Episode AI notes
- Language is a unique form of communication that involves arbitrary symbols and shared interpretive agreement.
- Icons and indices are conventionalized forms of communication that rely on similarity or correlation, respectively.
- Humans interpret language in an abstract way, while other species tend to interpret it indexically.
- The ability to learn correlations is a key function of the brain, shaped by evolution.
- Early symbolic communication may have resembled rituals with iconic and indexical features.
- Language development is the result of accumulated biases and changes in brain connectivity over 2 million years of evolution.
- Immaturity can be an advantage in language learning, as demonstrated by bonobos and children.
- Humans have limitations in visual memory compared to chimpanzees.
- The human brain is not the largest, but the largest among primates of the same body size.
- Human brain development diverges from other primates, mirroring the gestational period in the first year.
- Neural plasticity allows for adaptation and specialization in language processing.
- Language affects neurological learning and behavior, influencing genetic support.
- Organisms tend to lose abilities if they can be acquired with less effort from outside sources.
- The dominance of language has led to the degradation of innate vocalizations.
- The co-evolutionary dance between language and the brain began after crossing the symbolic threshold.
- The transition to human-sized brains took place over a million and a half years.
- Stone tools appeared around 2.5 million years ago and became associated with slightly enlarged brains.
- Cooperation and communication were necessary for the transition to a new kind of foraging.
- Language development and brain evolution are intricately linked in human evolution. (Time 0:00:00)
Íconos, índices, símbolos y sus diferencias Transcript: Speaker 1 I titled my book the Symbolic Species, in part because I argued that in effect there’s something special about the way language represents things in the world and represents our own States and our own beliefs and our own intentions. And that difference, I think, is also troublesome because the word symbol has been used in so many different ways. It’s sometimes been used as just sort of the arbitrary term we use for any sign, any thing that stands for something else. But I think mostly we use it to talk about a very special kind of communication, which sometimes is described as arbitrary representations. Whereas representations, things that communicate by virtue of likeness, called icons, things that communicate by virtue of their sort of symptomatic correlation with things we Call indices. Symbols lack those things most of the time. And it’s not just that they’re conventional, not just that they’re set up by agreement sort of between individuals, whether different organisms or different people. But it’s that both their form and their way of referring are conventional. That is they’re set up by virtue of some kind of shared interpretive agreement. And it makes them much, much different. And as a result, language refers to things in the world in a very different way. And because they’re not connected directly with things in the world, they can refer by virtue of things that have happened in the past, things that are possible, things that are impossible, Things that don’t exist. We can communicate about that. Whereas if the way of communicating is always associated with something that has the same form or is somehow physically related to something else, you’re sort of stuck in the present. It makes it hard to communicate about things that are in the past or could happen in the future. (Time 0:05:47)
Íconos e índices Transcript: Speaker 1 I want to be clear that you can have conventionalized icons and conventionalized symbols. We have them all the time. So a conventionalized icon might be that sort of smiling face we make with colons and parentheses in our text. It’s made with components that are symbolic, but it communicates by virtue of its similarity to something, to a smiling face. But a lot of perception is iconic. We recognize things because they share form. And one thing can stand for something else by virtue of shared form, including, including for example, the smiling face. That’s an icon. And so in a sense, it’s the simplest and probably the most common form of representations. All perception works this way. Indices are things that represent other things by virtue of their connection to them in some form or other. So a simple form might be that a hiccup or a cough communicates something about my state because it’s physically associated with it. The smoke that we might smell is associated with something burning. And therefore it communicates to us by virtue of its correlation with something that burns. (Time 0:08:07)
Símbolos son arbitrarios, convencionales y requieren de interpretación Transcript: Speaker 1 And so this is another interesting feature that things that are symbols will also have oftentimes iconic features. They’re like other things. Indexical features that correlate with other things, but they also require something else in interpretation. The thing itself is not enough. Its correlations are not enough. Its likenesses are not enough. You need some sort of agreed upon interpretation, shared interpretive features. And that’s the difference between this white smoke and the dark smoke coming up from the Vatican. Symbols on the other hand, which is that feature of the difference between the light smoke and the dark smoke. Notice how much more is there. Looking just at the smoke, all of the information carried by smoke itself, whether light or dark smoke, is not sufficient. There is nothing in that side vehicle that provides the symbolic meaning. That’s something that is in the interpreters alone. (Time 0:10:15)
Animales no acceden al nivel simbólico, sólo pueden procesar el lenguaje como índices Transcript: Speaker 1 And when my dog hears the same word. It interprets it indexical. When I say, you know, walk, my dog immediately knows that walk is associated with something that’s likely to happen. It doesn’t know that I’m talking about this device that I cook things in. It doesn’t know that I’m talking about something that happened a day ago, two days ago, or might happen tomorrow. It’s interpreted indexically. Like it’s associated with something that’s likely to happen right now. And so my dog gets excited about it. However, we’re talking about walks. And of course, it has nothing to do with anything that’s likely to happen today between us or that I’m about to do in some time in the near future. I’ve now been able to pull it out of that sort of immediate context. In part, because now the word walk doesn’t have that indexical association. My argument is that for some reason, species other than ourselves tend to interpret words that we produce only indexically. They can’t for some reason cross that threshold to see them as referring to things in this sort of abstract way that words like walk can refer. (Time 0:14:32)
animales homo_sapiens interpretación lenguaje
Evolución esculpe cerebros diseñados para aprendizaje correlacional (índices) Transcript: Speaker 1 In the first case, the case with animals we’re talking about, this basically conditioning like that is about indexical relations. It’s creating an indexical relation. Now, what’s interesting is that think about a rat in a Skinner box that sees a light go on and once it learns the association between lights going on and I can push a button to get a drink Of water. That’s really an arbitrary association. There is nothing about light going on that says it’s about water. But what the rat has learned is that it’s correlated, the two are correlated. It’s learned an indexical relation. Now, the experimenter created that association. It’s not a sort of natural association in the world, but because rats can learn, but their learning is an indexical relation. And much of learning is about indexicality. In fact, it’s one of the things that evolution has built brains to do well. Brains recognize correlations and learn them because that’s how we get along in the world. We need to know what causal features linked with other causal features. (Time 0:16:38)
La discontinuidad en la evolución del lenguaje. Transcript: Speaker 1 But the way we use it to represent is really quite different. Realizing that there were no simple languages in the world. Now it became a problem and it became a problem for two reasons. One, then it said, look, there’s something fundamentally different. That there’s a real difference in this, the symbolic difference in my thinking. But also it undermines our ability to use this standard capacity that we biologists love, which is to have this sort of graded sequence of some process that we can say, oh, here it’s getting Better and better and better. And we can see that it’s adapted to this new function. And it was just sort of this incremental transition. Now I think historically, or evolutionarily, there had to have been an incremental process in our evolution, which we got to become better and better interpreters of this. Internalized some of these capacities more effectively. But clearly there had to be a point also where there were simple languages, something like a simple language. I think that we need to sort of get away from the ways we think about language now to answer that question. (Time 0:20:57)
Un pronto lenguaje puede haber sido similar a lo que ocurre en los rituales Transcript: Speaker 1 Clearly there had to be a point also where there were simple languages, something like a simple language. I think that we need to sort of get away from the ways we think about language now to answer that question. And I think it would probably be much more like what today we would call a ritual. Rituals have iconic and indexical features. You pantomine things, you act things out. They have, you know, so iconic features with what they represent. We might need to bring people together or people and objects together in certain ways that have indexical features. Or in fact, you know, I might act as though I’m going to strike someone or do something, which indicates something that might have happened or might happen. And yet we also use ritual to communicate things that are abstract about the future. One of my favorite ones is, of course, marriage rituals that we find throughout the world. Well, guess one of the things we have to do is to communicate to a population. And this doesn’t, not easy to see if we do it on paper, but in most parts of the world where we actually see ceremonies involved in this. What you’re doing is you’re communicating a sort of change in status. It’s something that is not visible you can’t put your hands on, but it’s going to affect social interactions on into the future. It’s about something that is happening at the moment, it’s changing this abstract relationship that people have to each other. Somehow the ritual has to communicate that as well. And so I think about early symbolic communication has much more like I would think about ritual today. (Time 0:21:54)
