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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

1. A Cultural (Geonome) Code : Systems Linguistics

Combes, Claude. Quantum Leaps in Evolution. Levinson, Stephen and Pierre Jaisson, eds. Evolution and Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Whereof information diverges and converges in the same way in both genetic and cultural realms.

Culicover, Peter and Andrzej Nowak. Dynamical Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Ohio State University and University of Warsaw linguists seek to move beyond static “Descriptivist” or “Cognitivist” schools, which are hard to define, by viewing “language as a biological system.” In this regard, a “Mental Grammar” is not a prefixture but an emergent neural property. As in many other areas, a revolution is taking place in linguistics from a physics-based model to a view of language as a biological process which develops and organizes itself within a psychological and social milieu by means of modular complex adaptive systems.

Culotta, Elizabeth and Brooks Hanson. First Words. Science. 303/1315, 2004. An Introduction to eight survey articles about the current state of our understanding of language ranging from its evolutionary origins to the future of English and a grammar of software codes.

Dalby, David. The Linguasphere Register. Hebron, Wales: Linguasphere Press, 2000. A two volume set which aims to collect, assemble and record at the Millennium all the world’s languages. Within this novel worldwide unity, our human voice ought to be appreciated as a singular tongue. We should thusly begin to imagine a common, salutary “linguasphere” or “logosphere” modeled on the planetary noosphere of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky. One might add, in this spirit, just as every language can be translated into each other, because they all describe the same reality, so every culture could be seen to have an affinity as they necessarily spring from and express the one, same creation.

This first classified Register of the world’s languages and speech communities is completed as a new era of global communication begins. Human society is crossing a major threshold in its development, and its twin poles are now the individual person and the planetary community of humankind. All forms of all languages are integral parts of a fluid and continually evolving continuum of human communication. (frontispiece) The logosphere can be considered as the cumulative product of human expression and creativeness through time and in all parts of the world, including every tangible and intangible product of humankind. It extends to the totality of every act of human expression and communication, including every verbalized thought and conversation. (40) A major task of the new millennium will be to construct a new social architecture which permits the construction of a single planetary community, preserving the creative and non-destructive elements of all component communities and leaving the individual free to create and to choose, but not destroy. (41)

The remarkable kaleidoscope of the world’s languages and communities may now be observed in detail, without one’s view being constrained and fragmented by the framework of the modern nation-state. Human beings today have the means of observing and studying themselves as a single but complex human family, across all superimposed frontiers of nationality, religion and culture. By exploring the continuum of languages and communities which make up the linguasphere, they will perhaps find the key to unlock within themselves a deeper, underlying sense of global unity and of human interdependence. (45)

De Boer, Bart. Evolution of Speech and Its Acquisition. Adaptive Behavior. 13/4, 2005. Animal communication proceeded from holistic calls in primates to discrete combinatorial (phonemic) systems. (A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.) What is worth noting is that this sequence broadly repeats the right to left brain hemisphere maturation of an individual person.

It was shown that a population can change much more quickly from holistic to phonemic language use if there is co-evolution of the culturally transmitted system of speech sounds with the genetically evolving language learners. (290) It also confirms that phonemically coded systems win over holistically coded systems, at least as far as storage is concerned. They win, even though at first there is a cultural evolution towards systems that are more learnable for holistic learners. (290)

De Boer, Bart. Self-Organization in Language. Hemelrijk, Charlotte, ed. Self-Organization and Evolution of Social Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. The University of Amsterdam theoretical linguist concisely describes how these universally applicable dynamics similarly distinguish the occurrence and discourse of human communication. And the recognition of dual complements of many discrete agents, along with their connective relations, well serve as an exemplary instance of the masculine and feminine principles.

Self-organization, according to this definition is “The emergence of order on a global scale through interactions on a local scale.” The definition assumes there is a system that has two main components: actors and interactions. (123-124)

de Boer, Bart. The Origin of Vowel Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. The common properties of language evolve and emerge by processes of self-organization within a population of users and learners.

Deacon, Terrence. Multilevel Selection in a Complex Adaptive System. Weber, Bruce and David Depew, eds. Evolution and Learning. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. To properly understand human language, an expanded view of evolution must include the self-organizing dynamics of complex systems and their symbolic content.

