Your position is reasonable, Charles, but I choose -- perhaps as a matter of faith -- to dissent from it as a "progressivist fallacy". Are the more evolved necessarily better off? I don't believe that question is settled. The idea of progress only makes sense if it is progress *toward something*. Isn't it absurd to say, "we don't know where we're going but we're getting there really fast"? Given the almost universal embrace of the idea of progress (PEN even stands for the "progressive economists network"), it seems prudent for a few of us eccentrics to take a position on the side of digression (although not of reaction, regression or decline).
To take your hypothesis about the invention of language seriously, one would have to modify it to qualify that it was an invention before there was invention, and of a teaching method before there was teaching. Mothers sang wordless lullabies to babies to answer and mollify their crying and, in turn, babies learned the "words" to those tunes. It was only after those words were already very, very old that they came, by tradition, to name something other than their own sound and, eventually, to signify something beyond what they named. The name and the sign are additive but that doesn't make them the telos of the utterance. I think it makes sense to re-examine the origins of language, work and culture to try to recapture what may have been lost or forgotten. This may have to be done speculatively, reconstructing these origins from their "ruins". It may even be (sez Sandwichman) that the most fallen word, the interuptive commercial "and now a word from our sponsor..." may offer the most compelling clue as to the function or meaning of the divine word that "in the beginning was". On 12/11/07, Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > As to neurotransmitters, the key thing with humans is that the first > person, individual brain's neurotransmitters are in communication with > all these second, third, fourth...brains' neurotransmitters. Thus, my > postition is that the communication function of language _is_ selected > for in evolution. That is culture is selected for in the emergence of > the species _homo sapiens_ . Language and culture are not spandrels > ,in the Gould sense. Language and culture are _the_ most adaptive, even > defining > characteristic of our species in our emergence, the complete opposite > of a spandrel. > > My hypothesis is that language and culture were invented by > women/females to teach children. > ^^^^^ > -- Sandwichman