La infraestructura lingüística que se pone en juego en el ritual Transcript: Speaker 1 And so this idea that icons indices and symbols are sort of linked together in some respects. It’s actually about what I would like to call the infrastructure that you need to build symbols. You need to build symbols up using iconic and indexical means. When we think about agreements coming up with a sort of symbolic relationships by agreement, we use the word convention often to talk, often times to talk about this. A conventional habit or something like that. What we recognize is that if we wouldn’t have symbols capable of helping us do this, if we didn’t have language, how do we establish conventions? Well, we do so and this is what rituals often do. Rituals establish conventions oftentimes in context that would be hard to do with just symbols. And one of the things about marriage, the example I just used, is that recognize that everybody else that’s out there in your community that are close friends. There’s going to be some sexual tensions. There’s going to be obligations that have to change. These are not things that are easily communicated, particularly about the future. So it may take a lot more support with lots more iconic and indexical support so that you get this stuff. So you really understand how it works. And this tells us that in fact in building symbols, in building our capacity for symbolic interpretation, even as young children acquiring language for the first time, we have to do So by building an infrastructure first of icons and indices, showing things, sharing things, using words initially not as symbols, but as indices. Young children, a year of age and so on, maybe using words, but they’re not using them symbolically right away. They have to develop this slowly. (Time 0:26:03)
No existe un módulo cerebral para el lenguaje. Selección cultural. Transcript: Speaker 1 So first of all, I don’t think there’s something like language module. In fact, much of my early work was to look at human neuroanatomy, compare it to the anatomy of other species brains, and ask the question, do I find anything new there? Are there new structures? Are there new connections? And of course, one of the things that’s obvious is that our brains are pretty big for our bodies. There’s some quantitative changes and there are internal quantitative changes that I focused on, but one of the surprises of my early work, this is throughout the 1980s, my early 1990s, Was that there aren’t new parts that particularly are associated with this new capacity. And in fact, what it means is this capacity recruited old parts that still do what they evolved to do in chimpanzees and gorillas and so on, but are now also associated with language. That is, the brain, these brain systems were recruited to do something new. And the recruitment was really complicated because it involves not just one area that does it or two areas into it, but we are now pretty clear that most of this readable cortex is involved In one way or another with word meaning, a really startling feature because what it means is that none of these areas evolved specifically to do language. So that first of all, we’re not going to find a simple answer to this question in finding the special part. That’s not going to work. Nor are we going to find the special gene that does this. There are lots of genes that have been changed that make it possible. So it’s a multi gene, multi regional recruitment process that first of all makes it pretty difficult to sort of come up with a nice need answer that says, okay, this part does it, and this Is why where we are. And this is what led me to think about this co-evolution rally. In other words, that an early use of symbolic communication, which is difficult, symbolic reference is not easy to acquire in the first place. And your point about mathematics is a good one that we still have difficulty as it becomes more abstract. We have increasing difficulty, since building that infrastructure, knowing why a certain equation looks a certain way, why the iconism of it, why the structure of the equation itself Is about the structure of a mathematical relation that’s not made up of symbols on a page, but is in fact sort of a relational feature, an abstract relational feature. When we get these levels of abstraction, we get lost pretty easily. So it shouldn’t surprise us that early on, this was not an easy thing to do. But if it had been going on for as I think about 2 million years, then there’s time for that demand to do symbol decoding more easily, draw changes in the brain, subtle changes in memory, In ways of acquiring associations, in ways of representing and communicating with each other, using sort of social cues about others’ attention and so on. All these things had time to develop in response to communicating symbolically. So I think of this as a sort of ratchet-like effect in which a slight demand to use symbolic communication produced selection for people who did it slightly easier, which produced the Capacity to produce more complex symbolic relations, which produced selection on people that did it slightly easier, crossed that threshold slightly easier. Over the course of about 2 million years, I think, we developed where we are now, so that, you know, since having pulled the ladder up after ourselves after 2 million years of evolution, It looks like this huge fundamental difference in cognition. But I think it was generated not by selection for a single language mutation, but in fact, this accumulation of biases that make it easier and easier and easier over time. Distributed over many, many brain areas, over probably changes in neurotransmission, subtle changes in connectivity, and so on, all that simply made the unusual process of acquiring Symbols just slightly easier over time. But after 2 million years, it could make quite a difference, quite a discontinuous appearance and difference. (Time 0:29:16)
cerebro circuitos evolución lenguaje selección_cultural
Las características de nuestros cerebros y lenguajes coevolucionaron Transcript: Speaker 1 Those languages that exist today must be those that were effectively easily passed on and acquired. That means that if you have better facility of language, if you’ve learned it at a younger age, in which you’ve committed more of your nervous system to this process during a time of great Neuroplasticity, then you’re going to have both more facility to produce it. And children who have, in a sense, this ability to pick it up easily will be advantage. But that means also we should expect that languages have adapted, in some sense, to human learnability. And in effect, if they’re passed on more effectively, if they’re acquired younger, then we should expect that language structures themselves have been selected by virtue of being Learnable at an early age, at an age in which you can’t do mathematics, at an age in which you’re not yet able to remember the names of the streets that you’re living on. A lot of other things are going to be impossible. So that tells us also that languages have adapted to be learnable at a younger age. And that I think is one of the interesting reversals of the idea that somehow we have at a young age a special language acquisition capacity. We probably do have all kinds of things that make it easier to acquire language. But languages have also adapted to us. (Time 0:37:39)
La ventaja de la inmadurez en el aprendizaje (del lenguaje) Transcript: Speaker 1 When Kansi, a different species related to chimpanzees, Benobos were brought into this same research facility down in Atlanta. One of the things that happened is that they tried to train this also for Kansi’s stepmother. Now Kansi was sort of brought in from the wild as a young chimpanzee and was raised by a stepmother named Matata. Matata was now old enough to be taught this language system. At the time, whenever you push the buttons, they had updated their computer a little bit. So it also spoke. It said the word when you push the button. And so they tried to train Matata in this same push button symbol system. Matata was not a very good learner. She did not acquire it very well. And in part, she did not acquire it well because she was raising Kansi at the same time. Kansi was this little youngster crawling all over her, pushing over the apparatus, getting in the way and messing things up. Matata as a result was just simply not learning. But Kansi was there all the time. At some point, and I like to think about this as Kansi being frustrated with his stepmother, the questions are asked Matata and Kansi just pushes the button to get the answer. He’s in their mind, in the experimenter’s mind, he’s too young to learn. Too young to acquire these symbols. But it looks as though, without actually having been trained, just sort of hanging around with his mom while they were trying to train her, he got it. He figured it out. He was too young to be trained with a sort of stimulus response kind of training, but got it. And once they began testing him without any extra training, he seemed to have this huge vocabulary that he had already acquired without being trained. He was a sort of passive observer in the process. Now, I think there’s a couple of ways to think about this. One is that, and this is what they originally thought, well, it must be that bonobos are much better at this than Kansi’s, and that’s the whole difficulty. Now, the problem is, of course, they were trying to train Matata. Matata was also a bonobo. So for some reason, it wasn’t working with Matata. The other way to think about it is that now they were using symbols in a much more language-like way, much more naturalistic way, because they were actually speaking. The keyboards were making the word sense. Kansi was picking it up probably a little bit more like a child picks up language. And the structure, of course, of the keyboard system, although it was artificial, it was based upon language, how language works, verbs and nouns, and things like that. Requests and responses to requests. All of these things were sort of built in. This is the way language is important structure. So another way to interpret this is that Kansi’s immaturity was actually an advantage. And that for us, being immature is actually an advantage, having a brain that doesn’t have quite the same kind of memory system and learning system that an adult brain has, was actually An advantage for Kansi. And I think that’s another way to think about our own situation. (Time 0:45:32)
aprendizaje bonobo desarrollo lenguaje madurez
