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The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain
This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.
Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.
Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.
528 pages, Paperback
First published April 17, 1998
About the author
Terrence W. Deacon
6 books70 followersTerrence W. Deacon is a professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience and the chair of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of The Symbolic Species, he lives near Berkeley, California.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
April 11, 2010
I couldn't understand this book at all, but was dutifully attempting to plough through it when a visiting friend noticed it on my shelf. "That's just the worst book ever written!" he said. "My mother-in-law knows him. He's an idiot." Possibly there was an adjective before "idiot".
At any rate, I decided I didn't need to read any more, though I'm afraid it's still on my shelf. I can't quite say why. Lack of decisiveness, I suppose.
At any rate, I decided I didn't need to read any more, though I'm afraid it's still on my shelf. I can't quite say why. Lack of decisiveness, I suppose.
December 7, 2012
Well, this took me a long time to read. Partly it was due to the ideas themselves; a lot of passages need to be re-read to really understand the point Deacon is trying to make, as a lot of what he talks about is just fundamentally hard to grasp. I think it was also partly due to Deacon himself; his prose can get pretty wordy and, in some portions, he's detailed almost to a fault.
To really a review this book properly I feel like a person would need to write a lengthy essay, but I don't feel like doing that. Instead, I'll do what I've gotten in the habit of doing and just give my vague, general impressions. My review score here was overly difficult to decide upon, by the way. His general thesis of symbolic co-evolution acting on the brain as a selective force is plausible and fascinating, but speculative nonetheless. One of his other main focuses--the attempted refutation of any Language Acquisition Device (LAD) or internal grammar mechanism--is well argued and substantiated with plenty of evidence, but I'm not entirely sure if I'd now say I'm on his side or not.
Just a brief overview of how the book is laid out: The first part deals with Deacon's analysis of language as a symbolic medium, broken down into the iconic, the indexical, and the symbolic. This section is probably the easiest part of the book, but it still requires careful reading to understand, and it's vital that one does understand this section since it's essential to comprehending the rest of the book. The second section is where he delves deep into the neuroscience and the neurobiology. Probably the most challenging section, it's here where he makes his sustained argument against the LAD. The last section is kind of all over the place, with Deacon speculating (sometimes quite freely) as to what language-brain co-evolution implies for things like the nature of consciousness, the constitution of the self, the mind-body problem, and other problems that have yet to be entirely successfully removed from philosophy and find placement in science.
So, should a person read this? Yeah, I definitely think so. That is, if you're really interested in this stuff. If you only have a passing interest in brains, language, or evolution, I would give this one a pass and go for something easier. Just making it through this tome is a hearty commitment. Precisely understanding all Deacon's points probably takes at least two read-throughs, and that's hours and hours of your time. But I think, in the end, if you enjoy the subject matter, it's almost definitely worth getting the perspective even if a person isn't inclined to agree with all he has to say (especially some of the questionable and more philosophical moves he makes toward the end).
To really a review this book properly I feel like a person would need to write a lengthy essay, but I don't feel like doing that. Instead, I'll do what I've gotten in the habit of doing and just give my vague, general impressions. My review score here was overly difficult to decide upon, by the way. His general thesis of symbolic co-evolution acting on the brain as a selective force is plausible and fascinating, but speculative nonetheless. One of his other main focuses--the attempted refutation of any Language Acquisition Device (LAD) or internal grammar mechanism--is well argued and substantiated with plenty of evidence, but I'm not entirely sure if I'd now say I'm on his side or not.
Just a brief overview of how the book is laid out: The first part deals with Deacon's analysis of language as a symbolic medium, broken down into the iconic, the indexical, and the symbolic. This section is probably the easiest part of the book, but it still requires careful reading to understand, and it's vital that one does understand this section since it's essential to comprehending the rest of the book. The second section is where he delves deep into the neuroscience and the neurobiology. Probably the most challenging section, it's here where he makes his sustained argument against the LAD. The last section is kind of all over the place, with Deacon speculating (sometimes quite freely) as to what language-brain co-evolution implies for things like the nature of consciousness, the constitution of the self, the mind-body problem, and other problems that have yet to be entirely successfully removed from philosophy and find placement in science.
So, should a person read this? Yeah, I definitely think so. That is, if you're really interested in this stuff. If you only have a passing interest in brains, language, or evolution, I would give this one a pass and go for something easier. Just making it through this tome is a hearty commitment. Precisely understanding all Deacon's points probably takes at least two read-throughs, and that's hours and hours of your time. But I think, in the end, if you enjoy the subject matter, it's almost definitely worth getting the perspective even if a person isn't inclined to agree with all he has to say (especially some of the questionable and more philosophical moves he makes toward the end).
March 5, 2017
The subtitle is a huge hint here - language and the brain evolved together. Partly, humans have a weird brain that allows us to have symbolic language, which is largely unattainable by other species. But also partly, the language we have is suited to our peculiar brains. Deacon's understanding of evolution allows him to see through the hysteria of how we could have possibly evolved such a universal grammar module and perceive what seems, in retrospect, obvious: what human languages have in common are those things that they require in order to survive in the environment of our brains. But the real meat of this book is the meticulous, evidence-backed detail he uses to flesh out the mechanisms that support his hypotheses. He dissects language down to its bits in order to pinpoint what's so wacky about symbolic language that it's so rare - it requires a weird sort of learning that normally isn't very useful to have. He then examines how it was that this one weird species accidentally happened to learn that one weird trick to allow such a thing. Drowning us in waves of anthropological and zoological evidence of what types of cognition, language, and behavior are present in different species, he really allows the reader to understand the mechanism of this complementary evolutionary process that let us have this dumb language and consequent crazy notion of self-awareness. It's very concretely grasping quite an abstract and ephemeral topic, which is really all I ever really want out of life. And, like anything that I gain a greater understanding of, it rather made the entire process seem wildly unlikely. There are a lot more factors involved in the type of consciousness we're familiar with than I had even realized, so I'll have to go back to my Drake equation and make sure the appropriate factors are appropriately factored in.
July 1, 2015
While Deacon often appears to take a self-aggrandizing attitude toward his own work and may use some questionable examples to support his theories (it is a pop science book, after all), The Symbolic Species is a great discussion starter regarding language evolution. I did walk away from this book thinking that very little of it actually offered evidence for HOW language and the brain co-evolved, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
While I am no disciple of Chomsky, Deacon does seem to gloss over the poverty of stimulus dilemma in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. Especially since Deacon becomes almost preachy in his anti-Chomskyan rhetoric. However, further outside reading did at least offer a more reasonable argument from Deacon as he employed more specific linguistic examples that you won't find in this book. (I'm a geeky grad student in linguistics, and I crave these tidbits!)
If you feel somewhat frustrated by Deacon's circular writing style, try listening to this talk from 2010:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT-zZ0...
Deacon provides a great summary of his theories when he wrote The Symbolic Species and offers new insights from his current research. Watching this video actually made him seem like a very amiable professor that I wouldn't mind visiting during office hours. I am wary of taking this book as dogmatic truth, but it's certainly a refreshing and provocative perspective on how symbolic thought makes the human experience so unique.
While I am no disciple of Chomsky, Deacon does seem to gloss over the poverty of stimulus dilemma in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. Especially since Deacon becomes almost preachy in his anti-Chomskyan rhetoric. However, further outside reading did at least offer a more reasonable argument from Deacon as he employed more specific linguistic examples that you won't find in this book. (I'm a geeky grad student in linguistics, and I crave these tidbits!)
If you feel somewhat frustrated by Deacon's circular writing style, try listening to this talk from 2010:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT-zZ0...
Deacon provides a great summary of his theories when he wrote The Symbolic Species and offers new insights from his current research. Watching this video actually made him seem like a very amiable professor that I wouldn't mind visiting during office hours. I am wary of taking this book as dogmatic truth, but it's certainly a refreshing and provocative perspective on how symbolic thought makes the human experience so unique.
February 9, 2011
In answer to central questions such as "What makes humans different?", "Is it brain size that gives humans speech?", "How did consciousness and language evolve in humans?", and "What is consciousness?", Deacon provides an elegant solution. We are a symbolic species. Language, and as a consequence consciousness, are made possible by the use of an ability to process symbols. I will try to explain how the symbolic process works, why it is important, how it evolved, and what effect it has on consciousness following Deacon's arguments.
Let us make a few important points to start with. The approach here is truly inspirational and revolutionary. This is not a repetition of tired and discredited views of 'language areas of the brain' or the left-right split for thought and language. This book does not spend 450+ pages supporting the tired hackneyed conjecturing of Chomsky, Pinker & their followers. Ever since Chomsky first announced some kind of language acquisition device, more and more physical evidence has been amassed about how the brain functions and is structured to show how misguided the original idea was. Instead of retreating, the Chomsky camp has only tried to obscure this basic belief behind formalisms and frauds. Deacon puts the problem clearly. It is nonsense to talk about brains being specifically designed to cater to language from birth, as if language is fixed and brains change to suit language. Whatever language is, it must have evolved to cater to the proclivities of human brain structures and patterns. Language has evolved to the human brain, not the other way.
The core principle of Deacon's approach is a neo-Piercean symbolism. While a real-life object may have a referent, the referent can quickly become an icon that stands separately from the object itself. In the animal world, alarm calls have a direct relationship between a threat and the sound made by a group of animals. These references rarely become iconic in the way that a pet dog may be able to associate any kind of round object with the sound of 'ball' and behave accordingly. None of these, however, represent the way that humans use language. The extra step that animals do not seem to make is to then re-associate icons with each other in novel combinations to the extent that meaning is derived more from the relationships between icons than between the icon and the original object. That this ability is not beyond animals, in particular bonobos, has been demonstrated by the great work carried out by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues at the Great Ape Trust, referred to by Deacon.
