Babel's Dawn

Just How Sane Are We?

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” Shakespeare put that line in A Midsummer’s Night Dream, first staged in the 1590s, and I doubt that anyone at the play’s opening thought the idea was new. Thus, a whole book asserting that we mortals do indeed have our foolish side might seem unnecessary. But a series of doubters have appeared since Puck had his laugh, people who insist that, to paraphrase Dr. Pangloss, we mortals are the most rational of all possible species. Now there is an idea that could give both Puck and his audience a hearty laugh. Who, you might demand, argues such nonsense?

From the Mouthes of Babes

Derek Bickerton is an interesting fellow, an odd man out who goes his own way even when he writes his memoirs. Most memoirs are, by definition, accounts of a person’s life. “I was born on a sunny day in the year of our lord 19__.” No such sentence is to be found in Bickerton’s memoirs. He does have a scene in which a driver almost crashes head on into an oncoming car, but this bit of personal recounting is so unusual that it left me wondering how he had happened to put that moment into his book. Bastard Tongues: A trailblazing linguist finds clues to our common humanity in the world’s lowliest languages is an account of “the world lowliest languages” and how they came to be as they are. The memoir side of it appears only in the fact that it describes how the author came to understand pidgin and Creole languages in his fashion. I should think the book will irritate scholars who have a different understanding of the subject. Fortunately, however, I’m not a scholar and I’m in complete agreement with Bickerton on his main theme.

Broca's Area in Chimpanzees?

Broca's area was the first region of the brain identified as specializing in speech production.

Broca's area is the best known region of the brain that is critical to speech production. If damaged it produces difficulties in speaking grammatically-complex sentences. It is one of those areas whose evolution seems critical to the story of speech origins. Now comes a report from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center that chimpanzees have a homologous region of the brain that is active when they communicate. (See: Jared P. Taglialatela et al March 11 Current Biology, abstract here) The authors speculate that "the neurological substrates underlying language production in the human brain may have been present in the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees."

Reality Blogging: The Survivors

Souvenir of the Evolang conference in Barcelona.

Most of the Evolang conference did not consist of paradigm-smashing presentations or PowerPoint shows that pointed in a new direction. The bulk of presentations and poster displays were the result of the normal hard work and fact gathering that is the foundation of scientific success. The professionals on the scene were very much encouraged by the numbers of students who had come to Barcelona, and by the range of their work. More than one speaker professed eagerness to see the results of the work that will be presented at Evolang 2028, but we don’t have to wait 20 years to spot the trends. The conference organizers handed out a book of papers and abstracts (costly, but available here) presented at the conference that provides a fine overview of range of work being done today.

Brain Changes for Language

I'm getting a little backed up as I go over the Barcelona results and prepare to review a couple of new books. Meanwhile news continues. I have a story on the backburner, but I see that another blogger has done a good job of presenting it, so why don't I just send browsers over to that site? Check out Neurophilosophy's account of brain changes to support language right here.