Capacidades simbólicas del humano inhiben habilidades presentes en simios Transcript: Speaker 1 What are some of the things that you would say humans are not very good at? There’s a wonderful study done in Japan with the chimpanzee I, in which this chimpanzee has been taught to recognize the numerals one to nine, and to recognize that they’re ordered One to nine. And the task was, I’m showing the screen flash up, distributed on the touch screen, a bunch of numerals one to nine, and the chimpanzee has to push them in order one, two, three, four, Five, six, seven, eight, nine. And learn this pretty well. The key is that this same procedure now is done when you flash the key, the numerals up on the screen, and then over the top of each new numeral now, you just put a blank square. So they suddenly disappear within a fraction of a second. They’re shown and they disappear. Can you now push the squares in order one to nine? If you’ve only seen them for a fraction of a second, and they’ve been flashed up in different positions on the screen, the chimpanzee can do this really well. That is, in a single glance, have the memory, the idetic memory of the screen and where each number was placed, and can do this. Human beings, we try and try and try and just can’t do it. There’s an ability to, in a sense, take this idetic information in, sort of like the idiot savant, the rain man, kind of example, in which it’s now suddenly there, and they can do this In a way that we cannot do. Because what we’re trying to do, and I look at numbers on the screen, I think of the concept of one, two, three, four, five, I’m thinking of all the symbolic relations. If they’re flashed up there for a fraction of a second, it just takes time for me to do that. Because I’m biased in a different way, I can’t do this. I can’t possibly keep up with the chimpanzee’s capacity. The chimpanzee is not seeing them symbolically. It’s seeing something else, and it’s been specialized to sort of make these snap judgments on the basis of this geometric distribution. Of course, must be necessary if you’re going to go flying through the trees, hand over hand over hand. (Time 0:50:39)
cognición homo_sapiens simios símbolos
El ser humano no tiene el cerebro más grande en términos relativos ni absolutos Transcript: Speaker 1 Number one, we don’t have the largest brain for our body size. We have a brain that’s about 2% of weight for our body weight. Some don’t worry between 1 and 2%. A mouse has about 4%. So in terms of brain and body size, we’re not the tops. Do we have the largest brains? No, we don’t. As you pointed out, many whales have much larger brains than ours. Sometimes four or five times larger than ours, really large brains. Of course, they have very large bodies. So, absolute size and relative size are both, in a sense, red herrings. They lead us to the wrong conclusions. There is a sense in which our brain is unusual for our body size. For an animal of our size, we do have the largest brain for an animal of our size. That’s an unusual feature. But it’s also the case that monkeys and apes, compared to non-primates for the same body size, have larger brains. (Time 0:54:22)
2min cerebro evolución tamaño
El cerebro humano durante el primer año se desarrolla como si estuviese aún en el útero Transcript: Speaker 1 And one of the things that’s different about us is that not only do we develop like a typical primate in the womb, but our brains keep maturing as though we’re still in the womb for the first Year of our life. So that in effect, we also diverge from primates in this respect. We’re like primates in the womb, but we have this extended brain development. (Time 0:59:54)
cerebro desarrollo embriología homo_sapiens simios
cerebro desarrollo embriología homo_sapiens simios
Darwinismo Neural, el mecanismo a la base de la adaptación en el desarrollo Transcript: Speaker 1 And this is the part of the book that was evocative for me of ideas that people often describe as neural Darwinism. So I’m thinking of thinkers like Gerald Edelman and others, and many people listening probably won’t be aware of these ideas. So just like you think of Darwinian natural selection operating in the origin of species, there are sort of Darwinian-like processes in the developing brain where different neuron Populations of neurons are in effect competing with each other, and many of them get pruned away. So how does this concept of neural Darwinism and competition between different brain structures and different locations start to fit into this? It’s a really interesting question, and it’s unfortunate that most people who think about the evolution of language and even the evolution of brains, not being aware of these developmental Issues, don’t recognize how important it is to look at this at a field that’s been called evo-devo over the last 20 years or so. Evo, referring to evolution and devo development, tries to get at these issues, and I became very much focused on this in development. One of the reasons I began doing research in terms of neural transplantation, fetal neural transplantation, was to begin to understand how these developmental features might have To do with species differences. So the key is this, and this turns out to be true for lots of structures in embryological development in animals and even in plants to some extent. That is one way, and I like to think about it in terms of you’re going to build a stone wall, but you want to have a door in the stone wall. You know, one way to do it is to build the wall and then knock things out so that you have a door that you can pass through. The stones will then sort of settle into place, but if you try to build the stones so that they create this arch to begin with, it can be very difficult, it takes a lot of work. So then in one sense, and this is the sort of evolutionary strategy, just build a lot of diversity and then select out from that diversity. You know, build your wall and knock things out. Well, it turns out that the brain has built this way in lots of respects. It turns out that neurons are way overproduced during development, and then the fine tuning takes place as they compete with each other for function. And those things that have better, in a sense, more correlated function with their inputs and outputs, out compete, survive, and others disappear. This happens also, and I was most focused on this in terms of connections, because one of the things that happens is that neurons, and there are cells that appear and are born in different Parts of the brain, they need to connect to each other. How do they connect to each other? Well, they grow out these long branches called axons that have to find their way to distant areas in the brain and make connections with certain neurons. They do this by sort of sniffing their way forward during development. They find their targets, they make connections, but it turns out that in this sniffing process of finding your targets, many more neurons find overlapping targets early on. It’s a not, not very specific technology. But what happens is that once they’re connected, they begin to send signals to each other. And there’s this phrase that we like to use when we teach this, that neurons that fire together, wire together, that in effect, the correlation of activity determines that those connections Will be maintained and connections that don’t seem to be synchronized with each other, don’t seem to be, you might say, synergistic in their functioning, seem to be eliminated over Time. So it uses this sort of selection-like logic. Now, it’s a little different than natural selection, because there’s not multiple generations of this. It just happens in one shot. You generate a lot of variety, and then you select it and you make the fine grain circuits after the fact. It turns out that not only is this done intrinsically, but also external information, visual information, auditory information, plays a role in this pruning process that fine-tunes Connectivity. (Time 1:01:12)
adaptación cerebro desarrollo evo-devo evolución neuronas poda
Qué es la alometría Transcript: Speaker 1 So the term alamatry, of course, comes from two parts, aloe and meter, meter, of course, measurements. Aloe means difference. Alamatry has to do with the fact that during growth, in our lives, as well as comparing animals to different size, things don’t grow at the same rate. So we look at young newborns, they have big heads and small bodies. Alamatry says that as they mature, their brain will stop growing at an earlier stage, and their body will keep growing. And as a result, when we look at an adult body, they have a big body and a small head in comparison to babies, they have big heads and small bodies. That process is an alamatry process. That is aloe, meaning two different meters of growth, two different rates of growth. When we find animals of different size, we see the same feature. And when I describe the difference between mouse, brain, and body relationships, and human brain, and body relationships, that’s the result of an alamatry, a different rate of growth, Across phylogeny, as mammals get bigger, their brains and their heads don’t get as big as fast as other parts of their body. (Time 1:08:19)
biología definición desarrollo
Los símbolos hacen referencia a sí mismos, formando una red con clausura operacional Transcript: Speaker 1 My point with respect to symbols is that’s exactly the problem with symbols. Symbols are stimuli that are not directly connected with things. And in fact, they work by virtue of combinations about how they affect each other, how they refer to each other. We began this discussion with this troublesome question of why don’t we extinguish that association if the association is lost, like other associations. Well, the key to that, of course, is that it’s because symbols are related to other symbols. I like to think about this in terms of a thesaurus or a dictionary. We can think of each of those as a kind of a network system in which each symbol, each word, is sort of linked to other words. And the network is distributed in lots of ways, and you can see how words are linked to words, linked to words. That linkage is one of the things that keeps them all in our memory. That is, they’re not linked to things in the world as much as they’re linked to each other. (Time 1:17:18)
Cómo los adultos incorporan a niños al mundo simbólico Transcript: Speaker 1 And that suggests to me that in fact, a lot of the early, what we call early language learning is very iconic and indexical. That we over interpret it because it’s a word and we know how to interpret words. We take it as symbolic. But what I think we try to do is we try to pull out the indexical features that young children are using it and embed it in a larger context. I’m immediate. Now that you say that, it almost seems obvious. A very young child just starting to use words is always pointing to a thing that’s right there and naming it. They’re not talking about something tomorrow. Exactly. And not only that, notice that children begin. And this is something I think is uniquely human and is critical for language learning. As we point, we reach, we have hands, we can exchange things and we can point to things. We can direct each other’s attention. And a number of people have sort of pulled out this sort of shared attention problem, joint attention. As a really critical feature, notice that this happens before we even start acquiring language. And children are very good at it. Other species just don’t get it. When I point to something, my dog looks at my hand, not what I’m pointing to. Children is just the other way around. And we look at each other’s eyes and we know where the face is turned, what we’re attending to. Joint attention is pretty critical here because it’s doing the indexical work. And the indexical work is important to assigning the reference to the sound that we’re producing. And yet, early on, it’s also just an index. They’re correlated with each other. The sound is correlated with the doggy with the pointing. But one of the things that’s happening, and I describe this as sort of ungroundy, we need to sort of figure out as young children how to take these iconic and indexical uses of words and Shift the iconic and indexical features to the relationships between words as opposed to the relationships between words and objects. And one of the things that’s going on is you need to make this shift. I think it happens slowly in children. I think we over interpret them as doing language because we haven’t distinguished the iconic and indexical from symbolic at this stage. Because we’re so used to words as being symbolic. But one of the things that we adults do is, of course, we’re trying to embed what we see the indexical and iconic use of these sounds, of these words that children are producing. We ought to embed it in this symbolic realm. We need to sort of pull them out of the iconic and indexical into the symbolic world. And we’re good at it as adults. And children are good at sort of following this because they’re very much interested in what adults and their caretakers are attending to. (Time 1:23:41)