The question that we must answer is why humans have come to depend so heavily on symbols. Or, more precisely, what evolutionary advantage did symbolic thinking offer early humans? To answer this question Deacon suggests that to look for the source of humans' unique linguistic abilities we should look at their unique evolutionary adaptations. Fundamentally, human societies are all WRONG for two reasons. The first is that human growth patterns work against survival. At precisely the time that mothers and infants need the most food they are at their most incompetent at foraging and feeding. The only way that the mother and child can be assured of having enough food is to share with others, either with other potential mothers or with the father. Potential mothers must make the symbolic connection between exchanging food in their hand for a promise of assistance when they are in need. Thus reciprocity, a human cultural universal, is a symbolic act - it is an exchange of material goods for a promise. Even animals capable of symbolic reasoning find this a difficult leap to make. A father will only share food if he is certain that the child is carrying their genes - and this leads us to the 2nd reason why human societies should not really work when compared to other animals' responses to the reproduction of an individual's genes. Typically animals will either pair-bond or congregate in exclusive mating groups. That is pair-bonds will have a way of showing other potential mates that they are no longer available for reproduction and may even withdraw from potential contact with other suitors to ensure the continuation of their genes. Outside crowded colonies, this is a typical response for many bird species. The other response is typified by the lion pride. A small number of (often related) males will mate with a 'harem' of females who are then given the responsibility of child-rearing and feeding. Thus, when a new lion takes over the pride he will normally kill all the infant lions so that the lionesses are not spending effort on raising another lion's cubs. The same dilemma of 'wasting' valuable resources on another man's genes faces humans, but the response of human social groupings is 'perverse.' Human groups typically consist of a variety of potential male and female mates. In order to ensure a pair-bond humans must again use a symbolic process to pair-bond: they must promise themselves to each other. Thus another human cultural universal becomes ritualised in the myriad forms of marriage ceremony that exist to announce to the community that a pair bond has been established.
So if Deacon can tie the genesis of language down to the end of Australopithecus and the start of homo habilus, what has happened to language since? Whatever language was at the start, it is no longer. We cannot expect our current linguistic abilities to have appeared in total at once. Deacon suggests that a lot of original language was multi-modal, involving body movements, pitch and volume. All of these aspects of communication are still present, but are often ignored by linguists obsessed with predicate logic. We cannot communicate without moving parts of our bodies and Deacon points out that while the 'words' that we concentrate so hard on are being transferred by speech, prosodic features of language are working hard to provide emotional cues. He then describes how the brain probably works in parallel across the two hemispheres to chunk incoming linguistic information so that while one half works on the segmented sounds that constitute lexis and grammar the other tries to unravel the cues provided by prosody. That is, neither hemisphere is exclusively related to language but the two hemispheres simultaneously process different types of linguistic information - and this can be learned by either side of the brain.
This is a superb book. It is almost impossible to do it justice in any length of review. In fact it is 3 superb books - one on linguistics, one on neurology and one on evolution. No make that 4 - it is also fundamentally an anthropological book. While this is its great strength, it is also what makes it a difficult read for most people. Few others could write this book, and most readers will have background knowledge in one or maybe two of these areas. Alongside Deacon's more typical anthropological interests in culture and language (and more than a passing interest in evolutionary theory), his expertise stretches to neurology and experimental biological anthropology. One might call him a renaissance man, but that probably betrays how narrowly-focused many disciplines and specialities have become as much as it celebrates the breadth of Deacon's knowledge.
Let us make a few important points to start with. The approach here is truly inspirational and revolutionary. This is not a repetition of tired and discredited views of 'language areas of the brain' or the left-right split for thought and language. This book does not spend 450+ pages supporting the tired hackneyed conjecturing of Chomsky, Pinker & their followers. Ever since Chomsky first announced some kind of language acquisition device, more and more physical evidence has been amassed about how the brain functions and is structured to show how misguided the original idea was. Instead of retreating, the Chomsky camp has only tried to obscure this basic belief behind formalisms and frauds. Deacon puts the problem clearly. It is nonsense to talk about brains being specifically designed to cater to language from birth, as if language is fixed and brains change to suit language. Whatever language is, it must have evolved to cater to the proclivities of human brain structures and patterns. Language has evolved to the human brain, not the other way.
The core principle of Deacon's approach is a neo-Piercean symbolism. While a real-life object may have a referent, the referent can quickly become an icon that stands separately from the object itself. In the animal world, alarm calls have a direct relationship between a threat and the sound made by a group of animals. These references rarely become iconic in the way that a pet dog may be able to associate any kind of round object with the sound of 'ball' and behave accordingly. None of these, however, represent the way that humans use language. The extra step that animals do not seem to make is to then re-associate icons with each other in novel combinations to the extent that meaning is derived more from the relationships between icons than between the icon and the original object. That this ability is not beyond animals, in particular bonobos, has been demonstrated by the great work carried out by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues at the Great Ape Trust, referred to by Deacon.
The question that we must answer is why humans have come to depend so heavily on symbols. Or, more precisely, what evolutionary advantage did symbolic thinking offer early humans? To answer this question Deacon suggests that to look for the source of humans' unique linguistic abilities we should look at their unique evolutionary adaptations. Fundamentally, human societies are all WRONG for two reasons. The first is that human growth patterns work against survival. At precisely the time that mothers and infants need the most food they are at their most incompetent at foraging and feeding. The only way that the mother and child can be assured of having enough food is to share with others, either with other potential mothers or with the father. Potential mothers must make the symbolic connection between exchanging food in their hand for a promise of assistance when they are in need. Thus reciprocity, a human cultural universal, is a symbolic act - it is an exchange of material goods for a promise. Even animals capable of symbolic reasoning find this a difficult leap to make. A father will only share food if he is certain that the child is carrying their genes - and this leads us to the 2nd reason why human societies should not really work when compared to other animals' responses to the reproduction of an individual's genes. Typically animals will either pair-bond or congregate in exclusive mating groups. That is pair-bonds will have a way of showing other potential mates that they are no longer available for reproduction and may even withdraw from potential contact with other suitors to ensure the continuation of their genes. Outside crowded colonies, this is a typical response for many bird species. The other response is typified by the lion pride. A small number of (often related) males will mate with a 'harem' of females who are then given the responsibility of child-rearing and feeding. Thus, when a new lion takes over the pride he will normally kill all the infant lions so that the lionesses are not spending effort on raising another lion's cubs. The same dilemma of 'wasting' valuable resources on another man's genes faces humans, but the response of human social groupings is 'perverse.' Human groups typically consist of a variety of potential male and female mates. In order to ensure a pair-bond humans must again use a symbolic process to pair-bond: they must promise themselves to each other. Thus another human cultural universal becomes ritualised in the myriad forms of marriage ceremony that exist to announce to the community that a pair bond has been established.
So if Deacon can tie the genesis of language down to the end of Australopithecus and the start of homo habilus, what has happened to language since? Whatever language was at the start, it is no longer. We cannot expect our current linguistic abilities to have appeared in total at once. Deacon suggests that a lot of original language was multi-modal, involving body movements, pitch and volume. All of these aspects of communication are still present, but are often ignored by linguists obsessed with predicate logic. We cannot communicate without moving parts of our bodies and Deacon points out that while the 'words' that we concentrate so hard on are being transferred by speech, prosodic features of language are working hard to provide emotional cues. He then describes how the brain probably works in parallel across the two hemispheres to chunk incoming linguistic information so that while one half works on the segmented sounds that constitute lexis and grammar the other tries to unravel the cues provided by prosody. That is, neither hemisphere is exclusively related to language but the two hemispheres simultaneously process different types of linguistic information - and this can be learned by either side of the brain.
This is a superb book. It is almost impossible to do it justice in any length of review. In fact it is 3 superb books - one on linguistics, one on neurology and one on evolution. No make that 4 - it is also fundamentally an anthropological book. While this is its great strength, it is also what makes it a difficult read for most people. Few others could write this book, and most readers will have background knowledge in one or maybe two of these areas. Alongside Deacon's more typical anthropological interests in culture and language (and more than a passing interest in evolutionary theory), his expertise stretches to neurology and experimental biological anthropology. One might call him a renaissance man, but that probably betrays how narrowly-focused many disciplines and specialities have become as much as it celebrates the breadth of Deacon's knowledge.
October 28, 2009
A brain-melter of a book. Fascinating and brilliant and dense. Written clearly but at great length and depth. Suggests language shaped the human brain as much as the brain shaped language, and shows just how that was accomplished, and why there's no such thing as 'simple' languages in other animals. It's all about the hurdle of symbolic thought and communication. My brain feels like it was re-shaped just to take it all in.
September 8, 2009
This is a great book that can get a little dense and technical at times. The main premise of the text is that what really separates humans from animals and other forms of life is language. Humans use language symbolically as opposed to indexically. The explanation for what this means was one of the hardest parts of the book to get. What it boils down to is that animals, particularly smart animals like chimps and dogs, can map words to specific meanings but they cannot do things like string words together to form long sentences or use the same symbol (word) for multiple meanings. Chimpanzees even struggle with this even though they can learn an impressive vocabulary of word to symbol mappings. Another important fact is that languages simply do not exist in nature outside of humans.
The author then proceeds to examine why or how humans can do this complicated trick. Simple net intelligence is examined and found to be not sufficient. He brings up the fact that mice have similar brain to mass ratios to humans and mice are not considered exceptionally smart. He also points out that Chihuahuas have a much higher brain to body mass ratio than other dogs, even close to humans, but they are not even considered smart for dogs. The reason must have something to do with brain size and structure (not just size). He goes on to show that several regions of our brain are quite a bit larger than expected if we simply scaled up a chimp brain to human size. Some how the pre-frontal region of the brain was exceptionally expanded.
How do things like this happen in nature? Evolution. And why would evolution select for this language ability? The author supposes it has to do with our social organization (pair bonding within a large group) which also turns out to be unique in nature. Humans needed language to determine who was sexually available and who was not. They also needed communication between the pairs so that the male who helps with provisioning of the children can be ensured he is in fact provisioning his own child (genetically).
The final chapters are devoted to how the brain actually learns. Pretty cool stuff. For a fairly large and challenging book, I found it a fairly easy read.
The author then proceeds to examine why or how humans can do this complicated trick. Simple net intelligence is examined and found to be not sufficient. He brings up the fact that mice have similar brain to mass ratios to humans and mice are not considered exceptionally smart. He also points out that Chihuahuas have a much higher brain to body mass ratio than other dogs, even close to humans, but they are not even considered smart for dogs. The reason must have something to do with brain size and structure (not just size). He goes on to show that several regions of our brain are quite a bit larger than expected if we simply scaled up a chimp brain to human size. Some how the pre-frontal region of the brain was exceptionally expanded.
How do things like this happen in nature? Evolution. And why would evolution select for this language ability? The author supposes it has to do with our social organization (pair bonding within a large group) which also turns out to be unique in nature. Humans needed language to determine who was sexually available and who was not. They also needed communication between the pairs so that the male who helps with provisioning of the children can be ensured he is in fact provisioning his own child (genetically).
The final chapters are devoted to how the brain actually learns. Pretty cool stuff. For a fairly large and challenging book, I found it a fairly easy read.
