The Language Gene

Timothy Birdnow

Fascinating; new research suggests that humanity's language may be in our genes.

From the Tech Science Daily article:

I'm intrigued by language; it seems to have stimulated our evolution, and our culture, and it seems that our improvement in culture and technology spurred the devolopment of our language as well. It was a kind of bootstrapping process.

Human beings have Brocca's Region, a rather large lobe in the left hemispheres of our brains. No other animals have that. Brocca's Region is the seat of language (although language appears to inhabit other areas as well. Why did Brocca's Region develop?

But it's not really that simple; animals can and do communicate, and sometimes quite sophisticatedly. I saw a documentary about chipmunks; they had very complex vocalizations and we were able to decode some of it (most of which was too high for us to hear) and it was obvious they had a rather complex linguistic pattern and could impart some information. There appeared to been a specific word for human and words for colors as well.

Does that mean Chipmunks speak as do we? No; undoubtedly their language had nouns and adjectives but lacked the flexibility to get across complex ideas.

Which is why human beings can exist in past and present and can predict the future to a limited degree; we can pass on what we learned.

I had a brilliant cat not so long ago. I often called him the Albert Einstein of cats because he was so smart; he could figure out what things did and how they operated. He figured out how the toilet flushed and took to flushing it to amuse himself; he was fascinated at how it worked (I had left the lid off and he would flush it and watch the water go down.) He would try to operate the door handles but couldn't without thumbs, but he knew how they worked. I tried to harness train him so I could take him out; the harness was supposedly animal proof, with clamps that had to be grabbed from both sides to open. He went under a bush and was free in a matter of minutes. Brillian animal.

And he clearly understood much of what we said. I could tell him "we're going in in fifteen minutes" and he would come up to the door in fifteen minutes. If I just went and got him he's be angry. I could tell him to get my wife out of bed and he'd do it. He would often move his mouth and it was clear he was trying to speak. He could communicate with us in a lot of ways though.

We know chimps and gorillas learn sign languge, too. So there is undoubtedly much more communication in the animal kingdom than we give them credit for, but they still can't think in the abstract way we do.Human speech (and the thinking that comes from it) is a whole order of magnitude above the animals.

Civilization was born of human speech, no question. So this isn't an idle question for academics.

And it's no idle question for modern civilization. Our ability to speak is degrading thanks to terrible education, and the younger generation has been steadily declining in it's ability to elucidate thoughts or even think them. That is the failure of modern education to teach kids to speak properly and read.

Computers have led to the young not reading, and when they do they just read snippets, and this failure to develop the speech centers of their brains has ramifications for the long-term survival of our species. We seem to be devolving back to the Neanderthal/Denisovian era, with speech being entirely direct and unsophisticated.

At any rate I find this discovery of a gene to be an interesting development. The more we understand language the more we understand the human mind.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:28 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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