few technological advances for millions of years. About 50,000 years ago some kind of mutation seems to have led to the use of language and hence to interchange of knowledge in sophisticated ways that had not previously been available.

George Ricker · Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 2:24 pm Post subject: Re: Neanderthal innovation

I suspect part of the reason for that is our human ancestors had to lay quite a bit of ground work before language could emerge.

Consider the gulf that had to be bridged--from the vocalizations and cries of earlier primates to the abstract concepts and symbolization of language. We really did have to learn a whole new way to think about things. It would be fascinating to track the developments from the time we first acquired the mechanical ability for more sophisticated speech, through the earliest inarticulate noises, to the discovery of name-words and meanings, to the idea that words could represent not only the things we saw but the things we imagined and felt, to the realization that words could work together with other words and some ways of putting them together were better than others. And we haven't yet got to full-blown language.

So I think there probably was more going on than we realize.

I also think Diamond is on target in identifying the development of language as one of the chief enablers of the "great leap forward" he talks about.

The Third Chimpanzee is a marvelous piece of work. Jared Diamond has a genuine talent for synthesizing knowledge from a variety of fields and putting it together in ways that make sense. We need more writers with that ability.

George

"Godlessness is not about denying the existence of nonsensical beings. It is the starting point for living life without them."

Godless in America by George A. Ricker

Edited by: garicker at: 2/9/07 11:50 am

MadArchitect · Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 5:05 pm Post subject: Re: Neanderthal innovation

One of the biggest gaps to bridge was probably the capacity to associate an auditory signal with an idea. I don't think we recognize how novel a thing that really is. The word "people" has always struck me as kind of funny-sounding, so it's one of those words that can easily atune me to how bizarre it is that we associate a given set of sounds with a) something physical and tangible, and further b) some abstraction conceived by imagining the physical and tangible in a context that is not immediately present to us. The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer has some very interesting things to say on that matter, cf. "An Essay on Man".

George Ricker · Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 8:10 pm Post subject: Re: Neanderthal innovation

Mad: One of the biggest gaps to bridge was probably the capacity to associate an auditory signal with an idea. I don't think we recognize how novel a thing that really is.

I suspect the gap was bridged by more than one individual and probably spread like wildfire once our ancestors got the hang of it. But what a leap that was--a genuine "eureka" moment, one of the evolutionary "good tricks" that Daniel Dennett writes about.

It's a fascinating subject. Maybe instead of "thinking" man, the sobriquet should have been "speaking" man. Of course, one hopes thought will accompany speech, but all too often it does not.

George

"Godlessness is not about denying the existence of nonsensical beings. It is the starting point for living life without them."

Godless in America by George A. Ricker

Edited by: garicker at: 2/9/07 11:51 am

Loricat · Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 2:06 am Post subject: Re: Neanderthal innovation

(ooh, linguistics. My favourite!)

So, how do you all feel about the theories that human language acquisition was similar to how a child acquires language today?

Born with thoughts, undefined, followed by intake of a lot of stimuli -- sights, sounds, some with linguistic meaning, some with other kinds of meaning, some with none. Then the first attempts at communicating -- sounds alone (and in an order of, to simplify, easiest to produce to harder, front of the mouth to back), then words alone -- often standing in for whole groups ('dog' to refer to dogs, cats, horses, cows). Then words grouped in the simplest of grammars (here there's the parallel with the pidgin trade languages), then the slow but steady acquisition of the complex grammar of the native tongue.

Language is an amazing thing. And whatever it is that we humans have, our children seem to be born with it. Any child can learn any language, given the input of interactive stimuli. If you speak English to your child, your partner speaks Romanian, your daytime babysitter only speaks Spanish, and you send your child to a French school...chances are, after a period of some linguistic confusion, your child will have the basis of all 4 languages.

One interesting idea about child language acquisition is that kids do not learn from negative evidence. Which means, you can't correct a child's grammar. They just don't hear it. They'll generalize a rule "He see'ed the dog", and until they learn the exception to that rule, they'll ignore any attempts on the part of parents to correct it. "Honey, he saw the dog." "That's what I said, he see'ed the dog."

I wonder how that fits into the idea of early human language acquisition?

"All beings are the owners of their deeds, the heirs to their deeds."

Loricat's Book Nook
Celebrating the Absurd

George Ricker · Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 8:31 pm Post subject: Re: Neanderthal innovation

Loricat: So, how do you all feel about the theories that human language acquisition was similar to how a child acquires language today?

I'm a bit skeptical. A human child born today comes into an environment in which language and language usage are the norm. It also benefits from a certain amount of programming that has occurred over tens of thousands of years as our species has learned about words and how to use them.

Of course, this is all very speculative.

We know that most animal species communicate through various postures, vocalizations and the like. Primates, particularly those other chimps we are related to, are very expressive in the range of sounds and gestures they make to convey wants and emotions.

Once our distant ancestors had begun to use bipedal motion, vocalizations and hand motions were probably the first types of communication. At some point we evolved a voice-box that allowed for a greater range of sounds, hence more distinctive communications.

Then came the big leap of associating certain sounds with objects. This would have been followed by a relatively long period of enrichment as various sounds were added to the human "vocabulary." At the same time our brains were getting better at differentiating between the various sounds and identifying them. At some point we made the great leap to concept formation, to the idea of ideas. But I suspect a long period of development would have been necessary before we got to that point.

Then we would have begun to develop a vocabulary that was closer to the sort of vocabularies we use today. At the same time we would have learned about how to put words together and combine them to convey even more complex meanings.

I think all of this groundwork would have had to have been completed before Diamond's "great leap forward."

Language was humankind's great gift to itself. But I think the process by which we acquired it must have been fundamentally different than the process by which human children learn it today.

After all, our ancestors had to make it up as they went along.

But, I say again, this is all speculation on my part.

George

"Godlessness is not about denying the existence of nonsensical beings. It is the starting point for living life without them."

Godless in America by George A. Ricker


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