Bad Internet Science

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by charles brough

CraigD: Please understand that in the social sciences, such as with anthropology, I do not always accept the concensus because I see a lot of subjective influence on the social sciences.

I quite understand.

Though my education and academic career was very “hard” - Math and Physical Science - I've done a lot of consulting work as a statistician, most of it with “soft” science academics - about 80% in healthcare related disciplines, the rest sociology. Most of what I know of those disciplines come from work and play with these folk. Being frequently in the position of being asked to “cook the numbers” statistically to support various nearly completely subjective, intuitive claims from these academics, my perception of the subjectivity of consensus in these disciplines is, I suspect, more cynically critical than most people in the disciplines themselves.

I am concerned about what the data shows; and I have read very different information than you have about when language began.

I too have read radically different speculation concerning the origin of human language. The lack of physical evidence compelling enough to satisfy my hard-sci bent leads me to consider all of this literature highly speculative - as, I've found, its authors also seem to consider it. More, some of my favorite speculation on the subject is self-admittedly fictional, from Jean Auel's Neolithic bodice-rippers to Neil Stephenson's outré “Snowcrash” to De Luca and Gottlieb's farcical movie “Caveman”.

Setting with any confidence even a rough date for the origin of human (or even proto-human hominid) language strikes me, therefore, as beyond our current technical ability. One fact, in my amateur judgment, is clear - prior to about 100,000 years ago, no animal on Earth created representational models - such as cave drawings - of any sort. A change in animal behavior so profound I think it fair to call it the beginning of culture occurred then, perhaps very abruptly, perhaps gradually or in stops and starts over tens of thousands of years. On the other side of this event, here we are, consummate language and symbol using model and art makers. That this event marked the onset of representation, modeling, symbol manipulation, and language seems to me a sensible conclusion - as the sampled-Steven-Hawking-synthetically-spoken introduction to Pink Floyd's “Keep Talking” puts it (with a bit of artistic license with powers of tens of years),

For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals /
Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination /
We learned to talk

Originally Posted by charles brough

Anyway, I detected some misunderstanding or confusion. Of course we are the product of millions of years of evolution. What I intended to make it clear, hopefully, was that FURTHER evolution since perhaps 150,000 years ago has not been the CAUSE of the growth of our numbers and cultural heritage here on Earth.

In complex natural system such as biological organism or societies, (as opposed to simpler artificial ones such as formal mathematical systems and computer programs), it’s rarely meaningful to describe any single entity, category, or phenomenon as the cause of another. Rather, phenomena have many causes.

In the context of this discussion, I think it inaccurate to assert that human population increase or quantity of artifacts produced (as in my previous post, I’m reluctant to use terms like “cultural heritage”, because they’re difficult to objectively define) are due only to either social or biological changes – to put it in Dennett-esque terms, due entirely to genes or entirely to memes – or to some other category of causes, such as climate or planetary mechanics. There’s nothing like an ice age, or an extinction-level meteoric impact, to alter the development of human society and culture.

Actually, however, I find it really hard to believe that language and religion had evolved all at the same time 40,000 years ago and right then produced the magnificant cave art culture.

Although one may find it hard to believe, it’s what the archeological evidence suggests. All that can really be measured is artifact creation – shaped stone tools, jewelry, what we take to be religious iconography, and depictions of activities such as hunting. There’s simply no evidence of a lengthy period in which human beings shaped stone, but didn’t make representational “art” objects, bury their dead in decorated graves, and otherwise behave as if they had some manner of religion. Much later, about 6,000 years ago, when the first writing systems appear, rapidly followed by the first writing, human write about the supernatural, of gods and giants and creation stories, suggesting they’d been talking about such matters for the past 30,000+ years or so.

I think once language/speech developed, the evolving of religion must have taken a good many tens of thousands of years more.

Again, the archeological record does not suggest such a gap.

Consider the following thought experiment/question: A huge maternity ward of newborn infants is shipwrecked on a tropical island, nurtured by a troupe of kindly monkeys, etc., to form a tribe completely un-time-bound with the culture of their parents. Would they behave just like their monkey foster parents, without the trappings of any sort of human culture? Or would they, in a single generation, invent gods, myths, language of a sort, etc, - in short, invent an instant, ad-hoc culture? Would they use tools, simple but beyond those of the most adept apes or birds. When one of them died, would the others abandon the corpse in the manner of monkeys, or ceremonially bury it? Would the human knack for time-binding result in the descendents of these cultural orphans establishing a “cultural heritage” as quickly as their agile, modern human brains could manage it.

If the cultural orphans adopted the behavior of their monkey cousins, would, over the course of tens of thousands of years, they develop human culture. And, if they did, would the monkeys (OK, for plausibility’s sake let’s make them chimpanzees) share in it, despite their similar but different biology?

PS:

Originally Posted by charles brough

( If you do happen to know your source, I would appreciate it.)

Oops – sorry about that!

In addition to Origin of language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; and History of writing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, which give the 40,000 and 6,000 year figures, Human - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia gives 130,000 years as the approximate appearance date of anatomically modern humans. Like all encyclopedia references, these are secondary – the linked-to articles provide some primary references.

