Re: Indo-European question

Rik Roots wrote:
> > The term "Hominid" includes pretty much everything from Lucy and
>forwards.
> > Since, as you say, modern humans have always had about the same language
> > skills as we, and it is inconceiveable that something so mind-numbingly
> > complex as human language evolved overnight, language must (leaving
> > creationism aside) have arisen among some ancestor species. The
>strongest
> > candidate is probably Homo Ergaster (or some similar erectid), but some
> > researchers believe it occured as late as among the archaic Homo
>Sapiens.
> >
>Something in me wants to argue with this point of view - given the
>speed with which complex systems can organise themselves, and the
>power of simple pattern matching algorithms to allow complex systems
>to develop (and pattern matching being one of the primary functions of
>the brain), I would have thought that a complex language could have
>developed within a few generations in a community of hominids. And
>that this could have happened not just once, but many times.
>
>Or am I talking out of my back end again?
a) "Within a few generations" is most certainly not "overnight".
b) Human children are "predisposed" to learn language. This must, I'm led to
believe, mean that somewhere in the human genome there's something which
makes us acquire langauge during childhood. A such genetic adaption could,
in theory, indeed arise overnight (due to a mutation), but it wouldn't have
much effect until a reasonable porportion of the population had it. More
probably, this genetic mechanism consists of several mutations that occured
at different times and each one had an more or less immediate advantage for
the individual - that's how genetic adaptions usually work. Exactly where
along the line of development the acoustic communication became "langauge"
is, I guess, mostly a question of terminology (perhaps when the
phoneme-morpheme system was into place?).

                                                       Andreas
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