The First Idea deals with the emergence of language and thought in our species and in us as individuals. It is reported to offer some new ideas about how these emerged, and ideas that run counter to many of the recent ideas on this subject.
My interest in scient, language, and human origins combine to create a special interest in a book like this, though I’m not sure how well-founded the ideas presented in this book will be.
THIS STORY offers a summary of them, but I’m not putting a whole lot of weight in the article’s summary. One item in the summary sounds too extreme to be something the authors could actually claim–i.e., “That is, language is rooted not in genes, not in the wiring of brains, but in behaviors we have learned over millenniums.” I can’t imagine the authors really claim that, because without genes and the wiring of brains there are no behaviors to be learned over millennia. But then newspaper reporters ain’t always that great about reporting science (or anything else for that matter).
They also don’t always know what is a shocking claim and what ain’t. For example, the authors of the book apparently think that spoken language has pre-verbal predecessors like gestures. That’s not a particularly controversial claim among linguists. The idea that spoken language has gestural precedents (sign langauges) is often talked about in linguistic circles. After all, babies learn to do things like point before they learn to speak, and it’s a lot easier to manipulate our hands than the delicate mechanisms of our mouths and vocal chords (at least with the kind of control needed to produce speech). Is it unlikely that gestural communication preceded spoken communication?
The most intersting part for me is always what the hookup was (if, indeed, there was one) between the pre-humans we see in the fossil record and the first true humans. Given the depiction in Genesis of our first parents as rational, speaking beings, I tend to look to the emerge of language as the emergence of our species. In other words, when speech appeared among hominids is where you’ll find Adam and Eve.
Language and human origins? How can I resist?