El lenguaje está parcialmente lateralizado en el cerebro. Transcript: Speaker 1 I think we’ve overplayed the lateralization story. We do know that people can have reverse lateralization. We know that children born with a disorder that causes them to have most of their left hemisphere missing kind of choir language. We also know that study done many years ago now with simultaneous translators. These are people who listen to somebody speaking, and while they’re speaking, say it in another language. So, you know, in the United Nations, we have these people assigned or a person who does, you know, sign language translation, you know, in real time, was somebody else speaking. One thing that was found early on is that typically, as students are learning to do this, they develop ear preferences. And oftentimes, the most successful simultaneous translators have lateralized the two languages differently. So, they’re not competing with each other. And they end up having an ear preference for one language, and not the other. And so, they have an earphone in one ear, and not the other ear, as they’re translated. So, this tells us that even young adults have considerable plasticity in terms of what side of the brain is doing what. The other part is that, again, thinking about language in a sort of general sense of language is just one thing. We tend to think of it while languages here or there. What’s really going on is that different aspects of language are being fractionated into the two hemispheres. And the things you want to fractionate, just like in the case of the simultaneous translator, are things that are going to get in each other’s way. So, what’s going to get in each other’s way? Well, if, for example, looking at the combinatorial relationships of language, as the words fitting together and modifying each other, versus this other aspect, which is its relationship To sensory and motor experience, and maybe emotionality. These are two kinds of associations of the same sound that could potentially get in each other’s way. So, as we acquire language and become more and more efficient at it, as we mature, one way to make it more and more efficient is to begin to fractionate those functions on the two sides. Not completely, not that one side will do one thing and the other side will only do the other, but largely that it will, in a sense, do a division of labor. So, what we find is oftentimes in the right hemisphere, there’s a lot of understanding of what you might call the referential, and particularly the emotional or attentional features Of language. One of the things that people have noticed is that right hemisphere damage oftentimes causes people to lose the ability to see sort of the big picture. Classic stories are, you know, you tell a story in which there’s, you know, a lot of things going on and there’s an anomalous event in the story. Right hemisphere damage means that oftentimes you don’t see why something is anomalous, doesn’t fit, but you interpret all the details well because your left hemisphere is getting The connections right and following the logic of the story, following what leads after, what leads after, but not sort of getting sort of the big picture. The other thing that is often noticed is, of course, right hemisphere damage causes what we call a prosodias. This has to do with what we call prosodic features. So, the fact that if I get excited, my voice gets higher and faster, if I’m depressed, you can tell that it’s depressed because of the way I’m speaking, that we communicate emotionality Or attentionality, or what we think is important or unimportant. My virtue of these changes in tonality and in speed and so on, this is very strongly both produced and interpreted on the right hemisphere. So, right hemisphere damage oftenized produces very flat speech. Speech is maintained in a normal way, but it’s very robotic, it doesn’t have a lot of character like this. Whereas left hemisphere damage, we lose a lot of the detail, but oftentimes, a phasic patient says patients who have damage to some of these language specific like areas, areas that Are really specialized for language, don’t get the details of meanings and connections, but get the gist of what’s being communicated, get the pragmatic framing of what’s going on. Whereas the split brain experiments where a patient has its corpus callosum cut, so that there’s not communication back and forth, oftentimes, will separate these two functions, And particularly shortly after the procedure, oftentimes, only one side is sort of dealing with one aspect and the other side dealing with the other aspect. Over time, it looks as though most of those patients begin to develop compensation for that. (Time 1:29:43)
cerebro función lenguaje
Hemispheric Differences in Speech Production and Interpretation Changes in tonality and speed of speech are strongly processed and interpreted by the right hemisphere, while damage to the right hemisphere can result in flat and robotic speech. Damage to the left hemisphere can lead to a loss of detail but an understanding of the gist and pragmatic framing of communication. Split brain experiments show that communication between the two hemispheres can separate language-specific functions, with compensation developing over time. Transcript: Speaker 1 My virtue of these changes in tonality and in speed and so on, this is very strongly both produced and interpreted on the right hemisphere. So, right hemisphere damage oftenized produces very flat speech. Speech is maintained in a normal way, but it’s very robotic, it doesn’t have a lot of character like this. Whereas left hemisphere damage, we lose a lot of the detail, but oftentimes, a phasic patient says patients who have damage to some of these language specific like areas, areas that Are really specialized for language, don’t get the details of meanings and connections, but get the gist of what’s being communicated, get the pragmatic framing of what’s going on. Whereas the split brain experiments where a patient has its corpus callosum cut, so that there’s not communication back and forth, oftentimes, will separate these two functions, And particularly shortly after the procedure, oftentimes, only one side is sort of dealing with one aspect and the other side dealing with the other aspect. Over time, it looks as though most of those patients begin to develop compensation for (Time 1:33:45)
Humanos somos simios que construimos un nicho simbólico con el que coevolucionamos Transcript: Speaker 1 That. I want to again, start to talk about this idea of co-evolution, that humans are adapted to be able to acquire and use language, but also that language is adapting to the brain, in particular, The child’s brain. You almost talk about language in the book as if it’s this other organism. The same way that a gazelle and a cheetah co-evolve, because there are two separate organisms that have a deep relationship, language and the human structures and the human phenotypes Are co-evolving with each other. At one point in the book, you have a passage that says, quote, languages are far more like living organisms than mathematical proofs. And I believe where that passage comes up, you’re contrasting the way that you’re thinking about things with the way that a lot of linguists would classically think about language. And so, what do you mean when you say that language is more like a living organism than a mathematical proof? That’s a very good question. And of course, it’s metaphoric. I mean, I don’t mean that languages themselves, unlike living organisms in that sense. What I am describing is that languages have to persist historically across many generations. And their persistence depends upon their learnability, their usability, and their transmissibility. Those are all things that are crucial. So that the persistence of language has something to do with how it fits with the users and with the brains of its users. So when we talk about language change, we’re oftentimes dealing with the fact that language doesn’t just change at random. There are certainly certain ways that it changes, because there are certain transmission and learning capacities that are sort of built into this. The way to think about this has been reconceived since I wrote this book, not just by me, but by others, with a phrase in evolutionary biology called niche construction. Niche construction is a recognition that organisms don’t just respond to their world, but they change their world. And in changing their world, it affects the way they have to respond to it. So the most obvious simple example are beavers and beaver dams. Beavers create an aquatic niche by their behaviors. They’ve been doing so for millions of years. As a result, beavers are rodents that have become aquatically adapted. They have flat tails. They know how to hold their breath. They know how to swim. They have web feet. They’ve become adapted to a niche that beavers have created. So I like to think about language and culture as our beaver dam, our aquatic environment. Beavers are aquatic rodents. We’re symbolic primates. That is, the symbol world is our aquatic world. And we’ve had to adapt to that world. We create that world. We pass it on. It’s not within an individual. It’s picked up. It’s passed on. It’s recreated generation after generation, like beavers build dams generation after generation. It’s beaver bodies that have adapted to that physical environment. It’s primate brains or human brains that have adapted to this abstract symbolic environment. And so in effect, we’re living in this niche. We’re embedded in this niche. We can’t get out of it. We’re so embedded in it that we would say that a human being that doesn’t have this experience is not a human being. It’s something fundamentally missing. They’re not human in some sense. And this is a so-called problem of the wild children, the feral children that are raised without language and human interaction. In effect, they’re not really human in the full sense of it, because a lot of what is human this now is something that’s distributed in this niche that we’re all embedded in, can’t get Out of. And our brains, you might say, expect this niche. We come into the world expecting certain kinds of social interactions, expecting certain kinds of communication. Our brains are set up to expect it. They’ve in a sense given up some things to be more adapted to this world, to this niche. And it shouldn’t surprise us that this niche is not an ecological niche in the same sense. And so much about our brains and bodies and our behaviors don’t look like they’re adapted to the kind of world that, say, chimpanzees are adapted to. Because we’ve adapted to this very different, in a sense, non-ecological niche, this symbolic cultural niche. I think you do a good job in the book of making it clear that our brains evolved physically somehow to be able to cross this symbolic threshold and engage in symbolic thinking. But once we did that, we’ve now effectively created this niche, this new environment, which then changes a whole set of selection pressures that cause subsequent brain evolution. So we’re sort of somehow evolving for some reason to cross this symbolic threshold and be able to do this kind of cognitive trick that’s very powerful. But then in so doing, we’re effectively creating a new environment that we then have to further adapt to. And I think that was a really interesting way of thinking about the evolution here, that I had not thought of before. And as mentioned previously, you very much think about language in an evolutionary (Time 1:35:01)
