[lit-ideas] Nicholas Wade on the development of language
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas " <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 13:26:17 -0700
Nicholas Wade, in The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and why it
Endures, wrote
"The human form has undergone extraordinary changes since its lineage split
from that of chimpanzees some 5 to 6 million years ago. Our brain tripled in
size, our body hair was shed, we downsized our teeth, shriveled our gut and
gained a fine facial appendage for conserving moisture in dry climates-the
nose.
"Equally radical and transformative, though less well appreciated, have been
the changes in human social behavior. In the societies of our apelike
forebears, coordination was achieved relatively simply, through a strict
hierarchy dominated by the alpha male. Hunter gatherer societies are
organized on a very different principle- they are completely egalitarian. It
was during the transition from male dominance to egalitarianism that
religious behavior emerged.
"Many other social innovations developed in the human lineage as this new
species, driven by the increasing intellectual capacity of its individuals,
experimented with one novel mechanism after another for communicating among
members of a group and governing the interactions among them. The surprising
gift of music appeared in the repertoire of human faculties. Even more
remarkable was language, a wholly novel system for conveying precise
thoughts from one individual's mind to that of another." [Kindle Locations
662-672]
Comment: I am ready to accept or at least be open to the early part of what
Wade writes, but fell into a coughing fit during his last sentence,
"conveying precise thoughts"???? Has he never been married? Has he never
been in a discussion forum on any subject? Has he never ready Gadamer or
any of the other philosophers who describe the difficulty of communicating,
or, if I recover sufficiently from my coughing fit and read on, will he
define "precise" in some new way I've never thought of?
Lawrence
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