June 1, 2010
Deacon's book is over a decade old but holds up well. His analysis of the forces that led to the characteristic brain structure of humans is not unique, although this was one of the first publications to pull the evidence together in a coherent account over time. His primary contribution is the careful argument for the *co*-evolution of brain structures with language, and for the way in which symbolic thinking and ritual preceeded and fostered language capability. Deacon's insights have found strong support in the cognitive linguistics movement and especially among the embodied cognition research thrust.
April 25, 2014
Some really good bits about brain development, brain evolution in mammals and humans, language and symbol use among trained animals, and ritual as the incubator for speech. Unfortunately, it's hard going, and you have to really care (and maybe skim parts) to get through it. Also, when an anthropologists says that a capacity did not evolve and could not have evolved, you have to take those conclusions with a grain of salt.
April 17, 2015
Brilliant!! Another incredibly useful paradigm shift! I just wish most of the technical research had been moved to the Notes section. But regardless, I think the quality of the ideas was worth the extra effort.
February 14, 2012
Best book on explaining difference between animal communication and true symbolic language.
February 28, 2019
الكتاب عن تطور اللغة و المخ، كتاب صعب جداً و م��ل، كثير من فقرات و اجزاء صعبة الفهم خاصة الجزء الثاني، أعتقد أن الكتاب موجه للمختصين بدراسة المخ و الإنسان تشريحيا و المختصين باللغة و الرموز.
March 17, 2022
This book is a fascinating synthesis of ideas to the point that I confess much of it requires more background knowledge than I have in neuroscience. However, the things that I do understand about it are that this is an excellent application of semiotics in order to explain the emergence of language as it is specific to human evolution relative to other animals.
Deacon forwards an excellent theory with one of the best examples of an oppositional reading of Chomsky I've seen in the sciences. Language isn't in humans. It's externally evolving to meet our needs. Thus, there is a co-evolutionary theory happening (that's distinguishable from the population models of evolution forwarded by Dual-Inheritance theory). However, the way Deacon explains this in relation to our brains is beyond me, but I'll take his word for it at the moment. Although I may have better formed opinions on a second reading once I dive into more of the neuroscience of culture, which is clearly in my future readings after this book.
Two criticisms: one stylistic, one theoretical.
Firstly, this book, as I have stated covers a lot of ground. That said, a lot of the things he covers does require a lot of backgrounds in a lot of things. Stylistically, I struggle with these kinds of works because it's almost as if I require multiple masters degrees in unusually connected subjects to understand. In this case, it perhaps sets a standard for how neuroscience is connected to the humanities, and in this way this book holds a power over how the humanities have to approach neuroscience and how neuroscience should approach the humanities. That said, in each case, the other side is not unpacked well enough to fully appreciate the thing they are lesser trained in. It feels as if both sides are being oversimplified. But at the same time, there's so much to know that I feel like this should have been several books. With how integrated each of the themes are within the book, it feel compelled to judge the book with knowledge I do not have or I feel compelled to agree with the thesis on the basis of its style of integration rather than agreement. Because of the quality people smarter than me have, I'm tempted to believe this is a reasonable synthesis because of their reviews. But I know that I do not know this book well, and I find that sincerely frustrating as a person who wishes to use this theory in my own work. I'm faced with an ethical dilemma in citing this book.
Secondly, the use of Peirce's theory here is, while nicely introduced, a really simplified understanding of his theory of Semiotics. The relationships of symbol, index, and icon into neuroscience initially seem well applied. However, it's within the neuroscience chapters that I get lost as to whether they really are. That is, it seems Deacon doesn't entirely appreciate that dynamic qualities that Peirce develops in his firstness, secondness, and thirdness and how this is essentially Peirce's theory of evolution. Considering this is a book about evolution, it is confusing to me how Deacon doesn't really explain this or at least offer a reason for not using them more directly or show how his theory differs.
Again, this is an excellent work, but I'm left wondering about specific connections, some of which I can't feasibly understand at this point. However, within a context of other experts on language and the brain, I'm sure this style works perfectly to frame a series of excellent experiments. But as a book for a general audience with extensive knowledge on one or the other, it feels as though it should have been more modular than the full synthesis it provides.
Deacon forwards an excellent theory with one of the best examples of an oppositional reading of Chomsky I've seen in the sciences. Language isn't in humans. It's externally evolving to meet our needs. Thus, there is a co-evolutionary theory happening (that's distinguishable from the population models of evolution forwarded by Dual-Inheritance theory). However, the way Deacon explains this in relation to our brains is beyond me, but I'll take his word for it at the moment. Although I may have better formed opinions on a second reading once I dive into more of the neuroscience of culture, which is clearly in my future readings after this book.
Two criticisms: one stylistic, one theoretical.
Firstly, this book, as I have stated covers a lot of ground. That said, a lot of the things he covers does require a lot of backgrounds in a lot of things. Stylistically, I struggle with these kinds of works because it's almost as if I require multiple masters degrees in unusually connected subjects to understand. In this case, it perhaps sets a standard for how neuroscience is connected to the humanities, and in this way this book holds a power over how the humanities have to approach neuroscience and how neuroscience should approach the humanities. That said, in each case, the other side is not unpacked well enough to fully appreciate the thing they are lesser trained in. It feels as if both sides are being oversimplified. But at the same time, there's so much to know that I feel like this should have been several books. With how integrated each of the themes are within the book, it feel compelled to judge the book with knowledge I do not have or I feel compelled to agree with the thesis on the basis of its style of integration rather than agreement. Because of the quality people smarter than me have, I'm tempted to believe this is a reasonable synthesis because of their reviews. But I know that I do not know this book well, and I find that sincerely frustrating as a person who wishes to use this theory in my own work. I'm faced with an ethical dilemma in citing this book.
Secondly, the use of Peirce's theory here is, while nicely introduced, a really simplified understanding of his theory of Semiotics. The relationships of symbol, index, and icon into neuroscience initially seem well applied. However, it's within the neuroscience chapters that I get lost as to whether they really are. That is, it seems Deacon doesn't entirely appreciate that dynamic qualities that Peirce develops in his firstness, secondness, and thirdness and how this is essentially Peirce's theory of evolution. Considering this is a book about evolution, it is confusing to me how Deacon doesn't really explain this or at least offer a reason for not using them more directly or show how his theory differs.
Again, this is an excellent work, but I'm left wondering about specific connections, some of which I can't feasibly understand at this point. However, within a context of other experts on language and the brain, I'm sure this style works perfectly to frame a series of excellent experiments. But as a book for a general audience with extensive knowledge on one or the other, it feels as though it should have been more modular than the full synthesis it provides.
July 5, 2022
No wonder why this book is a classic in psycholinguistics!!!
September 5, 2023
This book could probably be best summarized as a rebuttal of the Chomsky-style Language Acquisition Device class of hypotheses for the origin of language, proposing an alternative model based heavily on co-evolution. The book recaps the case that human language is not unique due to cognitive horsepower or vocal tract control, but the use of recursive grammar. It shows some pretty surprisingly severe and narrow cognitive deficits in chimps that suggest they lack some specific ability present in humans. Deacon then claims that this ability is the "conceptual negation" enabled by the PFC - without this, we would be unable to separate the influence of previous words when we detect a clause switch. They explain the current state of human language and human brains via a co-evolutionary loop, in which the crucial role of language incentivizes a more powerful PFC, and PFC power allows more complex language. It argues that in humans, the PFC is so overdeveloped that the brain begins to use it to power many tasks which in other animals don't use the PFC, making the human cognitive "style" deeply unusual and PFC-heavy.
The book does have some serious shortcomings though. It's longer than it needs to be, largely because of many neuroanatomical details that aren't ultimately load-bearing. Its theory of why symbolic cognition is difficult is more about *not getting lost in the local correlations* than about locating the correct higher-order correlations to pay attention to. The actual discussion of the mechanisms of symbolic reference is pretty limited, and the "conceptual negation" gloss on the critical PFC function is quite loose and vibes-based. Finally, the book doesn't discuss why symbolic cognition is so powerful for things other than tracking social information, but maybe that's out of scope.
Notes:
• Humans are the only species that use grammar in our communication - other species only use words
• Says that Chomsky thinks grammar is due to an "accidental organ" that encodes the rules of human grammar, explaining how infants pick it up so quickly. This apparently was a discontinuity of some sort rather than evolving gradually. Somehow I doubt this explanation would pass the Chomskyite ITT.
• Human language requires detailed perception, production, and lots of processing. But these can't be the limiting factors - there are no "simple languages" out there that use syntax, but have a limited enough vocabulary to be easier to use
• Semiotics distinguishes three basic kinds of reference. Iconic: signifier resembles signified, Indexical: signifier correlated with signified, and Symbolic: relationship between signifier and signified fully abstract and arbitrary.
○ Iconic reference pretty much means literally pictures. This is like mirror-recognition level understanding. Icons don't have to be photorealistic tho, because the correspondence is drawn according to some prior on what sorts of features are important, and which aren't
○ "Let's call this thing an X" is a Indexical reference, much more powerful than iconic, allows for arbitrary substitution of names, but requires an initial co-observation
○ "A pink elephant" is Symbolic, it can work by generalizing syntactic rules even if the referent has never been observed and the symbol is novel
• Chimps can learn lots of indexical meanings, and can (with difficulty) learn symbolic representation!! Chimps trained to think symbolically generalize (can put an unfamiliar tool in the "tool" bin and unfamiliar food in the "food" bin), indexical ones don't.
• Author suggests that miraculous language-learning may not be due to some "objective" property of language that is a very clever data structure or something, but simply because language is passed down through humans, so of course whatever structures are most memorable to our inductive biases will get passed down, whatever those inductive biases may be.
○ This suggests older languages should be easier to learn, which I think is false?? Seems like it also opens up some interesting questions about what happens when you tighten or loosen the bottleneck
• Author suggests Kanzi learned language well due to infancy, and what I've seen of Teco seems to match up. Makes sense from co-evo perspective - infants have a different set of inductive biases (which scan to me as making sense to drive early exploration), and language adapts to be highly learnable according to that set of inductive biases
• "contrary to a century of speculative accounts of brain evolution, phylogenetic differences in the sizes and functions of particular cortical or nuclear regions cannot generally be attributed to the addition of cells to that area or to changes in gene expression in that area."
○ "If a cortical region appears to have changed size or function in the course of evolution it is likely because of a systemic change affecting a number of brain regions whose connections happen to converge on it."
• Chimeric brains work shockingly well, even with sources as different as pigs vs rats!
