VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Twindividuality

1. A Cultural (Geonome) Code : Systems Linguistics

Jackendoff, Ray. Foundations of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. A copious synthesis of generative linguistics by the now Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, at Tufts University. The first three chapters affirm the realms of Mentality – that language is instantiated in brains and minds, Combinatoriality – by the employ of general principles a vast array of sentence and speech is possible, and Nativism – that, per Noam Chomsky, a child brings innate resources for language learning. The treatise proceeds to discuss Generative Theory, Syntax, the Lexicon, Processing, Evolution, Reference, and so on.

Jamli, Mohsen, et al. Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution.. Nature. July, 2024. By way of our Planatural philoSophia view, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School neuroresearchers report that they were able to quantify how neuron cell have an innate ability to discern, represent and relatively comprehend textual content. An interim surmise might be that a genesis uniVerse is made and meant to read and write its own narrative script.

From sequences of speech sounds or letters, humans can extract salient meanings through language. Yet, the their origins in neural tissue at the cellular level and over the timescale of action remains largely unknown. Here we recorded from single cells in the left prefrontal cortex as participants listened to sentences and naturalistic stories. By tracking their activities during natural speech processing, we discover a fine-scale cortical representation of semantic information at the level individual neurons. Together, these findings reveal a finely detailed cortical organization of semantic representations at the neuron scale in humans and the cellular-level processing of meaning during comprehension. (Abstract)

Jenkins, Lyle, ed. Variation and Universals in Biolinguistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004. A collection of particular and general papers which consider genetic, biological and evolutionary roots for human language from the generative viewpoint. Of especial interest is Partha Niyogi’s Phase Transitions in Language Evolution by way of dynamic systems theory and Unifications in Biolinguistics by Lyle Jenkins which finds the same patterns to recur from physical substrates to complex grammars. Isabelle Dupanloup goes on in Genetic Differences and Language Affinities to summarize the strong correlations between genes and dialects as peoples migrated across continents. A concise wrapup by Noam Chomsky is noted above.

Kirby, Simon. Culture and Biology in the Origins of Linguistic Structure. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 24/1, 2017. In a special issue on the Biology and Evolution of Language, the University of Edinburgh linguist reviews and updates his contributions, with many colleagues, to our late reconstruction of how a loquacious homo to anthropo sapiens became so distinguished by textual language and communicative expression. A main theme, as also per papers on his website, is a model whence by an interplay of genes and grunts simians and hominids came to achieve a growing, iterative learning ability from each other. This cumulative process is then denoted a “compositionality” as it forms a cultural record.

Amongst the issue’s 34 paper content, edited by W. Tecumseh Fitch, is, for example, Evolution of the Neural Language Network by Angela Friederici, The Human Infant Brain by Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz (search), Social Cognition and Pragmatic Inference in Primates by Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, and Toward the Language-Ready Brain by Michael Arbib. We also note The Origins of Language in Teaching by Kevin Laland, Evolution of Speech and Evolution of Language by Bart de Boer, Key Cognitive Preconditions for the Evolution of Language by Merlin Donald, and Evolution of Language: Lessons from the Genome by Simon Fisher. Altogether, an intricate meld of genes, anatomic, neural, and communal aspects are involved as they give rise to life’s distinctive, self-cognizant quality.

Language is systematically structured at all levels of description, arguably setting it apart from all other instances of communication in nature. In this article, I survey work over the last 20 years that emphasises the contributions of individual learning, cultural transmission, and biological evolution to explaining the structural design features of language. These 3 complex adaptive systems exist in a network of interactions: individual learning biases shape the dynamics of cultural evolution; universal features of linguistic structure arise from this cultural process and form the ultimate linguistic phenotype; the nature of this phenotype affects the fitness landscape for the biological evolution of the language faculty; and in turn this determines individuals’ learning bias. Using a combination of computational simulation, laboratory experiments, and comparison with real-world cases of language emergence, I show that linguistic structure emerges as a natural outcome of cultural evolution once certain minimal biological requirements are in place. (Kirby Abstract)

