R.K.: Alright, that brings me to another question. What you've described from this bottom-up idea of how primates and earlier animals evolved with a lot of the ideas that now are a part of morals is how they are influenced by different things. What are the human inventions that affect how bottom-up tendencies are manifested?
F.W.: Human inventions, you mean? What do you mean "human inventions?"
R.K.: Yeah. Well, when... acquisition of language. Was that an invention, or was that an
evolutional development?
F.W.: Well, I think humans are bred to learn language and so we know that, for example, in the first couple of years of life, even sometimes before the baby is born, recent experiments that show that the fetus picks up sounds already and including linguistic sounds and so we humans are really born to learn language and to develop language and so that's an evolved capacity even though learning is part of it. You have to learn a language to speak it. We are pre-programmed to learn and if you try to teach, for example, a chimpanzee, or gorilla language, people have tried that of course, that has been done for many decades, it's very limited what they learn.
They learn a little bit and they learn certain sounds that they associate with certain objects and they can learn to press certain keys, or certain symbols to request an object. So, yes, they can learn to communicate symbolically, but it's extremely limited compared to what even a two year old, or three year old child is doing.
And so we are really a species that evolved to use language and that's our specialization almost because language then influences everything else we do because language is not just a way of communicating with somebody else, but we also use it to organize the world around ourselves and it's a very powerful tool that we have.
R.K.: Now, you have also written that signing, hand-signing, the primates have more success with.
F.W.: Yeah, the primates, chimpanzees and Bonobos, they're very good at gesticulation just like humans and so they...it's actually very interesting with hand gestures... is that they gesture more with the right hand than the left hand and the right hand is of course controlled by the left brain and it's in the left brain where our language centers are. So there's a lot of speculation that hand gestures and language evolution are connected and that maybe humans, instead of starting with speech, they may have started with hand gestures first before they moved to controlling their vocal chords and speaking.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
2
1
