Re: Human brain on an evolutionary sprint!

From: Paul Crowley (slkwuoiutiuytciuyik_at_slkjlskjoioue.com)
Date: 01/22/05 

Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 19:52:34 -0000

"John Roth" <newsgroups@jhrothjr.com> wrote in message
news:10v2ao9i80oruc5@news.supernews.com...

> > Jim McGinn wrote:
> >> > No. The best question is what caused the emergence
> >> > of very large groups in the earliest years of hominid
> >> > evolution. What was adaptive about large groups?
> >> > Until you can answer this question you don't have the
> >> > basis for the emergence of language. The current
> >> > paradigm of Paleoanthropology completely has it's
> >> > head up it's ass on this issue. Language could not
> >> > have emerged in the context of the small groups that
> >> > PA currently finds fashionable to assume.
> >>
> >> A negative is very hard to prove. Anytime someone
> >> says "could not have", my bull*** detectors go off -
> >> it's a clear violation of Clarke's Law. To support
> >> "could not have" requires a _lot_ more data on how
> >> language actually works than we have at the moment.
> >
> > Your bull*** detectors need urgent
> > servicing. They are quite defective.
> > The problem here (insofar as there is
> > one) rests in Jim's terminology.
>
> Nope. A negative is possible to prove
> only by exclusion

The whole point of my post was to
show you that it was not a negative --
even if Jim posed it in that unfortunate
manner. To say that a situation is either
A or Not-A, is not to pose a negative.
That is not hard to understand, and
I did my best to set it out in brutally
simple terms. I guess I was not brutal
enough.

> > Language DID evolve. (Do I have your
> > agreement so far?)
>
> Why the oh-so-smug posturing?

I was being a bit flippant, BUT I could
see that you were laying down a line
of bull***, while pretending to
identify one.

> If
> you've bothered to read anything I've
> said, you know perfectly well what the
> answer to that is. For the edification of
> anyone who hasn't, however, of course
> it evolved. My position has been,
> as expressed in several posts over a
> number of years, that it evolved in
> stages over quite a few million years.

I've not been following your posts, nor
this topic before.

> > It did so in large
> > groups, in small groups or in medium-
> > sized ones. (Still with me?) Jim prefers
> > large groups (and I agree with him).
> > You, and standard PA, prefer small ones.
> > (We can forget the medium ones for the
> > moment, as no one is arguing for them.)
>
> I don't believe I said anything about
> group size.

You claimed to detect bull*** in Jim's
statement:

> >> > Language could not
> >> > have emerged in the context of the small groups that
> >> > PA currently finds fashionable to assume.

> > So we don't have much of a choice.
> > Language evolved. It did so in large
> > groups or in small ones (forgetting the
> > middle for the moment). To deny one
> > is to favour the other.
>
> Really? How quaint.

It may be quaint, but it is also a simple
statement of the logical truth. You say
that you detect bull*** in it. I'm fairly
sure that your bull*** detectors suffer
from a serious if well-known fault -- they
give a false positive when they encounter
ANY statement on your favourite topic
by anyone other than yourself. In this
field there is so much BS around that
this fault can readily pass unnoticed.
But, from time to time, such an automatic
response will trip you up.

> > There is no great problem about seeing
> > why, and (to a fair extent) how, language
> > would evolve in large groups -- or, at least,
> > be highly beneficial in them.
>
> Well, let's see. We have various communal
> insects, we have a large selection of mammalian
> herbivors, we have quite a few species of fish,
> and other examples of large groups sizes where
> language as we think we know it has failed
> to evolve. Somehow the proposition that large
> group size is somehow critically important
> seems to have missed me.

Wow! I knew things were bad.
I had no idea that they were THAT bad.

So if we each had our own language, we'd
get along fine? Or if each family did, that
would be almost as good? A society of say
10,000, consisting of groups of, say, 10 adults
(each with its own, entirely separate language),
would be just as effective (in terms of fighting
off predators, of making war, or of doing almost
anything) as one consisting of groups of 100
or 1,000 or 10,000 ?

[..]
> The question isn't what happens to current
> societies when they are below a critical mass.
> The question has to do with the conditions
> that fostered the first extensions of primate
> signaling mechanisms into a more flexible
> and information rich configuration.

True, and it's about the stage after that,
and the one after that, and so on. It's
also about the benefits that each group
obtained from its use of those 'extensions'
enabling it to do better than its
neighbours and out-compete them.

> > Secondly, the costs of evolving and
> > maintaining a language are huge. (I don't
> > think this statement needs defending -- but
> > complain if you want.) The benefits it yields
> > must correspond. It's very hard to see what
> > they could be in a society made up from
> > small groups.
>
> As you are at pains to point out above,
> language evolved, it did not suddenly appear
> fully fledged.

Yes, but you miss the point that each
stage (no matter how small you want
to make it) involves a cost, and has
to be selected for. Without a model of
human evolution (which you clearly lack)
that provides a mechanism enabling the
selection of improvements in language
at each stage, and which indicates how
it might have worked, then you are
thrashing about in the dark.

> > Thirdly, it's very hard to see how a language
> > COULD evolve in a society made up from
> > small groups. But here we run into a vast
> > swamp of standard-PA-turgidity. Are these
> > small groups territorial? Are they mutually
> > hostile? On what basis did they work?
>
> Well, that at least is a legitimate question for
> once. Just to enlighten you, there are a huge
> number of situations where a relatively small
> improvement in the efficiency of information
> transfer would lead to a very large improvement
> in effectiveness. The ability to give directions
> to a food source is one very obvious one.

Hardly. Other species get along fine
in this respect with next-to-nothing in
the way of anything resembling human
language. Nor does such an ability
feature prominently (nor even much at
all) among H/G tribes.

> I set up the direction giving hypothesis a few
> months ago in a series of posts that you seem
> to have missed. You might try looking them
> up.

What were the titles? On what should
I search?

> I have very specific reasons for chosing
> that as a possible first step based on both
> brain and linguistic structures.

Paul.