• "The developmental information is highly conserved precisely because it can be general, relying on
Darwinian-like developmental processes to produce the detailed adaptations of neural networks to one another. This introduces an evolutionary logic that runs counter to many of the most basic assumptions of classic theories of brain evolution. We do not need to invoke all sorts of specific and highly improbable mutations of brain structure design in order to account for changes in the relationships between the parts of brains."
• Mechanism of displacement: relative sizes of peripherals connected to a particular region affect what functionality gets learned in that region
• Displacement model of brain growth is why TD thinks developmental timing is so important: which peripheral tissues are how large at what time will determine how brain space gets allocated.
• Developmental timing v important, as the ratio of input volumes during the stage of development when "axon competition divides up the brain" is what leads to the body->brain effects. Chihuahuas have ratios that diverge too late for brain effects, humans diverge early
• Jane Goodall recounts one occasion where she observed a chimp trying to suppress an excited food call by covering his mouth with his hand
• Human babies only babble while calm, and cry when upset. Suggests behavior is initiated top-down cognitive control style, and inhibited by intense emotional states.
• When analyzing human symbolic cognition, the natural place to look is the place where the human brain is the most extreme - the prefrontal cortex. But PFC injuries don't tend to inhibit speech or symbolic thought. But because of the theory of development introduced, the next place to look is all the areas with increased axonal projections from the PFC, whose functions will also be altered.
• "In general terms, human information processing should be biased by an excessive reliance on and guidance by the kinds of manipulations that prefrontal circuits impose upon the information they process. We humans should therefore exhibit a "cognitive style" that sets us apart from other species-a pattern of organizing perceptions, actions, and learning that is peculiarly "front-heavy," so to speak."
• "So, what does the prefrontal cortex do? This is no simple question. In fact, it remains one of the more debated questions in neuropsychology"
• Normal monkeys that are presented with food in a number of slots will grab each piece, once, from each slot, as expected. (Dorsolateral) prefrontally damaged monkeys, however, will sometimes return to slots they've already taken the food from, or will fail to sample food-containing slots at all.
• Suggests that the unifying factor of prefrontal damage is an inability to "negate information". Remembering that you've sampled a well and therefore not sampling it again, producing mirror-image instructions by generating first-person instructions and inverting them, seeing the no-go light turn on and therefore not doing anything, etc.
• Claims that this negation ability allows hierarchical abstraction, by preventing gradient starvation of overlapping concepts? PFC damage phrased as "limiting the ability to pull attention away from surface correlations between stimuli"
• Claims PFC enables recursive clause nesting by negating effects of outer words once clause shift is detected
• Most of his discussion of language learning seems to model the key difficulty as "not getting lost in the surface correlations", which is explained by the brain-wide functional differences introduced by relative PFC enlargement during axon projection stage. But this leaves open the problem of how the correct nonlocal patterns actually get learned? The difficulty of learning language seems like it ought to come at least in large part from the fact that when you're trying to learn a nonlocal pattern, the number of hypotheses explodes exponentially in the degree of nonlocality
• Language evolves much faster than genes, and language implementations can vary significantly in what aspects of the brain are used to process them (inflected vs uninflected, marker-words vs conjugation vs word order, etc). Since the relevant computations are not distributed consistently, not much could be memorized
• Author's hypothesis for how symbolic communication got started: humans started to use cooperative mixed-sex living groups, while maintaining individual pair-bonding instead of something like competitive polygyny. This was incentivized because it allowed large cooperative groups of men to start hunting, who would not work together in any other circumstance. However, the close proximity of the mixed living group led to lots of risks of infidelity, which gave advantages to symbolic communication to track social information needed to enforce reciprocal altruism
○ Lions are social hunters, but only closely-related groups of female lions group hunt
○ Wolves are social hunters, but only one female per pack will be able to reproduce at a time, as enforced by pheromones and infanticide
• Makes the case that prescriptions, betrayal, etc. require abstraction… seems sus, just have conditional threats? Surely non-symbolic minds can understand conditionals
• "The problem for symbol discovery is to shift attention from the concrete to the abstract; from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organized set of relations between signs"
• "The key to this is the co-evolutionary perspective which recognizes that the evolution of language took place neither inside nor outside brains, but at the interface where cultural evolutionary processes affect biological evolutionary processes."
• When you give a chimp two piles of food, and have it point to the one to be given away, it's unable to do the negation operation needed to point to the smaller pile????
• Chimps become more able to do these negations when rewards available are weaker
• Animal cognition will look hugely different because it uses different engines for the same problems
• Uhhh the waxing poetic/philosophical towards the end is starting to seem like a bit much
The book does have some serious shortcomings though. It's longer than it needs to be, largely because of many neuroanatomical details that aren't ultimately load-bearing. Its theory of why symbolic cognition is difficult is more about *not getting lost in the local correlations* than about locating the correct higher-order correlations to pay attention to. The actual discussion of the mechanisms of symbolic reference is pretty limited, and the "conceptual negation" gloss on the critical PFC function is quite loose and vibes-based. Finally, the book doesn't discuss why symbolic cognition is so powerful for things other than tracking social information, but maybe that's out of scope.
Notes:
• Humans are the only species that use grammar in our communication - other species only use words
• Says that Chomsky thinks grammar is due to an "accidental organ" that encodes the rules of human grammar, explaining how infants pick it up so quickly. This apparently was a discontinuity of some sort rather than evolving gradually. Somehow I doubt this explanation would pass the Chomskyite ITT.
• Human language requires detailed perception, production, and lots of processing. But these can't be the limiting factors - there are no "simple languages" out there that use syntax, but have a limited enough vocabulary to be easier to use
• Semiotics distinguishes three basic kinds of reference. Iconic: signifier resembles signified, Indexical: signifier correlated with signified, and Symbolic: relationship between signifier and signified fully abstract and arbitrary.
○ Iconic reference pretty much means literally pictures. This is like mirror-recognition level understanding. Icons don't have to be photorealistic tho, because the correspondence is drawn according to some prior on what sorts of features are important, and which aren't
○ "Let's call this thing an X" is a Indexical reference, much more powerful than iconic, allows for arbitrary substitution of names, but requires an initial co-observation
○ "A pink elephant" is Symbolic, it can work by generalizing syntactic rules even if the referent has never been observed and the symbol is novel
• Chimps can learn lots of indexical meanings, and can (with difficulty) learn symbolic representation!! Chimps trained to think symbolically generalize (can put an unfamiliar tool in the "tool" bin and unfamiliar food in the "food" bin), indexical ones don't.
• Author suggests that miraculous language-learning may not be due to some "objective" property of language that is a very clever data structure or something, but simply because language is passed down through humans, so of course whatever structures are most memorable to our inductive biases will get passed down, whatever those inductive biases may be.
○ This suggests older languages should be easier to learn, which I think is false?? Seems like it also opens up some interesting questions about what happens when you tighten or loosen the bottleneck
• Author suggests Kanzi learned language well due to infancy, and what I've seen of Teco seems to match up. Makes sense from co-evo perspective - infants have a different set of inductive biases (which scan to me as making sense to drive early exploration), and language adapts to be highly learnable according to that set of inductive biases
• "contrary to a century of speculative accounts of brain evolution, phylogenetic differences in the sizes and functions of particular cortical or nuclear regions cannot generally be attributed to the addition of cells to that area or to changes in gene expression in that area."
○ "If a cortical region appears to have changed size or function in the course of evolution it is likely because of a systemic change affecting a number of brain regions whose connections happen to converge on it."
• Chimeric brains work shockingly well, even with sources as different as pigs vs rats!
• "The developmental information is highly conserved precisely because it can be general, relying on
Darwinian-like developmental processes to produce the detailed adaptations of neural networks to one another. This introduces an evolutionary logic that runs counter to many of the most basic assumptions of classic theories of brain evolution. We do not need to invoke all sorts of specific and highly improbable mutations of brain structure design in order to account for changes in the relationships between the parts of brains."
• Mechanism of displacement: relative sizes of peripherals connected to a particular region affect what functionality gets learned in that region
• Displacement model of brain growth is why TD thinks developmental timing is so important: which peripheral tissues are how large at what time will determine how brain space gets allocated.
• Developmental timing v important, as the ratio of input volumes during the stage of development when "axon competition divides up the brain" is what leads to the body->brain effects. Chihuahuas have ratios that diverge too late for brain effects, humans diverge early
• Jane Goodall recounts one occasion where she observed a chimp trying to suppress an excited food call by covering his mouth with his hand
• Human babies only babble while calm, and cry when upset. Suggests behavior is initiated top-down cognitive control style, and inhibited by intense emotional states.
• When analyzing human symbolic cognition, the natural place to look is the place where the human brain is the most extreme - the prefrontal cortex. But PFC injuries don't tend to inhibit speech or symbolic thought. But because of the theory of development introduced, the next place to look is all the areas with increased axonal projections from the PFC, whose functions will also be altered.
• "In general terms, human information processing should be biased by an excessive reliance on and guidance by the kinds of manipulations that prefrontal circuits impose upon the information they process. We humans should therefore exhibit a "cognitive style" that sets us apart from other species-a pattern of organizing perceptions, actions, and learning that is peculiarly "front-heavy," so to speak."
• "So, what does the prefrontal cortex do? This is no simple question. In fact, it remains one of the more debated questions in neuropsychology"
• Normal monkeys that are presented with food in a number of slots will grab each piece, once, from each slot, as expected. (Dorsolateral) prefrontally damaged monkeys, however, will sometimes return to slots they've already taken the food from, or will fail to sample food-containing slots at all.
• Suggests that the unifying factor of prefrontal damage is an inability to "negate information". Remembering that you've sampled a well and therefore not sampling it again, producing mirror-image instructions by generating first-person instructions and inverting them, seeing the no-go light turn on and therefore not doing anything, etc.
