Language:
one of life’s great inventions
The 9 April 2005 issue of the New Scientist magazine
features a special article on “Life's top
10 greatest inventions”.
“Evolution is blind
and brutish,” the magazine reports, “but,
every now and then, it stumbles across a truly
stunning innovation that rewrites the rules of
life.”
The top 10 evolutionary
achievements highlighted include the eye, the
brain, photosynthesis - and language.
“As far as humans
are concerned, language has got to be the ultimate
evolutionary innovation,” writes Kate Douglas.
“It is central to most of what makes us
special, from consciousness, empathy and mental
time travel to symbolism, spirituality and morality.
Language may be a defining factor of our species,
but just how important is it in the evolutionary
scheme of things?
“A decade ago, John
Maynard Smith, then emeritus professor of biology
at the University of Sussex, UK, and Eors Szathmary
from the Institute of Advanced Study in Budapest,
Hungary, published The Major Transitions in Evolution,
their description of life's great leaps forward.
They identified these crucial steps as innovations
in the way information was organised and transmitted
from one generation to the next - starting with
the origin of life itself and ending with language.
“Exactly how our
ancestors took this leap is possibly the hardest
problem in science, Szathmary says. He points
out that complex language - language with syntax
and grammar, which builds up meaning through a
hierarchical arrangement of subordinate clauses
- evolved just once. Only human brains are able
to produce language, and, contrary to popular
belief, this ability is not confined to specialised
regions in the brain such as Broca's and Wernicke's
areas. If these are damaged others can take over.
Szathmary likens language to an amoeba, and the
human brain to the habitat in which it can thrive.
‘A surprisingly large part of our brain
can sustain language,’ he says.
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