[charles brough]

Originally Posted by CraigD

I quite understand.

Though my education and academic career was very “hard” - Math and Physical Science - I've done a lot of consulting work as a statistician, most of it with “soft” science academics - about 80% in healthcare related disciplines, the rest sociology. Most of what I know of those disciplines come from work and play with these folk. Being frequently in the position of being asked to “cook the numbers” statistically to support various nearly completely subjective, intuitive claims from these academics, my perception of the subjectivity of consensus in these disciplines is, I suspect, more cynically critical than most people in the disciplines themselves.I too have read radically different speculation concerning the origin of human language. The lack of physical evidence compelling enough to satisfy my hard-sci bent leads me to consider all of this literature highly speculative - as, I've found, its authors also seem to consider it. More, some of my favorite speculation on the subject is self-admittedly fictional, from Jean Auel's Neolithic bodice-rippers to Neil Stephenson's outré “Snowcrash” to De Luca and Gottlieb's farcical movie “Caveman”.

Setting with any confidence even a rough date for the origin of human (or even proto-human hominid) language strikes me, therefore, as beyond our current technical ability. One fact, in my amateur judgment, is clear - prior to about 100,000 years ago, no animal on Earth created representational models - such as cave drawings - of any sort. A change in animal behavior so profound I think it fair to call it the beginning of culture occurred then, perhaps very abruptly, perhaps gradually or in stops and starts over tens of thousands of years. On the other side of this event, here we are, consummate language and symbol using model and art makers. That this event marked the onset of representation, modeling, symbol manipulation, and language seems to me a sensible conclusion - as the sampled-Steven-Hawking-synthetically-spoken introduction to Pink Floyd's “Keep Talking” puts it (with a bit of artistic license with powers of tens of years),In complex natural system such as biological organism or societies, (as opposed to simpler artificial ones such as formal mathematical systems and computer programs), it’s rarely meaningful to describe any single entity, category, or phenomenon as the cause of another. Rather, phenomena have many causes.

In the context of this discussion, I think it inaccurate to assert that human population increase or quantity of artifacts produced (as in my previous post, I’m reluctant to use terms like “cultural heritage”, because they’re difficult to objectively define) are due only to either social or biological changes – to put it in Dennett-esque terms, due entirely to genes or entirely to memes – or to some other category of causes, such as climate or planetary mechanics. There’s nothing like an ice age, or an extinction-level meteoric impact, to alter the development of human society and culture.

Although one may find it hard to believe, it’s what the archeological evidence suggests. All that can really be measured is artifact creation – shaped stone tools, jewelry, what we take to be religious iconography, and depictions of activities such as hunting. There’s simply no evidence of a lengthy period in which human beings shaped stone, but didn’t make representational “art” objects, bury their dead in decorated graves, and otherwise behave as if they had some manner of religion. Much later, about 6,000 years ago, when the first writing systems appear, rapidly followed by the first writing, human write about the supernatural, of gods and giants and creation stories, suggesting they’d been talking about such matters for the past 30,000+ years or so.Again, the archeological record does not suggest such a gap.

Consider the following thought experiment/question: A huge maternity ward of newborn infants is shipwrecked on a tropical island, nurtured by a troupe of kindly monkeys, etc., to form a tribe completely un-time-bound with the culture of their parents. Would they behave just like their monkey foster parents, without the trappings of any sort of human culture? Or would they, in a single generation, invent gods, myths, language of a sort, etc, - in short, invent an instant, ad-hoc culture? Would they use tools, simple but beyond those of the most adept apes or birds. When one of them died, would the others abandon the corpse in the manner of monkeys, or ceremonially bury it? Would the human knack for time-binding result in the descendents of these cultural orphans establishing a “cultural heritage” as quickly as their agile, modern human brains could manage it.

If the cultural orphans adopted the behavior of their monkey cousins, would, over the course of tens of thousands of years, they develop human culture. And, if they did, would the monkeys (OK, for plausibility’s sake let’s make them chimpanzees) share in it, despite their similar but different biology?

PS: Oops – sorry about that!

In addition to Origin of language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; and History of writing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, which give the 40,000 and 6,000 year figures, Human - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia gives 130,000 years as the approximate appearance date of anatomically modern humans. Like all encyclopedia references, these are secondary – the linked-to articles provide some primary references.

the last information I have on when we appeared was from a science news report on a study which concluded it was almost 200,000 years ago. That was late last year.

Because of the subjectivity you and I both understand re. social science theory, I have spent decades enterpreting social science data differently than the concensus of the social theory scholars. By doing this, I worked out a natural selection process going on between ideological systems. I managed to do this by collecting word-trick strategems used in social theory rationalizing. Once I had found them (I found twenty one), I avoided them and was able to re-interpret their interpreting to come out with a clear and logical NS process. It is because I think in this different interpreting (a sort of different paradigm) that we differ on the points above.

sometime when you have some extra time, take a look at it. With your mind and background, I think you will find it interesting. HOME PAGE

charles