how language transformed humankind essay

Category: Education,
Words: 574 | Published: 02.03.20 | Views: 519 | Download now

Homework and study tips

The evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel states, in his speech, that language is the most powerful, dangerous and ground-breaking characteristic of the human being ever evolved. The goal of the loudspeaker is to inform about the truly great and effective features of this kind of trait. Pagel explains to us that after we talk, we are able to copy thoughts in someone else’s brain and conversely using such a form of telemetry. In other words this technique is similar to what goes on between TELEVISION SET remote control and television.

According to the biologist language is one of the the majority of subversive assists you to00 use to share ourselves. One particular very representative example is the censorship plus the awareness that we have to pay attention to whenever we say or write nearly anything. Going on, Mr Pagel postures two essential questions: he asks the key reason why language advances itself, and why it evolved in our species but not in other folks. The answer is that only human beings have a special characteristic named “social learning, which in turn lets us boost ourselves by simply watching and copying the actions that someone else would.

Such a new characteristic can also prevent us from making the same errors and permits us to do the same action much better than before. Thus we generate progresses, although the wiser animals stay doing some activities over and over again, with no big breakthroughs. As a result of the social learning or, because anthropologists call it, cumulative cultural adaptation we could make products, and all the things that surround us are outcomes of this method. Now we are moving towards a critical stage, which is: “Why do we have language? .

First, Mister. Pagel claims that cultural learning is visual thievery. We can study stealing ideas and gain benefit best characteristics of someone else, without working on something or persevering on it. Secondly he reveals all of us that when human beings discovered this aspect of sociable learning (thousands of years ago) arose a dilemma: “How do we preserve our best ideas and avoid that others grab them? . Our ancestors could have socialized in the subsequent ways: focusing themselves in small organizations so as to bequeath the attained information to offspring.

Nevertheless the result would have been remoteness and a slight improvement. Or perhaps they would have created a system of communication to start cooperating with one another and share anything useful. Certainly they had chosen the second choice and in in this way language came to be. So the answer to the previous issue is communication. Then Mister. Pagel remarks how distinct the fact is that we get 8000 distinct languages spoken on Earth. More surprising would be that the greatest density is located in the actual areas including islands.

This is certainly related to it tends of people to isolate in small teams in order to protect identities and cultures. On the other side nowadays we all communicate much more than in the past. Yet our modern day world founded on connectivity and cooperation is limited by the various languages. This kind of raises problem: “is this possible in our globalized and standardized community to have all these different languages? . Mister. Pagel has no answer nonetheless it seems unavoidable that our lives might be a single language community.

1

< Prev post Next post >