adaptación coevolución homo_sapiens lenguaje nicho_ecológico símbolos
The concept of niche construction and its analogy to language and culture The concept of niche construction in evolutionary biology explains that organisms not only respond to their world but also change it, thereby affecting the way they have to respond to it. This concept is exemplified by beavers creating an aquatic niche through their behaviors and subsequently adapting to it. The speaker draws an analogy, likening language and culture to the beaver dam, suggesting that humans, as symbolic primates, have adapted to the symbolic world created by language and culture. Transcript: Speaker 1 There are certainly certain ways that it changes, because there are certain transmission and learning capacities that are sort of built into this. The way to think about this has been reconceived since I wrote this book, not just by me, but by others, with a phrase in evolutionary biology called niche construction. Niche construction is a recognition that organisms don’t just respond to their world, but they change their world. And in changing their world, it affects the way they have to respond to it. So the most obvious simple example are beavers and beaver dams. Beavers create an aquatic niche by their behaviors. They’ve been doing so for millions of years. As a result, beavers are rodents that have become aquatically adapted. They have flat tails. They know how to hold their breath. They know how to swim. They have web feet. They’ve become adapted to a niche that beavers have created. So I like to think about language and culture as our beaver dam, our aquatic environment. Beavers are aquatic rodents. We’re symbolic primates. That is, the symbol world is our aquatic world. And we’ve had to adapt to that world. (Time 1:36:42)
The Embedded Nature of Human Existence Human existence is shaped by the environment and experiences it is exposed to, which are passed on and recreated across generations. Similar to beavers building dams, human brains have adapted to the abstract symbolic environment, creating a niche in which humans are embedded. As a result, individuals without certain experiences, such as wild children raised without language and human interaction, may be considered not fully human, as much of what constitutes humanity is distributed in this niche. Human brains are wired to expect certain social interactions and communications, having evolved to be more adapted to this embedded niche. Transcript: Speaker 1 We create that world. We pass it on. It’s not within an individual. It’s picked up. It’s passed on. It’s recreated generation after generation, like beavers build dams generation after generation. It’s beaver bodies that have adapted to that physical environment. It’s primate brains or human brains that have adapted to this abstract symbolic environment. And so in effect, we’re living in this niche. We’re embedded in this niche. We can’t get out of it. We’re so embedded in it that we would say that a human being that doesn’t have this experience is not a human being. It’s something fundamentally missing. They’re not human in some sense. And this is a so-called problem of the wild children, the feral children that are raised without language and human interaction. In effect, they’re not really human in the full sense of it, because a lot of what is human this now is something that’s distributed in this niche that we’re all embedded in, can’t get Out of. And our brains, you might say, expect this niche. We come into the world expecting certain kinds of social interactions, expecting certain kinds of communication. Our brains are set up to expect it. They’ve in a sense given up some things to be more adapted to this world, to this niche. (Time 1:38:08)
Baldwinian Evolution and its Relationship to Lamarckian and Darwinian Evolution Baldwinian evolution challenges the traditional Lamarckian and Darwinian views of evolution by proposing that a flexible, plastic way of behaving can lead to adaptation to environmental changes. This idea was developed in response to the debates between Lamarckian evolution (acquired characters being passed on) and the Darwinian view that learned traits are only passed on culturally or behaviorally, not genetically. Baldwinian evolution suggests a Darwinian process that produces Lamarckian effects, allowing for adaptation to environmental changes through flexibility and adaptability. Transcript: Speaker 1 And I think we still don’t fully understand Baldwinian evolution. We assume that Baldwin got it right and did not. But let me sort of lay out the argument. It begins in the late 1890s. And this is a time when there’s a very powerful set of debates going on between Lamarckian evolution, the acquired characters being passed on, acquired during your life being passed On, somehow to the next generation, versus a Darwinian story we often think about, which those things that we learn and acquired during our lives are only passed on culturally or behaviorally, But not genetically into the next generation. So a number of people, James Mark Baldwin and in fact two others at the same time, came up with a response that said, maybe what we can do is think about a Darwinian process is not Lamarckian, But it produces kind of Lamarckian effects. And it works this way. The argument is that somehow you develop a plastic way of behaving, whereas the environment has changed, but by virtue of being flexible, you adapt to this change in the environment. (Time 1:42:01)
The Impact of Language on Neurological Learning and Behavior The demands of language on combinatorial learning and abstraction can affect neurological learning and behavior. These demands are not specific to language, but rather affect various aspects of neurological learning and behavior. The argument also suggests that if something can be acquired plastically, it often leads to genetic support degradation, as genes tend to do only what is necessary, following the ‘lazy gene hypothesis.’ Transcript: Speaker 1 I argued that, in fact, we need to not think about it in terms of something that’s language specific, but that in fact all the demands that language places on us for combinatorial learning Or suppressing certain associations compared to others for this kind of abstraction. When in effect, those things would be selected. Early on would be acquired with some effort and would become better and better at it. So rather than something specific to language, my argument, which I made earlier in this discussion, is that many, many different aspects of neurological learning and behavior, In a sense, would be affected this way and would just simply make it as better. Subsequently, I think that there’s problems with this argument. And let me spell those out. And the main thing that we’ve discovered as more we’ve learned about genetics and how genes evolve in these contexts is that if something can be acquired plastically, without having To sort of build it in, it oftentimes does the reverse. It oftentimes allows some genetic support to degrade. If it can be acquired by something outside that takes less work, we oftentimes, by a kind of a less work principle, I like to call it the lazy gene hypothesis, that genes only do what they Need to do. (Time 1:45:23)
Evolutionary adaptation and the lazy gene hypothesis Organisms tend to lose the ability to perform functions if they can be acquired from outside sources with less effort, known as the lazy gene hypothesis. This is illustrated by the loss of the ability to produce vitamin C in humans due to the abundance of this vitamin in fruits. The Darwinian story suggests that abilities are lost if not used, contradicting the Baldwin story, which implies that learning language might result from loss of function. This is supported by a bird example showing improved singing ability due to domestication. Transcript: Speaker 1 If it can be acquired by something outside that takes less work, we oftentimes, by a kind of a less work principle, I like to call it the lazy gene hypothesis, that genes only do what they Need to do. And if it’s supplied elsewhere, if you can get it from something else, give it up. My favorite example of this is our ability, our need for vitamin C in our diet. Almost all other animals make their own vitamin C. It’s just a primate somewhere beginning about 60 million years ago, began eating fruit, where there’s a lot of it out there. We actually still have a pseudo gene, a non-functional gene, for making the last enzyme that makes vitamin C. It just doesn’t work anymore. And it’s degraded because this capacity could be acquired outside easier. One of the problems with the Darwinian story is that it basically says that if you don’t have to do it yourself, oftentimes you lose the ability. You know, don’t use it, you know, if you don’t use it, you lose it. So the Baldwin story is not quite as helpful as I thought it was initially. On the other hand, it’s led me to believe that maybe some of the advantages that we have in learning language actually might be the result of loss of function, of loss of specificity. And in fact, we’ve done some recent work using a bird example, a bird that by virtue of domestication has become a better singer, so to speak. (Time 1:46:33)