Ultimately, the emergence of language offers a puzzle that requires us to rethink the concept of evolution itself in many significant ways, and demonstrates that it is intimately linked with processes of self-organization and semiosis.” (85) “The origins of language are not simply a two-tiered evolutionary problem, but involves a many-tiered complex system of self-organizing and selection processes nested within each other. (97)

Di Sciullo, Anna Maria and Cedric Boeckx, eds. The Biolinguistic Enterprise: New Perspectives on the Evolution and Nature of the Human Language Faculty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. An international volume as an endeavor to parse how we sapiens came to be distinctively loquacious. Main sections are Evolution, Variation, and Computation, with chapters such as The Biolinguistic Program by Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky, and Deep Homology in the Biology and Evolution of Language by W. Tecumseh Fitch.

This book, by leading scholars, represents some of the main work in progress in biolinguistics. It offers fresh perspectives on language evolution and variation, new developments in theoretical linguistics, and insights on the relations between variation in language and variation in biology. The authors address the Darwinian questions on the origin and evolution of language from a minimalist perspective, and provide elegant solutions to the evolutionary gap between human language and communication in all other organisms. They consider language variation in the context of current biological approaches to species diversity -- the "evo-devo revolution" -- which bring to light deep homologies between organisms. In dispensing with the classical notion of syntactic parameters, the authors argue that language variation, like biodiversity, is the result of experience and thus not a part of the language faculty in the narrow sense. They also examine the nature of this core language faculty, the primary categories with which it is concerned, the operations it performs, the syntactic constraints it poses on semantic interpretation and the role of phases in bridging the gap between brain and syntax. (Publisher)

Diessel, Holger. The Grammar Network: How Linguistic Structure is Shaped by Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. As this site reports, we seem to be in the midst of an historic scientific shift from finding discrete, nodal parts to identifying the many animate netflex relations in between. Here a Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena, linguist shows that even our vernacular communications can be seen to exemplify these connective topologies. After recounting their general properties, how they are in effect for sign conveyance, cognitive decisions, social discourse, and more is illustrated. A “taxonomic” view, akin to systematic classes, is then applied to linguistic associations, symbolic relations, and schema constructions. A reference is also made to self-organized complex systems as they are used to parse this conversation (Bybee, Beckner, et al herein). The work goes on to explain that changing modes of societal usage play a key formative role. As I log in along with The Grammar of the (Atomic) Elements (Ghosh), it is becoming evident that the natural ecosmos does seem to be a literal narrative.

Dor, Daniel and Eva Jablonka. Culture and Genes in the Evolution of Human Language. Goren-inbar, Naama and John Speth, eds. Human Paleoecology in the Levantine Corridor. Oxford, UK: Oxbow Books, 2004. A Tel Aviv University linguist and a historian of science propose that protolanguage initially arose through increasing social communication in large primate groups. This novel capability in turn impacted the genetic complements of its speakers in a Baldwin effect manner – individuals better able to communicate and learn the whereabouts of food or predators survived and thus their genes were more likely to be passed on. The authors suggest that group selection, embellished by linguistic and cognitive abilities, was an important component.

As an aside, the Levant is an area along the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan river reaching into the Tigris and Euphrates basin. It served as a fertile passage through which early humans moved from Africa into the Near East. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are called religions of the Levant. Is it not then an indictment of our civilization so many millennia later that violent conflicts continue to rage and intensify in this cradle? We seem to be not one whit wiser, which is another reason this website proposes a novel worldwide knowledge as a resolve.

Dor, Daniel, et al, eds. The Social Origins of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. The work explores communal, interactive influences beyond gene-centric views upon life’s propensity to form communicative and “imaginative” venues across every species and onto its primate and sapient florescence. Five Parts are Theoretical Foundations, Language as a Collective Object, Apes and People, Social Theories of language Evolution, and The Journey Thereafter. Among the authors are Eva Jablonka, Chris Sinha, Camilla Power, Chris Knight, Ehud Lamm, and Luc Steels. One might surmise that life’s evolutionary gestation is a genesis uniVerse’s way of trying to gain its own voice and vision.

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