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

1. A Cultural (Geonome) Code : Systems Linguistics

Mace, Ruth and Clare Holden. A Phylogenetic Approach to Cultural Evolution. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 20/3, 2005. The search for parallels between biological and social evolution has a long and checkered past. This article draws upon many advances in evolutionary theory, genetics, along with linguistic and cultural studies to propose that cultures and languages are analogous to species and thus form phylogenetic trees. A detailed table is then constructed with close comparisons between genetic and cultural systems. For example, “discrete units” are nucleotides, codons, genes and individual phenotypes or cultural traditions, memes, ideas, artifacts, words, grammar and syntax. By 2005, it is possible to fill in and understand an emergent development of life which as it repeats at each stage can take on the visage of a natural embryogenesis.

MacWhinney, Brian. Language Development. Lerner, Richard, editor-in-chief. The Handbook of Life-span Development. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010. A chapter within the holistic, dynamic systems modelview of these volumes, wherein a Carnegie Mellon University psychologist defines a sequential communicative emergence across phylogenetic, epigenetic, developmental, processural, social, interactional and diachronic realms.

MacWhinney, Brian and William O’Grady, eds. The Handbook of Language Emergence. New York: Wiley, 2015. A comprehensive volume with five parts: Basic Language Structures, Language Change and Typology, Interactional Structures, Language Learning, and Language and the Brain. Typical authoritative chapters are Emergence at the Cross-Linguistic Level: Attractor Dynamics in Language by Joan Bybee and Clay Beckner, The Diachronic Genesis of Synchronic Syntax by T. Givon, and Dynamic Systems and Language Development by Paul Van Geert and Marjolijn Verspoor. A final chapter, Language Evolution: An Emergentist Perspective by Michael Arbib, traces a brain-ready, multi-phase ascent from holistic protolanguage to linguistic complexity. See also a special issue of Language and Cognition (5/2-3, 2013) on this general conception.

Malik-Moraleda, Saima, et al. Constructed languages are processed by the same brain mechanisms as natural languages. PNAS. 122/22, 2025. By way of the latest neuroimage acuity, MIT neuroscientists including Evelina Fedorenko are able to discern similar cerebral circuits used by both human verbiage and made up versions. But note that these remain as separate faculties from computer codes.

What constitutes a language? The brain mechanisms that process linguistic input are specialized, with little response to diverse nonlinguistic tasks. Here, we examine constructed languages (conlangs) to ask whether they draw on the same neural mechanisms as natural languages. Using individual-subject fMRI analyses, we show that understanding conlangs recruits the same brain areas as natural language comprehension. We argue that the critical shared feature of conlangs and natural languages is that they are symbolic systems capable of expressing an open-ended range of meanings about our outer and inner worlds. (Excerpt)

Manrubia, Susanna and Damian Zanette. At the Boundary Between Biological and Cultural Evolution: The Origin of Surname Distributions. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 216/4, 2002. The same statistical mathematics, scaling relations and taxonomies apply for both species and languages.

Markos,, Anton, et al. Living as Languaging: Distributed Knowledge in Living Beings. Stephen Cowley, ed. Cognition Beyond the Brain. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Reviewed more in Rosetta Cosmos, Charles University, Prague, scholars continue their interpretation that nature, evolution, and human are best known as a natural literacy project.

Markosova, Maria. Network Model of Human Language. Physica A. 387/661, 2008. A study from the Dept. of Applied Informatics, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia, concurs with other recent work (Google article abstract, search Steyvers here) that similar to all natural phenomena, linguistic discourse likewise takes on the form of self-organized, scale-invariant dynamic networks. By extrapolation, one might consider that our encompassing cosmic and earthly nature could be appreciated as textual (scriptural) in kind.

Martin, Andrea and Giosue Baggio. Modelling Meaning Composition from Formalism to Mechanism. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 375/20190298, 2019. MPI Psycholinguistics and Norwegian University of Science and Technology scholars introduce a special issue with this title in search of a more thoroughly parsed explanation. Among the authoritative contributors are Peter Hagoort, Laura Gwilliams, Marco Baroni, Liina Pylkkanen, Alona Fyshe and Petra Hendricks.

Human thought and language have expressive power because meaningful parts can be assembled into more complex semantic structures. This quality underlies our ability to compose meanings into novel configurations, and sets us apart from other species and current computing devices. Furthermore, composing parts into complex structures does not threaten the existence of constituent parts as independent units: parts and wholes exist simultaneously yet independently from one another. This independence is evident in human behaviour, but it seems at odds with the brain's sensitivity to statistical patterns. Everyday language is productive and expressively accurate because it goes beyond statistical regularities. Philosophy and linguistics explain this by realizing that language and thought are “compositional” in kind. (Abstract excerpt)

Massip-Bonet, Angels and Albert Bastardas-Boada, eds. Complexity Perspectives on Language, Communication and Society. Berlin: Springer, 2012. Reviewed more in Rosetta Cosmos as a robust association of universal self-organizing network dynamics with our grammar and conversation.

Matalon, Nadav, et al. Structure in conversation: Evidence for the vocabulary, semantics, and syntax of prosody. PNAS. 122/17, 2025. Weizmann Institute of Science and University of Chicago system linguists contribute a novel empirical study of this other emphatic verbal and gestural component that serves and completes the entire language-based conversation.

In conversation, prosody complements words, forming a structured communication system distinct from, yet connected to, content. We study spontaneous speech to identify the fundamental essence of this system and find a prosodic vocabulary of a few hundred patterns which fulfill interactional and attitudinal functions. Just as syntax governs word combinations, we observe recurring prosodic patterns more frequently than chance. These results support the analogy of prosody to a linguistic system with its own vocabulary, semantics, and syntax.

Prosody is the musical aspect of speech, conveying information on multiple levels, in parallel to the text. It includes vocal features like pitch, loudness and timing, as well as voice quality. Here, we take a data-driven approach and examine prosody as a linguistic system in its own right, as though it were an unknown language. We explore a large volume of conversational English, to move away from controlled stimuli toward natural data. (1)

Moore, David. The Dependent Gene. New York: Freeman, 2001. To counter an older emphasis on particulate DNA determinism, Moore explains how genetic expression depends as much on interactive developmental systems.

To produce such an understanding, we need to adopt a more complex and genuine interactionism - a developmental systems perspective - born of the detailed study of how traits emerge from gene-environment interactions. (10)

Mufwene, Salikoko. The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. The University of Chicago linguist contends that languages are somewhat akin to bacterial or parasitic species which compete and evolve by both Darwinian and Lamarckian means. Their macroecology is also influenced by nonlinear dynamics.

This section presupposes that languages are complex adaptive systems….They consist of numerous components of many different kinds which interface with each other - some linguists will argue that such systems are modular…..The components interact nonlinearly and on different temporal and spatial scales….They organize themselves to produce complex structures and behaviors. (157)

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