Tradeoff evolutivo entre flexibilidad y innatez: El ejemplo de las vocalizaciones. Transcript: Speaker 1 And so one of the thoughts I had is that our human capacity is not just the result of adaptation that’s produced more flex, more capacity to be biased towards language, but maybe also A loss of specificity in some directions. So one of the classic examples of this is that chimpanzees have somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 distinct vocalizations that they give that refer to different aspects of their life That are built in, that is they don’t have to learn them. They’re there, they’re from birth of having to do with threats, having to do with food, having to do with sexuality, having to do with solicitation of health, and that sort of thing. We have some innate vocalizations too that we acquire genetically. There’s laughter, there’s sobbing, there’s groans, there’s shrieks. But I’m starting to run out of vocalizations. We human beings have a very small repertoire of these innate vocalizations, surprisingly small compared to other primates. And I think one of the things that’s happened is that they’ve degraded. They’ve degraded in part because our linguistic communication can take it over. But this also carries me back to this notion of prosodic features of language. The fact that when I’m more excited, I’m talking faster with a higher frequency. This is also something that we find in primate calls, when they’re more excited, they’re also producing the same thing. Their calls become faster and a higher frequency. When you’re soliciting aid, you can tell the vocalizations are more nasal, like this. We human beings know what it means. And our vocalizations, our speech can be a much more diminutive and demanding because what’s happened is much of the, you might say, background, autonomic and emotional side of it Is still being communicated, but now it’s subordinated to the language. It’s a separate channel almost in which we can now actually have much more sophistication because we can now adapt it to the language use. So we have far fewer innate vocalizations, but a lot of the features of innate vocalizations have been carrying forward and now, in a sense, adapted to language. (Time 1:48:15)
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The Role of Vocalizations and Prosodic Features in Human and Primate Communication Human beings have a small repertoire of innate vocalizations that has degraded due to the dominance of linguistic communication. The prosodic features of language, such as speaking faster and with higher frequency when excited, are similar to primate calls. Primate calls also change in frequency and become more nasal when soliciting aid, conveying emotional and autonomic signals. In human speech, these emotional and autonomic signals are subordinated to language, leading to more diminutive and demanding vocalizations. Transcript: Speaker 1 But I’m starting to run out of vocalizations. We human beings have a very small repertoire of these innate vocalizations, surprisingly small compared to other primates. And I think one of the things that’s happened is that they’ve degraded. They’ve degraded in part because our linguistic communication can take it over. But this also carries me back to this notion of prosodic features of language. The fact that when I’m more excited, I’m talking faster with a higher frequency. This is also something that we find in primate calls, when they’re more excited, they’re also producing the same thing. Their calls become faster and a higher frequency. When you’re soliciting aid, you can tell the vocalizations are more nasal, like this. We human beings know what it means. And our vocalizations, our speech can be a much more diminutive and demanding because what’s happened is much of the, you might say, background, autonomic and emotional side of it Is still being communicated, but now it’s subordinated to the language. (Time 1:49:11)
The Co-evolutionary Dance and the Symbolic Threshold in Primate Evolution The co-evolutionary dance between language and the brain kicks off after crossing the symbolic threshold when the brain evolves the capability of using symbols. The speculation is on when during primate evolution this symbolic threshold was crossed, potentially going back to the common ancestor with chimpanzees, or shortly after that. Empirical evidence for this is challenging because languages and brains don’t fossilize. However, around 2 million years ago, a transition in brain size compared to body size occurred, diverging from the common ancestors, suggesting the beginning of the expansion of brains. Transcript: Speaker 1 So this sort of co-evolutionary dance happens, but it can only kick off after you cross the so-called symbolic threshold after the brain has evolved the capability of using symbols. And so I’m curious to get your speculation on when during primate evolution, what wins the earliest in primate evolution, you think we could have crossed the symbolic threshold. And given what you described earlier about Kansi, is it possible that it goes all the way back to the common ancestor with chimpanzees? Or if not then, shortly after that? So what I want to use in this regard is what empirical evidence might we even think about drawing? Obviously, languages or brains don’t fossilize. The only thing that we can see about brains is that sometimes the cast of the inside of skulls give us a sense of how big the brain was or some trivial surface features. But one of the things that happened in our evolution is that there was a transition about 2 million years ago, which a number of things change at once. It’s the point at which brain size compared to body size begins to diverge from what we find in our common ancestors. The Australopithecines have preceded this and brain size, body size relationships, very much like chimpanzees. But by about 1.8 million years, we begin to see this depart. Brains begin to expand. They (Time 1:50:46)
Evolutionary transition in early hominids The transition to human-sized brains took place over a million and a half years, with brain sizes like ours appearing just a few hundred thousand years ago. Stone tools, initially appearing 2.5 million years ago, became stabilized around 1.8 million years ago and were associated with slightly enlarged brains. These tools were likely used for butchery, indicating early hominids may have been scavengers who cooperated to gather meat and evade dangerous predators. Transcript: Speaker 1 Expand over the course of the next million and a half years, so that it’s not until just a few hundred thousand years ago that we’re seeing brain sizes like ours. But this transition also takes place at another point. The first stone tools that is chipped stones, the start from the edges, begin to show up in the fossil record about 2.5 million years ago. They show up, they disappear, they show up, they disappear, but by 1.8 million years ago, we never find them separate from hominids, that is early precursors. So something is stabilized at this point in time. Now we see stone tools and slightly enlarged brains happening together. What are stone tools for? They’re for butchery. They’re not good yet for killing animals probably, but they’re really good for sort of cutting up meat, taking chunks of meat away from other animals. The problem is that if you’re not hunting and all you have is stone tools, you’re not so good at catching these animals and eating them as our cats, big cats or big dogs. The predators that are out there, even the hyenas and the wild dogs that are out there, you know, that’s good at it. How are you going to get this? Well, first of all, it looks as though probably our early ancestors were scavengers. They stole. Let me open surveillance. And one way to be a scavenger is to be able to go out and grab a little bit of this meat and then get away from these guys that are dangerous. How might you do that? Well, you probably can’t do it on your own. And if you can’t do it on your own, that means you have to cooperate in some respect. (Time 1:52:15)
Evolution of Brain Sizes and Stone Tools Over the course of the next million and a half years, brain sizes expanded, with brain sizes like ours only appearing a few hundred thousand years ago. The first stone tools, chipped stones, began to show up in the fossil record about 2.5 million years ago, and by 1.8 million years ago, they never appeared separate from hominids. This stabilization coincided with the simultaneous appearance of stone tools and slightly enlarged brains. Stone tools were likely used for butchery and cutting up meat from other animals. Transcript: Speaker 1 Expand over the course of the next million and a half years, so that it’s not until just a few hundred thousand years ago that we’re seeing brain sizes like ours. But this transition also takes place at another point. The first stone tools that is chipped stones, the start from the edges, begin to show up in the fossil record about 2.5 million years ago. They show up, they disappear, they show up, they disappear, but by 1.8 million years ago, we never find them separate from hominids, that is early precursors. So something is stabilized at this point in time. Now we see stone tools and slightly enlarged brains happening together. What are stone tools for? They’re for butchery. They’re not good yet for killing animals probably, but they’re really good for sort of cutting up meat, taking chunks of meat away from other animals. (Time 1:52:15)
The Evolution of Cooperation, Communication, and Sexual Dimorphism The transition to a new kind of foraging required stable cooperation and communication to access a powerful food source. This transition also necessitated passing down the niche of toolmaking and engaging in systematic relationships. Additionally, the disappearance of sexual dimorphism signaled a shift away from male-male competition for mates. Transcript: Speaker 1 I think one of the things that happened in this transition is that there had to be an ability to create stable cooperation so you could rely on each other in life and death kind of situations To get at a kind of food source that’s remarkably powerful. A lot of calories, a lot of nutrients that are not able to be attained in other regards. So I see this transition to a new kind of foraging that requires cooperation, requires passing on down this niche of toolmaking, but also requires a kind of communication that allows Us to talk about things that might happen, that could happen, that could happen in the future. That is, we’ve got to be able to get away from now the kind of immediacy that icons and index provides and deal with these other questions. And I think it applies also to make choice and make exclusion relationships. I think it’s a much more systematic relationship. And this points to another thing that happens right at this time as well, that something called sexual dimorphism begins to disappear. Sexual dimorphism is that in species where there’s a lot of male-male competition for mates, males are oftentimes quite a bit bigger than females. (Time 1:54:23)