Speech is the physical signal used to convey spoken language. Because of its physical nature, speech is both easier to compare with other species’ behaviors and easier to study in the fossil record than other aspects of language. Here I argue that convergent fossil evidence indicates adaptations for complex vocalizations at least as early as the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans. Furthermore, I argue that it is unlikely that language evolved separately from speech, but rather that gesture, speech, and song coevolved to provide both a multimodal communication system and a musical system. Moreover, coevolution must also have played a role by allowing both cognitive and anatomical adaptations to language and speech to evolve in parallel. Although such a coevolutionary scenario is complex, it is entirely plausible from a biological point of view. (de Boer Abstract)

Kotov, K. and K. Kull. Semiosphere versus Biosphere. Brown, Keith, editor-in-chief. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006. A survey and synthesis of the visions of Yuri Lotman, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Vladimir Vernadsky, and James Lovelock of a self-organizing and regulating bioplanet most distinguished by an enveloping and enlivening realm of reflective signification.

Kretzschmar, William. Language and Complex Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. A University of Georgia linguist contributes to the current paradigm shift, as reported in this section, to reinterpret the domain of human discourse and literature in terms of nonlinear complex adaptive systems. Again by this realization our most distinctive human ability becomes ever rooted in a natural emergent literacy. See also Evolutionary Syntax (2015) by Ljiljana Progovac herein for another take.

Kretzschmar, William. The Linguistics of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Along with Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, and Namhee, et al, a University of Georgia humanities scholar independently contributes another current volume that reinvents and reinterprets our understanding of language pattern and process in terms of self-organizing dynamical systems. Indeed the properties listed in the first quote would be a good generic summary of complexity phenomena, which could equally apply to genetics, likewise under revision, and by projection to a genesis universe just learning to speak, read, and write its birth announcement.

In order for speech to be a complex system, we should be able to observe the following conditions: (a) speech is open and dynamic, thus not at equilibrium; (b) speech includes a very large number of interactive components/agents: (c) speech shows emergent order; (d) the distribution of units in speech is non-linear; (e) speech has the property of scaling. (184)

The fact that speech is a complex system tells us a good deal, and not just about language behavior. First of all, the linguistics of speech can take advantage of work in many other scientific fields that also work with complex systems, from biological systems and chemistry to economics, from climate and ecology to the human nervous system, even to physics. (216)

We can expect to observe what amounts to an unlimited series of Russian dolls in speech, in which the dolls have the same shape at different scales, but may each be painted with different motifs and colors. The property of scaling tells us, regarding both the dolls and speech, to look for the same patterns composed of different elements at different scales of observation, pattern within pattern, as closely as we might ever like to observe them. (217)

Larsen-Freeman, Diane and Lynne Cameron. Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Larsen-Freeman is a University of Michigan professor of education and linguistics, while Cameron teaches linguistics at the Open University, UK. “Applied” is a distinction from theories of grammar and syntax and studies the dynamics of personal and social communication. After a good review of complexity theories and principles, it is shown how well they accord with literacy and discourse, so as to bring a new degree of explanatory veracity. (For similar affirmation see Namhee, et al, herein.) But, as if a negative imprimatur, as per the page 61 quote, and so often the case, even though such properties are seen to grace walk and talk, the tacit machine model inhibits attributing any innate drive and arrow. But then compare with the words of the Harvard linguist George Zipf (1902-1950) quoted in the work on page 111.