• Claims that this negation ability allows hierarchical abstraction, by preventing gradient starvation of overlapping concepts? PFC damage phrased as "limiting the ability to pull attention away from surface correlations between stimuli"
• Claims PFC enables recursive clause nesting by negating effects of outer words once clause shift is detected
• Most of his discussion of language learning seems to model the key difficulty as "not getting lost in the surface correlations", which is explained by the brain-wide functional differences introduced by relative PFC enlargement during axon projection stage. But this leaves open the problem of how the correct nonlocal patterns actually get learned? The difficulty of learning language seems like it ought to come at least in large part from the fact that when you're trying to learn a nonlocal pattern, the number of hypotheses explodes exponentially in the degree of nonlocality
• Language evolves much faster than genes, and language implementations can vary significantly in what aspects of the brain are used to process them (inflected vs uninflected, marker-words vs conjugation vs word order, etc). Since the relevant computations are not distributed consistently, not much could be memorized
• Author's hypothesis for how symbolic communication got started: humans started to use cooperative mixed-sex living groups, while maintaining individual pair-bonding instead of something like competitive polygyny. This was incentivized because it allowed large cooperative groups of men to start hunting, who would not work together in any other circumstance. However, the close proximity of the mixed living group led to lots of risks of infidelity, which gave advantages to symbolic communication to track social information needed to enforce reciprocal altruism
○ Lions are social hunters, but only closely-related groups of female lions group hunt
○ Wolves are social hunters, but only one female per pack will be able to reproduce at a time, as enforced by pheromones and infanticide
• Makes the case that prescriptions, betrayal, etc. require abstraction… seems sus, just have conditional threats? Surely non-symbolic minds can understand conditionals
• "The problem for symbol discovery is to shift attention from the concrete to the abstract; from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organized set of relations between signs"
• "The key to this is the co-evolutionary perspective which recognizes that the evolution of language took place neither inside nor outside brains, but at the interface where cultural evolutionary processes affect biological evolutionary processes."
• When you give a chimp two piles of food, and have it point to the one to be given away, it's unable to do the negation operation needed to point to the smaller pile????
• Chimps become more able to do these negations when rewards available are weaker
• Animal cognition will look hugely different because it uses different engines for the same problems
• Uhhh the waxing poetic/philosophical towards the end is starting to seem like a bit much
July 26, 2017
This impressive book by an imminently qualified brain specialist, who also displays a firm grasp of language acquisition mechanisms and associated disorders, is structured in three parts, each having 4-6 chapters (see the table of contents at the end of this review). At 525 pages, each packed with information, it isn’t an easy read but persevering pays out handsomely at the end. One appealing feature of the book is its many helpful diagrams and charts.
Deacon begins Chapter 1 with this wonderful quote from Soren Kierkergaard: “[T]he paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.”
Deacon’s thesis is that a sort of grammar mechanism is hardwired into the human brain, which accounts for the facility with which we learn language. Other species, by contrast, have a very hard time doing so. Many species do develop sophisticated communication systems, but the symbolic nature of human languages, with its immense representational power, is missing from all such schemes. The figure below shows three oft-cited examples of animal communication systems possessing elements that can be likened to a vocabulary. But these systems lack the generality of human language, which requires “symbolic competence” for understanding.
Figure: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbi...
Having stated his thesis clearly and forcefully, Deacon sets out to methodically describe and argue for the supporting evidence. One key observation is that we should avoid the illusion of progress toward understanding human language acquisition mechanism that results from using more and more precise terminology for what we don’t know, rather than actually discovering what is missing. “Linguists have progressively redefined what supposedly cannot be learned in ever more formal and precise terms, and so we may have the feeling that these accounts are approaching closer and closer to an explanation.” I have been bothered by a similar phenomenon in astrophysics, where gaps in our knowledge are filled with ill-defined notions such as dark matter, which is, in effect, a way of increasing the mass available in the universe in order to balance our equations, without adding understanding as to why the discrepancy exists to begin with.
In the course of human evolution, language and thinking have become virtually inseparable. “The way that language represents objects, events, and relationships provides a uniquely powerful economy of reference. It offers a means for generating an essentially infinite variety of novel representations, and an unprecedented inferential engine for predicting events, organizing memories, and planning behaviors. It entirely shapes our thinking and the ways we know the physical world. It is so pervasive and inseparable from human intelligence in general that it is difficult to distinguish what aspects of the human intellect have not been molded and streamlined by it.”
The reproductive advantages of better language skills are rather obvious, explaining the evolutionary path for human language. Language skills help cooperative behaviors, such as the ability to pass on information about distant food supplies or organizing labor for a hunt. They also lead to more successful social manipulation and deception, such as misleading one’s competitors. In fact, it is quite difficult to imagine any human endeavor that would not benefit from better communication.
Despite catchy chapter titles and mostly informal style of writing, this is no popularized science book. Many passages are taxing and require concentration. Nonetheless, the book has my highest recommendation for those who seek to understand human communication and the mechanisms that have evolved over millions of years to support it.
I end this review by listing the book’s table of contents.
[Part One: Language] 1. The Human Paradox. 2. A Loss for Words. 3. Symbols Aren’t Simple. 4. Outside the Brain
[Part Two: Brain] 5. The Size of Intelligence. 6. Growing Apart. 7. A Darwinian Electrician. 8. The Talking Brain. 9. Symbol Minds. 10. Locating Language.
[Part Three: Co-Evolution] 11. And the Word Became Flesh. 12. Symbolic Origins. 13. A Serendipitous Mind. 14. Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made on.
Notes (19 pp.), Additional Reading (4 pp.), Bibliography (22 pp.), Index (17 pp.).
Deacon begins Chapter 1 with this wonderful quote from Soren Kierkergaard: “[T]he paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.”
Deacon’s thesis is that a sort of grammar mechanism is hardwired into the human brain, which accounts for the facility with which we learn language. Other species, by contrast, have a very hard time doing so. Many species do develop sophisticated communication systems, but the symbolic nature of human languages, with its immense representational power, is missing from all such schemes. The figure below shows three oft-cited examples of animal communication systems possessing elements that can be likened to a vocabulary. But these systems lack the generality of human language, which requires “symbolic competence” for understanding.
Figure: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbi...
Having stated his thesis clearly and forcefully, Deacon sets out to methodically describe and argue for the supporting evidence. One key observation is that we should avoid the illusion of progress toward understanding human language acquisition mechanism that results from using more and more precise terminology for what we don’t know, rather than actually discovering what is missing. “Linguists have progressively redefined what supposedly cannot be learned in ever more formal and precise terms, and so we may have the feeling that these accounts are approaching closer and closer to an explanation.” I have been bothered by a similar phenomenon in astrophysics, where gaps in our knowledge are filled with ill-defined notions such as dark matter, which is, in effect, a way of increasing the mass available in the universe in order to balance our equations, without adding understanding as to why the discrepancy exists to begin with.
In the course of human evolution, language and thinking have become virtually inseparable. “The way that language represents objects, events, and relationships provides a uniquely powerful economy of reference. It offers a means for generating an essentially infinite variety of novel representations, and an unprecedented inferential engine for predicting events, organizing memories, and planning behaviors. It entirely shapes our thinking and the ways we know the physical world. It is so pervasive and inseparable from human intelligence in general that it is difficult to distinguish what aspects of the human intellect have not been molded and streamlined by it.”
The reproductive advantages of better language skills are rather obvious, explaining the evolutionary path for human language. Language skills help cooperative behaviors, such as the ability to pass on information about distant food supplies or organizing labor for a hunt. They also lead to more successful social manipulation and deception, such as misleading one’s competitors. In fact, it is quite difficult to imagine any human endeavor that would not benefit from better communication.
Despite catchy chapter titles and mostly informal style of writing, this is no popularized science book. Many passages are taxing and require concentration. Nonetheless, the book has my highest recommendation for those who seek to understand human communication and the mechanisms that have evolved over millions of years to support it.
I end this review by listing the book’s table of contents.
[Part One: Language] 1. The Human Paradox. 2. A Loss for Words. 3. Symbols Aren’t Simple. 4. Outside the Brain
[Part Two: Brain] 5. The Size of Intelligence. 6. Growing Apart. 7. A Darwinian Electrician. 8. The Talking Brain. 9. Symbol Minds. 10. Locating Language.
[Part Three: Co-Evolution] 11. And the Word Became Flesh. 12. Symbolic Origins. 13. A Serendipitous Mind. 14. Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made on.
Notes (19 pp.), Additional Reading (4 pp.), Bibliography (22 pp.), Index (17 pp.).
December 24, 2015
Terrence W. Deacon presents a reasonable, but not conclusive case for the co-evolution of the brain and language. The way he describes it, they kind of feedback on each other. He is against the Chomskian theory of there being a dedicated innate brain structure for a universal grammer wich all languages are thought to share in this theory. Having agrued against Chomsky and others, he does not deny that children have a special ability to learn language. He believes that languages use children to evolve as languages help the brain evolve.
This co-evolution of brain and language is posited by Deacon to occur through the Baldwin effect. The Baldwin effect is that behavior that is produced during the lifetime of an organism affects the niche of that organism. Than any changes in genes through mutation and natural selection that helps the organism to survive in this altered niche is than passed on to the next generation. Deacon thinks that this is what happened with the brain and language. Homonids figured out how to use symbols in communiction which affected their cultural niche, and subsequently the genes took over, so that the brain now evolved it's language abilities. The process continues back and forth—behavior and genes. Although I have heard of the Baldwin effect, I do not know if it is accepted by mainstream evolutionists. Not that this is necessary for a theory to be true in some cases. It sounds plausable, like Deacon's whole scheme.
Another scheme Deacon introduced, at least to me, was how symbolic communication developed out of the indexical, which in turn developed out of the iconic. The iconic is more or less immediated, while the indexical is the association of the iconic, and finally the symbolic stands in for the indexical so to speak. When later in the book he discusses consciousness, he believes that human style consciousness requires symbolic level communication, while all animals have a consciousness link to both the iconic and indexical levels.
As I mentioned, I think that Deacon's arguments are reasonable, but not ironclad, which is not suprising giving how we are dealing with topics that are hard to pin down, not like physics or chemistry. Biology, especially biology which deals with human behavior is just messy in my opinion. Still I believe he has made a valuable contribution to the subject matter he delves into.
Finally, I found the book's middle section on the brain, to be on the boring side. It was mainly just this structure and that, and how it contributes to different compentences. Overall, because of his unique view, as far as I know, I give the book good marks. I would recommend it to anybody interested in langauge and the brain. The overall level is not to difficult to understand, although the novice might be taxed.
This co-evolution of brain and language is posited by Deacon to occur through the Baldwin effect. The Baldwin effect is that behavior that is produced during the lifetime of an organism affects the niche of that organism. Than any changes in genes through mutation and natural selection that helps the organism to survive in this altered niche is than passed on to the next generation. Deacon thinks that this is what happened with the brain and language. Homonids figured out how to use symbols in communiction which affected their cultural niche, and subsequently the genes took over, so that the brain now evolved it's language abilities. The process continues back and forth—behavior and genes. Although I have heard of the Baldwin effect, I do not know if it is accepted by mainstream evolutionists. Not that this is necessary for a theory to be true in some cases. It sounds plausable, like Deacon's whole scheme.