Evolution of Male-Female Size Ratio and Implications for Sexual Competition In early ancestors, australopithecines, males were two to three times larger than females based on the size of mature bones. In contrast, today’s male-female size ratio is only slightly larger for men, with a lot of overlap and definitely not two to one. This shift in size ratio indicates a modification in male-female relationships and sexual competition, leading to more male offspring care and exclusive mating in certain social groups. Transcript: Speaker 1 We also see it in the ancestors, our early ancestors, the australopithecines. The australopithecine males were probably two to three times larger than females, long-average as adults. We know this by looking at the size of mature bones, particularly mature jaws and maxill, where we can look at the teeth and say these are mature teeth. And notice that there’s a sort of bi-modal distribution of sizes here. What is the ratio today? The ratio is just a slight fraction. I can’t tell you because I don’t know the exact ratio. Men are slightly larger than women, but on average there’s a lot of overlap, number one, and it’s certainly not two to one. It’s a fraction of that. And that fraction shows up and is pretty much established by about one and a half million years ago. And that tells us that also the male female relationships, you might say the sexual competition has had to be modified. Where we see more monomorphism is we see a lot more male offspring care taking place. And oftentimes we see it associated with exclusive mating, where there’s not a lot of competition over mates because mating is separated off from the social group in some way or another. (Time 1:56:03)
Evolution of male-female relationships and monomorphism The evolution of male-female relationships has led to modifications in sexual competition, with more male offspring care and exclusive mating observed in monomorphic species. Monomorphic species tend to be isolated pairs, and the human situation is considered unusual in this context. This is referred to as Deacon’s paradox, where extensive male offspring care and relatively separated male-female bonding are present. While cheating does occur, the existence of cheating is acknowledged as an exception within this context. Transcript: Speaker 1 And that tells us that also the male female relationships, you might say the sexual competition has had to be modified. Where we see more monomorphism is we see a lot more male offspring care taking place. And oftentimes we see it associated with exclusive mating, where there’s not a lot of competition over mates because mating is separated off from the social group in some way or another. In fact, most monomorphic species, or monomorphic, I mean, biomorphism means two different sizes, two different morphologies, monomorphism, one size. We see more monomorphic species being isolated pairs. The weirdness about our own ancestry is that here we are needing to cooperate but becoming monomorphic. It makes the human situation really unusual, simply looking at it in the context of other animal behavior. Somebody else has described this as Deacon’s paradox. There’s a paradox where the only real species that is mostly monomorphic, in which there’s extensive male offspring care, in which there’s relatively separated male female bonding, Which you don’t find a lot of sort of crossing over. You do find cheating, of course. That’s something that we’re very much aware of. But it’s something that we call cheating. (Time 1:56:57)
Transition into Cooperative Group Behavior and Division of Labor in Humans Cheating is recognized and deemed as not the way it’s supposed to happen in large social groups requiring cooperation. In the transition between 2.5 million and 1.8 million years ago, there was a shift towards division of labor and cooperative behavior in humans, marked by males playing a significant role in offspring care and provisioning resources. This transition also saw the coexistence of tool use, cooperative groups, larger brains, and loss of sexual dimorphism. Transcript: Speaker 1 You do find cheating, of course. That’s something that we’re very much aware of. But it’s something that we call cheating. We recognize that it shouldn’t be the way it’s supposed to happen. This normally happens in the rest of the world in isolated populations. Gibbons, for example, are pair bonded and monomorphic. But they are not in troops. They’re in separate pairs. In humans, when these large social groups that have to cooperate, we’re monomorphic, for the most part. Males play a lot of role in offspring care, provide food and resources that females and babies might have difficulty getting at, chasing after meat, for example. Not a very safe place to carry your babies to. So division of labor may have already begun. So it’s at this transition, somewhere between 2.5 million and 1.8 million years ago, that there had to be a transition into this process. Because after about a million and a half years ago, all of these things always are coexisting. That is, tool use, cooperative groups, larger brains, loss of sexual dimorphism. In fact, there’s some other things that have happened as well that are interesting in all of this. (Time 1:58:15)
Insights on the Fox P2 gene and Neanderthal genome The gene Fox P2 was originally associated with a family experiencing speech articulation and grammar difficulties. This led to the assumption that it could be linked to the sophistication of human language. However, the Neanderthal genome sequencing revealed that Neanderthals also possessed a distinct variant of the Fox P2 gene, suggesting that the gene predates the split between Neanderthals and humans around three and a half to 500,000 years ago. Transcript: Speaker 1 But one of the things that happened is that there was a period of time when we had just been looking, this is now back in the early 2000s, in which this gene Fox P2 was associated with a family Who had damaged the Fox P2 that had some serious articulatory problems. They had difficulties forming words, their speech was where I understand, they had articulatory problems, and they had some problems with regularized verb endings, for example, Regularized nouns, so in English. And it was thought that, well, maybe this gene has something to do with syntax and grammar, and that maybe that’s what makes humans sophisticated and others not. Well, it turns out that when the Neanderthal genome was sequenced, it turns out that they also had this variant, and that this variant was distinct in the Neanderthals and humans from Before the point that they split, then the Neanderthal human split was probably somewhere in the range of three and a half to 500,000 years ago, a long time ago. Now, if this articulatory capacity was there (Time 2:04:00)
The Evolution of Writing and its Impact on Human Intellectual Capacity Writing was a concern for Plato, who feared that it would decrease human intellectual capacity by allowing people to offload their memory. However, the offloading of memory has allowed for the development of other capacities. Additionally, written language has evolved from logographic languages to phonetic languages, which has impacted the way information is represented and understood. Transcript: Speaker 1 My favorite example comes from Plato’s favorites, in which Plato worries that writing is becoming available to the Greeks, and written word is going to decrease human intellectual Capacity. But somehow, now that we don’t have to remember the great epics, then we just look it up. We can just read it. Somehow, we’ll become less intelligent in this process. What’s happened is, of course, not quite the same. As we’ve been able to offload some of these memory capacities, we’ve gained other things that is in its place. And I think this has to do with the flexibility of our capacities. The other thing that I would, I think, is interesting about particularly written language, and all kinds of written forms, including written musical forms, is that to some extent, They have evolved as well. Many of the very earliest stages of written language are not phonetic languages, they’re logographic languages. That is, they picture what they refer to. Their semantics is iconic, but it’s about symbols. (Time 2:09:06)
Evolution of Writing and the Impact of Emojis The evolution of writing has caused divergence between the east and the west, making languages mutually untranslatable due to sound changes. Emojis, being logographic, directly refer to something but are now being used in an indirect way. The internet has led to offloading knowledge into public space, similar to language not being confined to an individual. Transcript: Speaker 1 Whereas I can’t read Russian, Finnish, Swedish, make any sense of it, even though it’s using many of the same sound characters. What’s happened is because it’s iconic of sound and the sounds of those languages have changed. Now they become mutually untranslatable. So there’s this interesting sort of divergence that’s happened in the west and the east with respect to these ways in which writing has evolved. So writing has evolved for certain purposes under certain selection. And we can learn a little bit about our future, I think, by looking at this because emojis are logographic. That is, they directly refer to something. And yet we’re now using them to refer, in a sense, in another indirect way. It’s not quite the same. So I’m curious as to what’s going to happen with this. But I’m not sure exactly how to think about it, except in the following sense. One of the things that’s happening by virtue of the internet is that we’re offloading a lot of our knowledge into this sort of public space. Now that was always the case of language. That is, a language is not something that’s inside of a person. (Time 2:12:44)
Limitations of Machine Intelligence in Language Comprehension Current machine intelligence programs, including GPT-3, are capable of parsing and constructing sentences in impressive yet sometimes awkward ways, but they lack true fluency and comprehension of language like humans. One major limitation is the absence of symbolic capacity in machine intelligence. Despite this, these systems require a large corpus of human text to train and generate new sentences. Transcript: Speaker 1 We certainly have forms of machine intelligence programs that we can make that are capable of parsing sentences and defining words and actually constructing sentences in relatively Impressive, if sometimes awkward ways. GTP3 is probably the latest thing that’s out there that people may have heard about. You can train it on some corpus of human text. And it can construct new sentences which are usually fluent, they’re technically fluent, but they’re sort of awkward and funny in interesting ways. And it’s clear that these systems don’t quite have what you would call true fluency or true comprehension of the language the same way that a human, even a human child does. So, A, do you agree with that? And B, if so, what do you think is missing from the machine intelligence we have today that is preventing them from having that level of fluency? So, first of all, I would say that the machine intelligence we have today, even the best at this, has no symbolic capacity, zero. And how is it able to do what it does, if that’s true? And I think the answer here is that we notice this because we have to feed it a huge corpus. We have to give it lots and lots of sentences. (Time 2:16:36)