In the pages that follow, we suggest that complex systems can be found throughout applied linguistics. The language used by a discourse community can be described as such a system, as can the interactions of learners and their teacher in a classroom, as can the functioning of the human mind. We aim to show that reconceptualizing these and other phenomena in terms of complexity opens up the possibility for new understandings and actions. (5)

In this chapter (Complex Systems in Language and its Evolution), we have made the case for conceiving of language as a complex, adaptive, dynamic system. By so doing, we have been laying the foundation for claiming that the evolution of language, language change, language diversity, language development, language learning, and language use are emergent from the dynamic processes of change that operate in all languages at all times. (112)

When complex systems self-organize and we speak of ‘order’ or ‘co-operation’ emerging from previous disorder or separation, we should not be misled by the positive connotations of these words in non-scientific language. In their technical use here, there is no assumption of an inherent drive towards improvement of the universe of any automatic direction towards better, more hopeful states. (61)
Thus we are finding for the acts of speech what physicists have long since found for the acts of inanimate nature: behind all the apparent diversity and complexity of the phenomena lies the sameness of fundamental dynamic principle. (Zipf, 111)

Locke, John and Barry Bogin. Language and Life History: A New Perspective on the Development and Evolution of Human Language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 29/529, 2006. A peer-reviewed paper which adds a novel dimension to how humans beings came to a flourishing social crosstalk. What needs to be factored in are various phases of the human life-span, from attention-getting utterances of infants and children, and to mating communications during adolescence. Throughout the article and comments runs a tacit sense of this ontogeny repeating in kind its phylogenetic occurrence.

Loreto, Vittorio and Luc Steels. Emergence of Language. Nature Physics. 3/758, 2007. A news report of a summer satellite school of STATPHYS 23, a conference held in Erice, Italy where speakers from physics and mathematics to linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and economics avowed tha “universal dynamical processes” in effect across nature equally serve to self-organize cultural and semiotic communications. By name “Statistical Physics of Social Dynamics” can be found at http://pil.phys.uniroma1.it/erice2007/index.html with some papers are online. And one may reflectively notice the beginnings of a melding and synthesis of statistical, many body, mechanics with nonlinear science and its many interactive agents.

Once you adopt the view that language is a complex adaptive system, statistical physics suddenly becomes very relevant for building a theoretical foundation for the study of language. (758-759)

Loreto, Vittorio, et al. Statistical Physics of Language Dynamics. Journal of Statistical Mechanics. 4/P04006, 2011. An interdisciplinary team of Loreto, Sapienza University, Rome, Andrea Baronchelli, Northeastern University, Animesh Mukherjee, Institute for Scientific Interchange ISI, Torino, Andrea Puglisi, CNR-ISC, Rome, and Francesca Tria, ISI, proceed to reconceive and situate linguistics by way of complex systems science in a foundational physical theories. Our human conversational and textual discourse then achieves a novel integration with and rooting in the realms of a condensed matter, many-body, multifarious nature. And since this revolution is also apace in epi/genomics, might genetics and language be realized as sequential evolutionary phases of an original universe to human cosmic code?

Language dynamics is a rapidly growing field that focuses on all processes related to the emergence, evolution, change and extinction of languages. Recently, the study of self-organization and evolution of language and meaning has led to the idea that a community of language users can be seen as a complex dynamical system, which collectively solves the problem of developing a shared communication framework through the back-and-forth signaling between individuals. We shall review some of the progress made in the past few years and highlight potential future directions of research in this area. (Abstract)

Mathematical modeling of social phenomena. Statistical physics has proven to be a very effective framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. Recent years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the interactions of individuals as elementary units in social structures. This is the paradigm of complex systems: an assembly of many interacting (and simple) units whose collective (i.e., large-scale) behavior is not trivially deducible from the knowledge of the rules that govern their mutual interactions. This scenario is also true for problems related to the emergence of language. From this new perspective, complex systems science turns out to be a natural ally in the quest for general mechanisms driving the collective dynamics whereby conventions can spread in a population, to understand how conceptual and linguistic coherence may arise through self-organization or evolution, and how concept formation and expression may interact to coordinate semiotic systems of individuals. (3)

Loritz, Donald. How the Brain Evolved Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. The author contends that language evolved through a scalar self-similar process which served to intensify the value of communication.

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