Another scheme Deacon introduced, at least to me, was how symbolic communication developed out of the indexical, which in turn developed out of the iconic. The iconic is more or less immediated, while the indexical is the association of the iconic, and finally the symbolic stands in for the indexical so to speak. When later in the book he discusses consciousness, he believes that human style consciousness requires symbolic level communication, while all animals have a consciousness link to both the iconic and indexical levels.
As I mentioned, I think that Deacon's arguments are reasonable, but not ironclad, which is not suprising giving how we are dealing with topics that are hard to pin down, not like physics or chemistry. Biology, especially biology which deals with human behavior is just messy in my opinion. Still I believe he has made a valuable contribution to the subject matter he delves into.
Finally, I found the book's middle section on the brain, to be on the boring side. It was mainly just this structure and that, and how it contributes to different compentences. Overall, because of his unique view, as far as I know, I give the book good marks. I would recommend it to anybody interested in langauge and the brain. The overall level is not to difficult to understand, although the novice might be taxed.
December 26, 2015
This is a very badly written book with excellent ideas - Nassim Nicholas Taleb's ideas with Ayn Rand's writing skills.
It can take almost infinite time to read, I haven't finished it yet, it is not even enjoyable most of the times. But then, every 50-80 pages or so, an idea would strike me hard and I would just close the book and think about what I have understood, perhaps reread the previous portions to make sense of what I understood.
In a sense, that the book is badly written is an advantage to the reader since you are forced to think the ideas through, rather than taking the author by face value, but really, the writing skills are somewhere between ghastly and gruesome. The quality of ideas are somewhere between beautiful and shocking.
It can take almost infinite time to read, I haven't finished it yet, it is not even enjoyable most of the times. But then, every 50-80 pages or so, an idea would strike me hard and I would just close the book and think about what I have understood, perhaps reread the previous portions to make sense of what I understood.
In a sense, that the book is badly written is an advantage to the reader since you are forced to think the ideas through, rather than taking the author by face value, but really, the writing skills are somewhere between ghastly and gruesome. The quality of ideas are somewhere between beautiful and shocking.
October 24, 2019
Okay, so I read it for a class, it was interesting, but confusing, and really hard to get into at some points. Like you know when you just fly through a book and you almost forget you're reading, that didn't happen. If I wasn't reading it for a stressful paper while being overwhelmed I would have enjoyed it much more. I think, it isn't my normal genre, but I'm trying to broaden my horizons. Fascinating and really makes you introspect, also changed my mind on some things that I thought were fact but turned out to be speculation/not absolutely true, like how brain to body ration affects intelligence.
February 15, 2012
Great book. Pretty technical in places, not always correct or necessarily compelling, but this is a great book that helps to frame important questions around language and the brain. Stretches a bit, unsuccessfully I think, in the last chapter or two, but overall fascinating and important. I'm excited to start his sequel, which I bought as well.
March 14, 2017
Fascinating topic. The text was hard to get through. It didn't read like a book written for a wider audience and the author had a tendency to wax philosophical and meander on tangents around the point. I thoroughly enjoyed the tangents, but I feel they could have been organized more thoughtfully. It felt like the written equivalent of listening to a professor who likes to hear himself talk.
June 12, 2011
This is a great book, which explains how complexity arises from simple structures, in addition to the co-evolution of language and the brain. It is extremely interesting to learn how we are uniquely adapted to learn language from an early age. I highly recommend it!
August 30, 2011
A fascinating and challenging book about human uniqueness.
I can't believe I read the whole thing. Proper review to follow.
I can't believe I read the whole thing. Proper review to follow.
September 11, 2014
Its been a while since I read this book, but of the host of books at the time on the evolution of mind and brain I thought this was pretty clearly the top of the heap.
January 11, 2017
I'll paste a review I once wrote in a blog, sorry it's in Hebrew.
הספר מתבסס על מחקרים רבים שנעשו בנושאי חקר השפה וחקר המוח, ומציע באומץ הסברים חדשניים ופשוטים לתופעות שלא על כולן יש היום קונצנזוס מדעי. הוא מעניין וכתוב בשפה קולחת. הביקורת היחידה שלי בינתיים היא שלעתים המחבר מורח טענה על יותר מדי עמודים וחוזר עליה בניסוחים שונים.
בינתיים קראתי בערך שליש מהספר, והחלטתי לכתוב סיכום קצר, בעיקר כדי שיום אחד אוכל להיזכר בספר מאיר-העיניים הזה.
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הפרק הראשון מנסה לשכנע שהשפה האנושית היא תופעה ייחודית בנוף התקשורת של עולם החי. אנחנו נוטים לחשוב שלציפורים, כלבים, דולפינים ודבורים יש שפות שפועלות על עקרון דומה לשפות שלנו, רק פשוטות יותר: בלי תחביר, עם אוסף מילים מוגבל, וכדומה. לפי דיקון, אדם הטוען שבעלי חיים מתקשרים ב"סוג של" שפה משול לפינגווין שידרג את סוגי הכנפיים של ציפורים או לקיפוד שישווה בין סוגי הפרווה של יונקים. השפה שלנו ייחודית. לראיה, גם הדרך שבה מתקשרים בעלי חיים אחרים השתמרה במין שלנו – היא השתמרה בתופעות כגון צחוק, והרי אף אחד לא יטען שצחוק הוא מילה בשפה האנגלית. בהמשך יינתן הסבר תאורטי להבדל שבין שפה לצורות תקשורת אחרות.
אז למה לא קיימות שפות פשוטות שמדוברות על ידי בעלי חיים אחרים? האם זה רק כי אנחנו "מפותחים" יותר ועומדים ב"ראש הפירמידה" של יכולות החשיבה והזיכרון? הגודל היחסי של המוח שלנו יכול להסביר למה שפות של יונקים אחרים יהיו פשוטות יותר, אבל הוא לא מספיק כדי להסביר למה אין להם שפה בכלל. הרי יונקים אחרים יכולים להיות חכמים מאד, ומראים יכולות למידה מרשימות בנושאים אחרים. אז למה יונקים שחיים איתנו מגיל אפס, כמו כלבים, סוסים וחתולים, מראים אפס הצלחה בלתפוס את המבנים התחביריים של השפה האנושית הסובבת אותם, שבני אדם מצליחים לתפוס בגיל כל כך קטן?
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הפרק השני והשלישי נותנים הסבר להבדל שבין שפה לבין דרכי תקשורת אחרות. לבעלי חיים קיימים סוגי תקשורת רבים, כדוגמת ריקוד הדבורים שמראה על מיקום מקור האוכל, והקריאות המגוונות של קופי ה-vervet שמזהירות מטורפים שונים, שכן דרך ההימלטות הרצויה כשמגיע עיט (לרדת מהעץ) שונה מדרך ההימלטות הרצויה כשמגיע נמר (לעלות על עץ) או נחש (להיות ערניים ולשים לב לשיחים).
כאן נכנסת סקירה קצרה של תחום הסמיוטיקה (חקר הסימנים) והרמות השונות שבהן דבר אחר יכול להיות מקושר במוחנו לדבר אחר. ניתן לסכם את ההבדל בין תקשורת של בעלי חיים כמו קופי ה-vervet לבין שפה אנושית באופן הבא. קריאות הקופים הן ברמת ייצוג שנקראת "אינדקס". משמעות הדבר היא שהייצוג מצביע ישירות על תופעה בעולם המוחשי. האינקדס מוגדר ע"י התופעה וניתן ללמוד אותו בהתנייה קלאסית – כמו שמלמדים כלב לשבת כתגובה על פקודת "שב" או תוכי לבקש אוכל במילים. במוחו של הכלב יש קשר אינדקסי בין המילה "שב" לבין תופעת הישיבה, במוחו של הקוף יש קשר ישיר בין סוג הקריאה לסוג הטורף המתקרב, ובמוחה של הדבורה יש קשר אינדקסי בין סוג הריקוד לבין הקואורדינטות של מקור האוכל.
לא כך הם פני הדברים בשפה אנושית. מילים בשפה אינן אינדקסים, אלא רמה גבוהה יותר של ייצוג, הנקראת "סימבול". סימבולים לא מוגדרים ע"י תופעות בעולם המוחשי, אלא ע"י סימבולים אחרים. הם יוצרים מישור נפרד מהמישור המוחשי, וכל סימבול (מילה בשפה) מוגדר על ידי הקומבינציות שלו עם סימבולים אחרים. הגדרה של מילה איננה אובייקט פיזי, אלא האופן שבו משתמשים בה, כלומר עם איזה מילים היא באה במגע. השפה יכולה אמנם לתאר תופעות בעולם המוחשי (וחלק מהמילים בה הן אמנם אינקדסים, כגון "ג'ורג' וושינגטון"), אבל היא יכולה לתאר גם חדי קרן, מלאכים ותקוות. הקפיצה מלמידת אינדקסים ללמידת סימבולים היא קשה במיוחד, והמין היחיד שמסוגל לעשות אותה בקלות הוא המין שלנו. המשך הספר ינסה להסביר אבולוציונית למה זה כך.
ההבדל הזה מומחש באמצעות מחקר של סו סייווג'-רמבו ודיאן רמבו בשני שימפנזים, אוסטין ושרמן, שהצליחו ללמוד לתקשר באמצעות מקלדת עם סמלים. תחילה הם למדו לקשר בין סמלים לבין תופעות בעולם האמיתי (סוגי אוכל), אך האתגר שעמד בפני החוקרים הוא ללמד את הקופים שפה בעלת תחביר, כלומר שיש בה מילים שמוגדרות ע"י מיקומן במשפט ביחס למילים אחרות. נדרשו אלפי נסיונות ואסטרטגיות לימוד מתוחכמות, אך לאחר שהתחביר נקלט במוחם של השימפנזים, היה להם קל מאד לשלב במבנה החדש מילים לסוגים חדשים של אוכל. דיקון מסביר את זה בכך שהשימפנזים הצליחו לעבור מייצוג אינדקסי לייצוג סימבולי, ונותן חיזוקים לטענה זו באמצעות השוואה לשימפנזה אחרת באותו ניסוי, שלא הצליחה לעשות את המעבר הזה, ואותה מילים חדשות רק בילבלו.