Iconicity and indexicality in language acquisition Language acquisition involves the use of iconicity and indexicality to capture structure and meaning. Iconic and indexical relations are captured in the grammar and index of language, influencing the understanding and simulation of language. While language systems can answer questions based on the structure present in the corpus and questions, they may not fully understand what they are saying. In contrast, children acquire new words rapidly by going directly to the symbols, which differs from the process of training a network to acquire language. Transcript: Speaker 1 I can use the iconicity to sort of make the guess that therefore, Socrates is mortal. There’s iconicity and indexicality in the grammar and index of language. And to the extent that a large corpus has incorporated these iconic and indexical relations, the kind of things that are not just in the thesaurus and dictionary, but in encyclopedias, So to speak. There’s structure there. And these systems capture that structure. And as a result can kick it back to us, but notice that what they’re capturing is the iconic and indexical structure. What we would want to say is that they don’t quite understand what they’re saying. They don’t know what they’re saying. And as a result, we’d say it’s simulating language. And it can answer questions that we might put to it, because that structure is there in our question. And it’s there in the corpus that it has. On the other hand, a young child can acquire new words in a very short period of time. A lot of words at once with a very few occasions of hearing it being used. When we try to train a network to do this, we oftentimes need millions of utterances to do it right. And that’s because it’s acquiring it in a very different way. Children are going right to the symbols. (Time 2:18:34)
The Nature of Human Intersubjectivity and Language The ability to communicate through language gives humans a unique capacity for intersubjectivity, allowing them to share experiences and thoughts with each other. This capacity distinguishes humans from other species, as it enables them to have a more distributed consciousness and internalize the experiences of others. Language acquisition in children also leads to the development of self-communication and the ability to internalize parental guidance. Transcript: Speaker 1 Very disturbed, very upset. There was no way that chimpanzee could communicate that experience. What had happened to me? What was my past like? That is, there was nothing that I would say that philosophers have called intersubjectivity. There was no ability to get in each other’s heads to know what experience we’ve had, but we were thinking that we have this incredible capacity because languages allowed us in a sense, This intermediary form of communication, of representation, that allows me to represent what I’m thinking to you and vice versa. That we human beings are not just in ourselves in our own experience, but we’re in each other’s experiences all the time. In this sense, we’re also a more distributed mind, a more distributed being, or distributed consciousness. I think it’s very different than any other species. This goes back to work that even Vygotsky back in the 1930s and 20s was thinking about that children, when they mature and they acquire language, they begin to talk to themselves. He suggested that one of the things that happens is that children can become their own parents. (Time 2:26:02)
The Challenge of Understanding the Notion of Self The speaker initially intended to explore the concept of the ‘homunculus’ in the brain but realized the need to explain the agency and self-awareness. This led to the broader question of what makes a mind distinct from other things and why life and thinking are not mere mechanisms. The speaker emphasizes the importance of understanding the basic notion of self, noting that every organism, including viruses, is organized around the preservation and transmission of the self. Transcript: Speaker 1 It was going to be titled homunculus as a kind of tongue-in-cheek argument that there’s no homunculus in the brain. But we need to explain the homuncular sense. We need to explain the agency and the feeling of self. So although there’s no place in the brain that does it, somehow we need to explain how it comes about. But I realized in working on this problem is that, in fact, we didn’t even have that answer for life itself. The sort of, you know, what makes a mind of mind as distinct from something else, it’s the same version of a problem of why life isn’t just mechanism, why thinking isn’t just computing. And what I realized is that until we can understand this sort of basic notion of what self is, every organism has a sense that we would call self, not in terms of self-consciousness, like We’re talking about, but they’re organized around the preservation of self. Even viruses. I can talk about viruses. They’re not alive in the sense that even a bacterium is alive in the sense, but we know that they’re organized around the persistence of themselves and the transmission of themselves. (Time 2:34:09)
The primitive notion of self and normativity in viruses Viruses are not just chemicals but have a primitive notion of self and normativity. Normativity implies the existence of right or wrong, good or bad, and correct or incorrect, which are not applicable to chemistry. The concept of normativity extends to viruses, as they can exist in good or bad environments, have good or bad hosts, and are affected by toxins. The transition to life involves the development of self and normativity at the most basic level. Transcript: Speaker 1 So there’s a very, very primitive notion of self that we wouldn’t ascribe to just chemistry. Viruses are not just chemicals. They’re chemicals organized with respect to maintaining that organization, preserving that organization against being disrupted. And what I would describe, I used when I talked about ethics, this is a sort of broader term we call normativity. Norms are things in which you can be right or wrong, good or bad, correct or incorrect. There is no good or bad chemistry. There’s no right or wrong chemistry. There is no chemical reaction that is better than another chemical reaction unless it’s in the service of something, usually with respect to something alive. But for a virus, there are good and bad environments. There are good and bad hosts. There are toxins that are bad for you. Even a virus, as simple as it is, has normative character. So the transition to life is the transition to something like the very basis of self and the very basis of normativity. (Time 2:35:39)
The Emergence of Normativity and Self in Living Organisms Living organisms resist the increase of entropy, maintaining themselves and their organization over billions of years. Life represents a transition from non-normative to normative chemistry, from non-self to self, evolving into more complex levels over billions of years. The emergence of normativity, indirectness, and self at the most basic level is crucial to understanding the complexity of the mind and consciousness. Transcript: Speaker 1 The increase of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. All living things are organized in such a way that they’re in a sense resisting this basic tendency of all of nature. And it maintains themselves, living things of, of course, maintaining themselves on the surface of the earth for billions of years against this ubiquitous tendency for things to Break down. The organization that we call life has been this transition from non-normative to normative chemistry, from non-self to self. And now norms and self over the course of three and a half billion years have just gotten more and more complex. And added level upon level upon level, minds and brains and consciousness and eventually symbolic communication are just one of these last layers in this process. So my argument, the reason I wrote the book in fact was to say, look, we need to explain how normativity, how indirectness, how self comes into the world at this very simplest basic level, If we want to have even a chance at making sense of it at the level of a mind. (Time 2:37:27)
The Origins of Normativity and Indirectness The book argues that understanding normativity, indirectness, and self at a basic molecular level is crucial for comprehending the mind. It delves into philosophical questions about the transition in molecular systems that give rise to indirectedness and purpose, which are characteristics associated with living organisms as they strive to achieve ends and avoid degradation. Transcript: Speaker 1 So my argument, the reason I wrote the book in fact was to say, look, we need to explain how normativity, how indirectness, how self comes into the world at this very simplest basic level, If we want to have even a chance at making sense of it at the level of a mind. So that I decided that I had to sort of go back to the beginning and ask these very basic, you might say, philosophical questions almost about how this could happen, what kind of a molecular System, what is it about a molecular system that would show the crossing over from this one kind of form to another kind of form, in which it has indirectedness to it. The term that’s also associated with this philosophically and historically is teleology or purpose, indirectedness. An end is something that doesn’t yet exist, but there are things that we do that are organized to achieve ends. Physical causality, chemistry is not trying to achieve ends. But all living things are. If for no other reason, just one of the ends is to keep from degrading, to keep from being eliminated. (Time 2:38:25)
The Paradox of Biological Complexity and the Evolutionary Process The speaker is working on a book called Falling Up, the Paradox of Biological Complexity, which argues that increased complexity in biology is actually a ‘less is more’ problem, where things have become more complex by simplifying and becoming more dependent on each other. This forced complexity is described as ‘falling up into complexity.’ The speaker also suggests rethinking the evolutionary process, using the example of how primates developed three color vision and taste cells responsive to sweet and sour due to the need to consume vitamin C. Transcript: Speaker 1 And it’s an attempt to bring what was called information theory together with these theories of reference and semiotic reference to try to create a formal theory of that. The other thing I’m working on is a book I’m almost finished with now. It’s called Falling Up, the Paradox of Biological Complexity. And it’s an argument that says that the increased complexity in biology is actually a less is more problem. That in fact, things have gotten more complex, not because they’ve added more parts, but because in fact they’ve simplified and they’ve become more dependent on each other. And this is forced complexity. We’re sort of backing into, we’re falling up into complexity. And that I even think that the language story is explained this way. We haven’t gone in this direction today, but that’s where I’m going with this. We have to rethink the evolutionary process. That one way to think about it is, I gave the example of vitamin C. We’ve become dependent upon vitamin C, we’re effectively addicted to dietary vitamin C. But simply because it’s always been there. But because we have to eat vitamin C and find it, we primates develop three color vision. We primate to develop taste cells that are responsive to sweet and sour in ways that other species are not. (Time 2:46:22)