Max Bennett: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. The so there's so much cons like, it's a really fun area of literature to read through because there's still, like, 0 consensus as to how language evolved. And the 1 reason why it's so controversial is the way in which we disambiguate, and I'll get to your your question. The the way we disambiguate evolutionary arguments is typically by observing gradation in extant or currently present animals. And so that enables us to observe these intermediary steps between, you know, morphological or sort of aspect of of the body a and morphological aspect of a body b. And the problem with language is we have nonhuman primates that, for the most part, don't have any language, and then we have humans that have very complex language. And all of the intermediary humans that existed between our divergence with chimpanzees about 6000000 years ago and our divergence with all other modern humans between 50100 thousand years ago, we don't have they're all dead. All those lineages are lost. And so that means that there's this broad spectrum of of arguments that could be made between, you know, Chomsky argues. I find this a very strong claim and thus hard to to defend, but there are people that argue that it happened all at once or, like, very rapidly. There was, like, no language, and all of a sudden there's language. Prometheus. And then there's right. And there's other arguments that it was a sort of gradual gradual process. But the 1 of the most controversial aspects of language evolution goes to what you're talking about, which is, evolutionary arguments for why language evolved has almost a harder burden of proof than other adaptations. So when we argue, about the evolutionary benefit of something like theory of mind, there's no complex evolutionary machinations 1 needs to conceive of to defend it. Because you can see why it would be beneficial for an individual, chimpanzee to be born with the ability to infer what's going on other people's heads because they can better defend themselves when someone is gonna be mean. They can better figure out who to trust. They can better climb a social hierarchy, etcetera. But language, unless you make take the Chomsky view that its primary adaptation is for thinking. But if you hold the argument that language evolved for communication, that's more challenging because it's it's not valuable for an individual human to be born with a little bit of language skill unless other humans are also engaging in language as well. And so this then means that the only benefit is if we're both sharing true useful information with each other. And although it seems intuitive that like, well, the way this would function is that a group of humans that, are sharing knowledge with each other is gonna survive better than another group of human that's not, and that's how evolution will ensue. , the way this would function is that a group of humans that, are sharing knowledge with each other is gonna survive better than another group of human that's not, and that's how evolution will ensue. This is actually quite controversial in evolutionary biology because that's invoking something called group selection, which now some people the modern incarnation of this, something called multilevel selection, where, there's some consensus that, yes, there are group level effects, where that kind of can impact things. But but it's but most people think that group level effects are not nearly as strong as we would intuit. And the issue the issue is the following. If you have a group of a 100 humans that use language with each other, and then you have 1 human that's born that actually is just gonna try and trick all the others. So all they're gonna do is use language just to to be disingenuous. It's not at all clear that that human would be at a disadvantage. And so if people then start in fact, they might be at a advantage relative to everyone else. And so if you play that forward over time, language will be lost because of someone born that's not gonna be tricked by the individual that's trying to lie to them with language is actually gonna survive better than the people that have language skills. And so and so there's been so much debate throughout linguistic evolutionary linguistics about these arguments as to how language evolves. I like the sort of there's a great book called The Evolution of Language by Fitch. And I think he makes a really great argument around how, you know, you could think about this occurring. But but a lot of people argue that it probably started with something called reciprocal altruism. And so the way altruism exists in the animal kingdom, there's 2 forms of accepted altruism. 1 is thing called kin selection, is quite straightforward. I'm gonna I'm willing to sacrifice something, in other words, share something with an individual if I share genes with them. So, you know, that's easy. Reciprocal altruism we do see in the animal kingdom, which is I'll scratch your back if you scratch my back. But if you start not scratching my back, then I'm gonna stop scratching your back. And so what this suggests is in order for language to be stable, in other words, it'd be beneficial for me to truthfully share information, there needs to be costs to me lying. And so this is 1 argument that people people speculate. This is 1 reason why humans, have such strong sort of, moral preferences toward punishing of liars and out groups and in groups because what we do is we really try to identify individuals that are lying. Robin Dunbar has a beautiful argument that this is why gossip evolved. 1 way that evolution can stabilize the using language is by virtue of us having a preference to share moral violations. And so gossip being a tool that, of language where if you see someone, lie or cheat, and you, share it with a bunch of other individuals, that becomes a huge cost to someone lying and cheating. Because if 1 person catches them, then the whole group is aware of it. meone, lie or cheat, and you, share it with a bunch of other individuals, that becomes a huge cost to someone lying and cheating. Because if 1 person catches them, then the whole group is aware of it. And so there's this sort of special feedback loop that happens where language skills require more punishment of violation to be a stable strategy. And then the 1 way you get that is by having more gossip and making sure there's higher costs to to defecting. So so this is not by any means like the only story of language evolution, but it's 1 that that there's, you know, a lot of interesting evidence behind. There are some people that argue that the the feedback loop, 1 emerging idea, which I don't talk about in the book, which is inter I do think is interesting, is that the the feedback loop of language evolution is actually 1 in which we try to detect lying in others. So so so and and they make the counterarguments to me saying that the effect of lying is loss of language. There is an argument that you get the reverse where you get really good theory of mind in humans because we're so sensitive to trying to detect people who are actually giving us false information. So still a lot of controversy around it, but but the main takeaway is that the the whole the blanket group level selection arguments that language is obviously beneficial because once a group has language, they're all going to to survive better, is not a sufficient argument for language evolution. You need a more nuanced evolutionary argument as to why it's a stable strategy for an individual to be born with superior language skills, or you have to argue that language did not evolve primarily for communication.…

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