Janky, unedited, written to help myself retain and understand better. Trenton Bricken (good friend and former podcast guest) was the one who recommended this book to me. Trenton found out the author lives right here in the Bay Area. So the two of us got a chance to go have lunch with the author, Terence Deacon, a couple weeks ago. Which was a really fun experience. Anyways, here’s the notes:
I disagree with the premise that human learning is correlated with inability to memorize. Human learning -- or, at least, the type of learning that language is aimed at -- peaks at around 10 - 20 years old. And this is also the age range at which humans are best at memorizing precise details. This is the age range at which current humans compete in Spelling Bees and math olympiads, and at which past polymaths would typically learn several languages. Lastly, this is the age range at which humans most often form distinct, indelible memories of life experiences.
Deacon inevitably runs into the same problem plaguing all of the "communication sciences": he's unable to pinpoint any theoretical moment when chimpanzee communication could have switched over into human language. Without this he's sort of lost in the usual storm of theoretical Darwinism, at once trying to specify hominization while denying its specific transition point. We see the same problem in Burling, Wrangham, Dunbar, Bickerton who all dance around the paradox of a supposed transition from simians while being incapable of theorizing what this transition was in any minimal way, sometimes even denying any kind of minimal property necessary for the transition (Burling did this, really sad).
Deacon's worst crime is on pages 347-8 where the case for the transition becomes hopeless: supposedly, human brains evolved so that our tools also evolved out of chimpanzee tools, and yet this brain evolution is on a different track than language evolution. He claims that A. africanus "were clearly not symbol users" and yet they were using tools advanced beyond those of chimps. The communication "trick" never held until 2.5 MYA, on 348 he claims that symbols and stone tools were separate developments running in parallel. "Stone tools and symbols must both, then, be the architects of the Australopithecus-Homo transition, and not its consequences." He never returns to this argument, probably for a good reason, because it's totally incoherent.
A smarter theory would have been that some kind of recursive property was responsible for both stone tool creation and language, and that these early stone tools were probably linguistic devices first, tools second. At least then he'd have a bridge. Recursion is more minimal than language (and also explains human violence, kinship, etc.), and it's the clearest and most obvious difference between us and them, but building a bridge from non-recursion in chimps to recursion in humans is theoretically impossible, at least using any kind of gradualist thinking. It'd be like gradually connecting a wire to a car battery to close a circuit. But once start thinking like this, you not only give up on gradualist thinking in general (since it's so vague and makes for unnecessarily long books like Deacon's), but you also realize it's unnecessary to understand the human condition, since recursion captures everything very nicely.
I disagree with the premise that human learning is correlated with inability to memorize. Human learning -- or, at least, the type of learning that language is aimed at -- peaks at around 10 - 20 years old. And this is also the age range at which humans are best at memorizing precise details. This is the age range at which current humans compete in Spelling Bees and math olympiads, and at which past polymaths would typically learn several languages. Lastly, this is the age range at which humans most often form distinct, indelible memories of life experiences.
Deacon inevitably runs into the same problem plaguing all of the "communication sciences": he's unable to pinpoint any theoretical moment when chimpanzee communication could have switched over into human language. Without this he's sort of lost in the usual storm of theoretical Darwinism, at once trying to specify hominization while denying its specific transition point. We see the same problem in Burling, Wrangham, Dunbar, Bickerton who all dance around the paradox of a supposed transition from simians while being incapable of theorizing what this transition was in any minimal way, sometimes even denying any kind of minimal property necessary for the transition (Burling did this, really sad).
Deacon's worst crime is on pages 347-8 where the case for the transition becomes hopeless: supposedly, human brains evolved so that our tools also evolved out of chimpanzee tools, and yet this brain evolution is on a different track than language evolution. He claims that A. africanus "were clearly not symbol users" and yet they were using tools advanced beyond those of chimps. The communication "trick" never held until 2.5 MYA, on 348 he claims that symbols and stone tools were separate developments running in parallel. "Stone tools and symbols must both, then, be the architects of the Australopithecus-Homo transition, and not its consequences." He never returns to this argument, probably for a good reason, because it's totally incoherent.
A smarter theory would have been that some kind of recursive property was responsible for both stone tool creation and language, and that these early stone tools were probably linguistic devices first, tools second. At least then he'd have a bridge. Recursion is more minimal than language (and also explains human violence, kinship, etc.), and it's the clearest and most obvious difference between us and them, but building a bridge from non-recursion in chimps to recursion in humans is theoretically impossible, at least using any kind of gradualist thinking. It'd be like gradually connecting a wire to a car battery to close a circuit. But once start thinking like this, you not only give up on gradualist thinking in general (since it's so vague and makes for unnecessarily long books like Deacon's), but you also realize it's unnecessary to understand the human condition, since recursion captures everything very nicely.