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הפרק הרביעי קורא תיגר על תאוריית הדקדוק האוניברסלי של חומסקי. אביא כאן את העמוד הראשון של הפרק במלואו:
Over the last few decades language researchers seem to have reached a consensus that language is an innate ability, and that only a significant contribution from innate knowledge can explain our ability to learn such a complex communication system. Without question, children enter the world predisposed to learn human languages. All normal children, raised in normal social environments, inevitably learn their local language, whereas other species, even when raised and taught in this same environment, do not. This demonstrates that human brains come into the world specially equipped for this function. Few would argue with this sense of the term innate. But many linguists and psychologists propose a more thoroughly preformationist interpretation of this same phenomenon. They argue that the child’s remarkable feat of learning afirst language is the result of an innate “language competence.” When we say that people are competent at a skill, for example, typing, we generally mean that they possess some proficiency in it,and not just a potential or talent that might be realized under the right conditions. A competence is an available skill, normally one learned or acquired previously. So by analogy an innate language competence is an ability to perform certain language tasks as though they had previously been learned.
If language competence is innate in this sense, then language knowledge itself, in some form, is already present in the human brain prior to gaining knowledge from any experience with language. But is it really? There is, without doubt, something special about human brains that enables us to do with ease what no other species can do even minimally without intense effort and remarkably insightful training. We not only have the ability to create and easily learn simple symbol systems such as the chimps Sherman and Austin struggled to learn, but in learning languages we acquire an immensely complex rule system and a rich vocabulary at a time in our lives when it is otherwise very difficult to learn even elementary arithmetic. Many a treatise on grammatical theory has failed to provide an adequate accounting of the implicit knowledge that even a four-year-old appears to possess about her newly acquired language. No wonder so many linguists have thrown up their hands, exclaiming that “language must be unlearnable” and claiming that it was all a magician’s trick, that the rabbit (grammatical knowledge) must have been in the hat (the child’s brain) from the beginning. But in what form? And how could it have gotten there? Unfortunately, the theory that innate knowledge of grammar is the heritage of all human children simply asserts the answers to these messy questions, and leaves it to evolutionary biology and neuroscience to explain how the answers are to be derived. Before scientists in these fields commit their experimental resources and theoretical modeling efforts to justifying this theory’s claims, it may be worth asking if they are biologically plausible and if there really are no alternatives.
ובכן, דיקון לוקח את האתגר להסביר את היכולת המדהימה של ילדים ללמוד שפה בלי להניח שיש בהם דקדוק מולד. לשם כך, בעקבות אליסה ניופורט, הוא מפנה את תשומת הלב לכך שלא נכון להתמקד ב"אבולוציה של המוח כדי להתאים לשפה". הרי אבולוציה ביולוגית לוקחת מיליוני שנים, בעוד שיש אבולוציה אחרת שהיא הרבה יותר מהירה, וממנה נוטים להתעלם – האבולוציה של השפה עצמה. שפות משתנות כל כך מהר שתוך אלף שנים אי אפשר לזהות אותן. בעקבות מודלים המתארים רעיונות ואמונות כפרזיטים ש"מתנחלים" במוחם של בני אדם, מתרבים ממוח למוח ותוך כדי כך עוברים אבולוציה, דיקון בונה מודל של השפה האנושית כיצור "חי" בעל נטיות הישרדות. כדי לשרוד מדור לדור, השפה חייבת להתאים את עצמה כך שהיא תילמד בצורה מיטבית ע"י בני אדם צעירים יותר ויותר. המבנים המורכבים מאד של השפה מרתיעים תאורטיקנים, ובלשנים חומסקיאניים כבר נתנו הוכחות פורמליות מדוע אי אפשר ללמוד שפה משמיעה בלי שום ידע מוקדם. אך כשחושבים על זה מנקודת מבט של השפה כיצור חי, עליה להתאים לצורת הלמידה של ילד. ייתכן שצורת למידה זו שונה מאד מהאופן שבו אדם מבוגר חושב על למידת שפה (ועובדה שמבוגרים מצליחים בכך הרבה פחות). אולי השפה התאימה את עצמה במהלך הדורות כך, שדווקא לצורת הלמידה הייחודית לילדים היא תתאים בצורה הכי טובה שיש?
ג'ף אלמן החליט לדמות את לימוד השפה ע"י המוח באמצעות רשת עצבית בעלת זיכרון. כקלטים הוא הזין משפטים תקינים באנגלית, בדומה למשפטים שילד שומע מסביבתו, וציפה שהרשת תלמד לזהות מהו משפט תקין – תתכנס על מודל כלשהו של תחביר תקני. זה עבד עם משפטים פשוטים (נושא-נשוא-מושא), אבל כשהמשפטים שהוזנו היו מורכבים יותר, זה לא עבד – הרשת לא התכנסה. אלא שאז הוא ביצע שני שינויים ברשת, והשני מרתק במיוחד:
1. במקום להתחיל עם כל סוגי המשפטים, הוא הזין תחילה משפטים פשוטים (נושא-נשוא-מושא), ורק אחרי שהרשת הצליחה לבנות מודל של משפט פשוט, התחיל להזין משפטים מורכבים יותר,
2. הוא פגע בכוונה ובאופן אקראי בזכרון של הרשת. כלומר, התאים שמטרתם לזכור את מה שנלמד עד עתה נפגעו במזיד – תחילה באופן מסיבי, ובהדרגה עם פחות ופחות פגיעות. זה בא למדל את התהליכים הקיימים אצל ילדים: ילדים לא טובים בלזכור פרטים, ונוטים לשכוח בקלות. הזיכרון מתייצב ומשתפר עם הגיל, ואנחנו בשלים להתחיל ללכת לבית הספר רק בסביבות גיל 6.
באופן מרתק, הפעם ה"מוח" המדומ�� הצליח – לאט אבל בטוח – במשימה שהתאורטיקנים הוכיחו ש"אינה אפשרית" – ללמוד תחביר מורכב ללא שום ידע מוקדם, רק על סמך דוגמאות. הדבר דומה לניסיון להבין מה רואים בתמונה, כשבתחילה רואים את התמונה מעורפלת, ולאט לאט הפרטים מתבהרים. זאת לעומת הגישה הנאיבית של למידה מתוך דוגמאות עם זכרון מושלם, שבה רואים בכל פעם חלק אחר בתמונה, אך קשה להבין מזה את התמונה הכוללת. הסוד הוא בשיכחה.
הפרק נותן עוד מספר הפרכות מעניינות לתאורית הדקדוק האוניברסלי של חומסקי, ומציע הסברים חלופיים לבעיות הקשות שהיא מנסה לתת להן תשובה. לדוגמה, תכונות המשותפות לדקדוקים של שפות שונות מוסברים על ידי אבולוציה מתכנסת של השפות.
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בהמשך צפוי לי החלק של הספר שעוסק באבולוציה של המוח, ואני מקווה לצלוח אותו.
הספר מתבסס על מחקרים רבים שנעשו בנושאי חקר השפה וחקר המוח, ומציע באומץ הסברים חדשניים ופשוטים לתופעות שלא על כולן יש היום קונצנזוס מדעי. הוא מעניין וכתוב בשפה קולחת. הביקורת היחידה שלי בינתיים היא שלעתים המחבר מורח טענה על יותר מדי עמודים וחוזר עליה בניסוחים שונים.
בינתיים קראתי בערך שליש מהספר, והחלטתי לכתוב סיכום קצר, בעיקר כדי שיום אחד אוכל להיזכר בספר מאיר-העיניים הזה.
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הפרק הראשון מנסה לשכנע שהשפה האנושית היא תופעה ייחודית בנוף התקשורת של עולם החי. אנחנו נוטים לחשוב שלציפורים, כלבים, דולפינים ודבורים יש שפות שפועלות על עקרון דומה לשפות שלנו, רק פשוטות יותר: בלי תחביר, עם אוסף מילים מוגבל, וכדומה. לפי דיקון, אדם הטוען שבעלי חיים מתקשרים ב"סוג של" שפה משול לפינגווין שידרג את סוגי הכנפיים של ציפורים או לקיפוד שישווה בין סוגי הפרווה של יונקים. השפה שלנו ייחודית. לראיה, גם הדרך שבה מתקשרים בעלי חיים אחרים השתמרה במין שלנו – היא השתמרה בתופעות כגון צחוק, והרי אף אחד לא יטען שצחוק הוא מילה בשפה האנגלית. בהמשך יינתן הסבר תאורטי להבדל שבין שפה לצורות תקשורת אחרות.
אז למה לא קיימות שפות פשוטות שמדוברות על ידי בעלי חיים אחרים? האם זה רק כי אנחנו "מפותחים" יותר ועומדים ב"ראש הפירמידה" של יכולות החשיבה והזיכרון? הגודל היחסי של המוח שלנו יכול להסביר למה שפות של יונקים אחרים יהיו פשוטות יותר, אבל הוא לא מספיק כדי להסביר למה אין להם שפה בכלל. הרי יונקים אחרים יכולים להיות חכמים מאד, ומראים יכולות למידה מרשימות בנושאים אחרים. אז למה יונקים שחיים איתנו מגיל אפס, כמו כלבים, סוסים וחתולים, מראים אפס הצלחה בלתפוס את המבנים התחביריים של השפה האנושית הסובבת אותם, שבני אדם מצליחים לתפוס בגיל כל כך קטן?
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הפרק השני והשלישי נותנים הסבר להבדל שבין שפה לבין דרכי תקשורת אחרות. לבעלי חיים קיימים סוגי תקשורת רבים, כדוגמת ריקוד הדבורים שמראה על מיקום מקור האוכל, והקריאות המגוונות של קופי ה-vervet שמזהירות מטורפים שונים, שכן דרך ההימלטות הרצויה כשמגיע עיט (לרדת מהעץ) שונה מדרך ההימלטות הרצויה כשמגיע נמר (לעלות על עץ) או נחש (להיות ערניים ולשים לב לשיחים).
כאן נכנסת סקירה קצרה של תחום הסמיוטיקה (חקר הסימנים) והרמות השונות שבהן דבר אחר יכול להיות מקושר במוחנו לדבר אחר. ניתן לסכם את ההבדל בין תקשורת של בעלי חיים כמו קופי ה-vervet לבין שפה אנושית באופן הבא. קריאות הקופים הן ברמת ייצוג שנקראת "אינדקס". משמעות הדבר היא שהייצוג מצביע ישירות על תופעה בעולם המוחשי. האינקדס מוגדר ע"י התופעה וניתן ללמוד אותו בהתנייה קלאסית – כמו שמלמדים כלב לשבת כתגובה על פקודת "שב" או תוכי לבקש אוכל במילים. במוחו של הכלב יש קשר אינדקסי בין המילה "שב" לבין תופעת הישיבה, במוחו של הקוף יש קשר ישיר בין סוג הקריאה לסוג הטורף המתקרב, ובמוחה של הדבורה יש קשר אינדקסי בין סוג הריקוד לבין הקואורדינטות של מקור האוכל.
