The short BBC News article, "Unlocking the mysteries of speech", caught my eye as I was browsing the BBC headlines a couple of days ago.
The article doesn't give any particularly stunning new insights into how human beings acquire language, but it does quote at some length Professor Simon Kirby, chair of language evolution at Edinburgh University. In fact, it was the title of Kirby's chair that really caught my interest. The one new piece of information in the article the account of an experiment, which sounds a bit like the game popular with children called Chinese Whispers. The experiment shows how language evolves mindlessly over a surprisingly short time. According to Kirby, it takes only nine generations to end up with a result that "looks like a real language," with the expected sort of "essential defining characteristics" ("Unlocking the mysteries of speech", 2009, Fascinating, ¶ 2), in particular, with parts that work as elements to be combined following the rules of the evolved grammar. As Kirby points out, this supports the idea that just as we, human beings, evolved to look as though we were amazingly well designed by a perfectly mindless evolutionary process with no design intention at all, so too did our languages evolve in a similarly automatic and mindless manner, albeit it sufficiently complex minds.
As you've probably guessed, it was the similarity between the explanations for the evolution of every living thing on our planet, which theory neatly removes any need for a designer, and the explanation of how languages arise in a similarly mindless fashion that interested me. In fact, it reminded me of current work by leading philosophers of mind, such as Daniel Dennett, cognitive psychologists and neuro-scientists who are working towards a theory of the mind that can explain how our minds arise from the purely physical and chemical events that occur inside our brains. Just as evolution did away with the need to make up any intelligent designer, so too can our brilliantly minds, and sophisticated language use, be fully explained in terms of things that are perfectly mindless.
__________
References
Unlocking the mysteries of speech. (2009, November 10). BBC News. Retrieved November 12, 2009 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8352525.stm
No comments:
Post a Comment
Before you click the blue "Publish" button for your first comment on a post, check ✔ the "Notify me" box. You want to know when your classmates contribute to a discussion you have joined.
A thoughtful response should normally mean writing for five to ten minutes. After you state your main idea, some details, explanation, examples or other follow up will help your readers.
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.