Wednesday, February 20, 2019
How Language Transformed Humanity Essay
The evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel states, in his speech, that terminology is the most powerful, barbarian and revolutionary trace of the human being ever evolved. The purpose of the verbaliser is to inform about the great and potent features of this trait. Pagel explains to us that when we talk, we be fit to transfer thoughts in both(prenominal)one elses mind and vice-versa using much(prenominal) a form of telemetry. In other words this process is resembling to what happens between TV remote control and television.According to this biologist manner of speaking is one of the most subversive means that we fundament use to stockpile ourselves. One very representative example is the censorship and the awareness that we give to pay attention to when we say or write anything. Going on, Mr Pagel poses both important questions he asks the reason why language evolves itself, and why it evolved in our species and not in others. The answer is that only human beings have a spec ial feature named favorable learning, which lets us improve ourselves by watching and copying the actions that someone else did.Such a revolutionary characteristic could also prevent us from making the same mistakes and allows us to do the same action better than before. So we make progresses, whereas the smarter animals remain doing some activities over and over again, without big advancements. As a precede of the hearty learning or, as anthropologists call it, cumulative cultural adaptation we can make stuff, and all the things that surround us are consequences of this process. Now we are moving towards a critical point, which is Why do we have language? .First, Mr. Pagel states that social learning is visual theft. We can learn stealing ideas and good from the exceed qualities of someone else, without working on something or persevering on it. Secondly he reveals us that when human beings discovered this aspect of social learning (thousands of years ago) arose a dilemma How can we preserve our best ideas and avoid that others steal them? . Our ancestors could have behaved in the following ways concentrating themselves in small groups so as to bequeath the acquired information to offspring.But the result would have been isolation and a slight improvement. Or they could have created a system of communication to start cooperating with one another and share everything useful. plainly they had chosen the second option and in this way language was born. So the solution to the previous dilemma is communication. Then Mr. Pagel points out how peculiar the occurrence is that we have 8000 different languages spoken on Earth. More surprising is that the superlative density is located in the smallest areas such as islands.This is related to the angle of inclination of people to isolate in small groups in order to cheer identities and cultures. On the other side nowadays we communicate a solidification more than in the past. But our modern beingness founded o n connectivity and cooperation is curb by the variety of languages. This raises the question is it possible in our globalized and standardized world to have all these different languages? . Mr. Pagel has no answer but it seems indispensable that our destiny might be a one language world.
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