לא כך הם פני הדברים בשפה אנושית. מילים בשפה אינן אינדקסים, אלא רמה גבוהה יותר של ייצוג, הנקראת "סימבול". סימבולים לא מוגדרים ע"י תופעות בעולם המוחשי, אלא ע"י סימבולים אחרים. הם יוצרים מישור נפרד מהמישור המוחשי, וכל סימבול (מילה בשפה) מוגדר על ידי הקומבינציות שלו עם סימבולים אחרים. הגדרה של מילה איננה אובייקט פיזי, אלא האופן שבו משתמשים בה, כלומר עם איזה מילים היא באה במגע. השפה יכולה אמנם לתאר תופעות בעולם המוחשי (וחלק מהמילים בה הן אמנם אינקדסים, כגון "ג'ורג' וושינגטון"), אבל היא יכולה לתאר גם חדי קרן, מלאכים ותקוות. הקפיצה מלמידת אינדקסים ללמידת סימבולים היא קשה במיוחד, והמין היחיד שמסוגל לעשות אותה בקלות הוא המין שלנו. המשך הספר ינסה להסביר אבולוציונית למה זה כך.
ההבדל הזה מומחש באמצעות מחקר של סו סייווג'-רמבו ודיאן רמבו בשני שימפנזים, אוסטין ושרמן, שהצליחו ללמוד לתקשר באמצעות מקלדת עם סמלים. תחילה הם למדו לקשר בין סמלים לבין תופעות בעולם האמיתי (סוגי אוכל), אך האתגר שעמד בפני החוקרים הוא ללמד את הקופים שפה בעלת תחביר, כלומר שיש בה מילים שמוגדרות ע"י מיקומן במשפט ביחס למילים אחרות. נדרשו אלפי נסיונות ואסטרטגיות לימוד מתוחכמות, אך לאחר שהתחביר נקלט במוחם של השימפנזים, היה להם קל מאד לשלב במבנה החדש מילים לסוגים חדשים של אוכל. דיקון מסביר את זה בכך שהשימפנזים הצליחו לעבור מייצוג אינדקסי לייצוג סימבולי, ונותן חיזוקים לטענה זו באמצעות השוואה לשימפנזה אחרת באותו ניסוי, שלא הצליחה לעשות את המעבר הזה, ואותה מילים חדשות רק בילבלו.
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הפרק הרביעי קורא תיגר על תאוריית הדקדוק האוניברסלי של חומסקי. אביא כאן את העמוד הראשון של הפרק במלואו:
Over the last few decades language researchers seem to have reached a consensus that language is an innate ability, and that only a significant contribution from innate knowledge can explain our ability to learn such a complex communication system. Without question, children enter the world predisposed to learn human languages. All normal children, raised in normal social environments, inevitably learn their local language, whereas other species, even when raised and taught in this same environment, do not. This demonstrates that human brains come into the world specially equipped for this function. Few would argue with this sense of the term innate. But many linguists and psychologists propose a more thoroughly preformationist interpretation of this same phenomenon. They argue that the child’s remarkable feat of learning afirst language is the result of an innate “language competence.” When we say that people are competent at a skill, for example, typing, we generally mean that they possess some proficiency in it,and not just a potential or talent that might be realized under the right conditions. A competence is an available skill, normally one learned or acquired previously. So by analogy an innate language competence is an ability to perform certain language tasks as though they had previously been learned.
If language competence is innate in this sense, then language knowledge itself, in some form, is already present in the human brain prior to gaining knowledge from any experience with language. But is it really? There is, without doubt, something special about human brains that enables us to do with ease what no other species can do even minimally without intense effort and remarkably insightful training. We not only have the ability to create and easily learn simple symbol systems such as the chimps Sherman and Austin struggled to learn, but in learning languages we acquire an immensely complex rule system and a rich vocabulary at a time in our lives when it is otherwise very difficult to learn even elementary arithmetic. Many a treatise on grammatical theory has failed to provide an adequate accounting of the implicit knowledge that even a four-year-old appears to possess about her newly acquired language. No wonder so many linguists have thrown up their hands, exclaiming that “language must be unlearnable” and claiming that it was all a magician’s trick, that the rabbit (grammatical knowledge) must have been in the hat (the child’s brain) from the beginning. But in what form? And how could it have gotten there? Unfortunately, the theory that innate knowledge of grammar is the heritage of all human children simply asserts the answers to these messy questions, and leaves it to evolutionary biology and neuroscience to explain how the answers are to be derived. Before scientists in these fields commit their experimental resources and theoretical modeling efforts to justifying this theory’s claims, it may be worth asking if they are biologically plausible and if there really are no alternatives.
ובכן, דיקון לוקח את האתגר להסביר את היכולת המדהימה של ילדים ללמוד שפה בלי להניח שיש בהם דקדוק מולד. לשם כך, בעקבות אליסה ניופורט, הוא מפנה את תשומת הלב לכך שלא נכון להתמקד ב"אבולוציה של המוח כדי להתאים לשפה". הרי אבולוציה ביולוגית לוקחת מיליוני שנים, בעוד שיש אבולוציה אחרת שהיא הרבה יותר מהירה, וממנה נוטים להתעלם – האבולוציה של השפה עצמה. שפות משתנות כל כך מהר שתוך אלף שנים אי אפשר לזהות אותן. בעקבות מודלים המתארים רעיונות ואמונות כפרזיטים ש"מתנחלים" במוחם של בני אדם, מתרבים ממוח למוח ותוך כדי כך עוברים אבולוציה, דיקון בונה מודל של השפה האנושית כיצור "חי" בעל נטיות הישרדות. כדי לשרוד מדור לדור, השפה חייבת להתאים את עצמה כך שהיא תילמד בצורה מיטבית ע"י בני אדם צעירים יותר ויותר. המבנים המורכבים מאד של השפה מרתיעים תאורטיקנים, ובלשנים חומסקיאניים כבר נתנו הוכחות פורמליות מדוע אי אפשר ללמוד שפה משמיעה בלי שום ידע מוקדם. אך כשחושבים על זה מנקודת מבט של השפה כיצור חי, עליה להתאים לצורת הלמידה של ילד. ייתכן שצורת למידה זו שונה מאד מהאופן שבו אדם מבוגר חושב על למידת שפה (ועובדה שמבוגרים מצליחים בכך הרבה פחות). אולי השפה התאימה את עצמה במהלך הדורות כך, שדווקא לצורת הלמידה הייחודית לילדים היא תתאים בצורה הכי טובה שיש?
ג'ף אלמן החליט לדמות את לימוד השפה ע"י המוח באמצעות רשת עצבית בעלת זיכרון. כקלטים הוא הזין משפטים תקינים באנגלית, בדומה למשפטים שילד שומע מסביבתו, וציפה שהרשת תלמד לזהות מהו משפט תקין – תתכנס על מודל כלשהו של תחביר תקני. זה עבד עם משפטים פשוטים (נושא-נשוא-מושא), אבל כשהמשפטים שהוזנו היו מורכבים יותר, זה לא עבד – הרשת לא התכנסה. אלא שאז הוא ביצע שני שינויים ברשת, והשני מרתק במיוחד:
1. במקום להתחיל עם כל סוגי המשפטים, הוא הזין תחילה משפטים פשוטים (נושא-נשוא-מושא), ורק אחרי שהרשת הצליחה לבנות מודל של משפט פשוט, התחיל להזין משפטים מורכבים יותר,
2. הוא פגע בכוונה ובאופן אקראי בזכרון של הרשת. כלומר, התאים שמטרתם לזכור את מה שנלמד עד עתה נפגעו במזיד – תחילה באופן מסיבי, ובהדרגה עם פחות ופחות פגיעות. זה בא למדל את התהליכים הקיימים אצל ילדים: ילדים לא טובים בלזכור פרטים, ונוטים לשכוח בקלות. הזיכרון מתייצב ומשתפר עם הגיל, ואנחנו בשלים להתחיל ללכת לבית הספר רק בסביבות גיל 6.
באופן מרתק, הפעם ה"מוח" המדומ�� הצליח – לאט אבל בטוח – במשימה שהתאורטיקנים הוכיחו ש"אינה אפשרית" – ללמוד תחביר מורכב ללא שום ידע מוקדם, רק על סמך דוגמאות. הדבר דומה לניסיון להבין מה רואים בתמונה, כשבתחילה רואים את התמונה מעורפלת, ולאט לאט הפרטים מתבהרים. זאת לעומת הגישה הנאיבית של למידה מתוך דוגמאות עם זכרון מושלם, שבה רואים בכל פעם חלק אחר בתמונה, אך קשה להבין מזה את התמונה הכוללת. הסוד הוא בשיכחה.
הפרק נותן עוד מספר הפרכות מעניינות לתאורית הדקדוק האוניברסלי של חומסקי, ומציע הסברים חלופיים לבעיות הקשות שהיא מנסה לתת להן תשובה. לדוגמה, תכונות המשותפות לדקדוקים של שפות שונות מוסברים על ידי אבולוציה מתכנסת של השפות.
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בהמשך צפוי לי החלק של הספר שעוסק באבולוציה של המוח, ואני מקווה לצלוח אותו.
February 5, 2022
The topic from the titles comes up at some point and is quickly replaced by more of what came before: a streak of long and densely written explanations of phenomena related to the topic. This is, of course, necessary in exploring a subject, but when most of the book is working away from its central idea, and doing so in a very distracting and overwritten way, it does get tiresome. The main idea it proposes is elegant and plausible with a lot of potential for research, modeling, and theorizing. It's a shame that there wasn't more of that.
March 13, 2019
provocative
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December 18, 2023Fun book to read partially, but far too long and dense to get through all of it. I get the gist and I like his argument and am a little bit bummed I dropped his class two years ago. That is all.
January 19, 2010
Fascinating exploration about the unique nature of symbolic thought and the distinction between cognition in humans and other primates. Ultimately, the hypothesis is that language evolved late as a result of the unique social forms developed by humans (including pair-bonding within a larger social grouping) rather than being the cause of symbolic thought development.
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September 16, 2008Writer's Block? This book offers solutions and practical exercises to open up your mind in order to recall, reflect upon and create images and characters and to transfer them to your computer or notebook. Great book for authors.
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