The Language Guy

My wife and I just finished watching Alan Alda's PBS thing on the "human spark." He's a smart guy and funny but what was he thinking when he endorsed the notion that there is a "human spark?" And what were these Harvard and Oxford and other scientists thinking?

I have had some experience with media sorts and they are very fond of "hooks" that one can use to snag an audience and keep it. The hook this time is the notion of a "human spark" -- something we have but that chimps and no other species (on this planet) have. This is a terrible metaphor. We know that it takes a spark to ignite gasoline fumes in an automobile cylinder and that this is the most proximate cause of the piston's moving downward thereby assisting the engine in its effort to ... I don't want to get into automobile stuff. I would be way out of my depth. However, I am inclined to think that the evolution of those human qualities that distinguish us from chimps and other life forms might be just a bit more complicated than this metaphor makes it out to be.

The terrible thing about this metaphor is that it works better for "sophisticated" intelligent design people than for Darwinists. If intelligent design people are willing to concede that we and the chimps have a common origin, they need only then say, "Aha, Alda is with us. We are the life forms god sparked into humanhood by causing us to be capable of forming complex intentions, recognizing complex intentions in others, and imagining future actions." Unsophisticated intelligent design people need only say that God dropped us on the planet pre-sparked.

The show actually admitted that chimps are capable of forming intentions and recognizing intentions in others (but not as well as we do). About the future, they don't seem to think too much but to suppose they can't think about the immediate future is absurd. Indeed the show proved otherwise as when it was argued that alpha males may choose to share with females based on attempting to curry favor with them. Back in the day when I followed research on chimp linguistic development, I formed the view that the researchers who did this work were not always the sharpest academic tacks. In my view, they tended to be so empathetic with their research subjects that they were willing to think things that just might not be true.

In the show, the human spark seemed to be whatever "sparked" the conjoint abilities to "read other's minds and travel in time," as Alda put it. Let me show you a picture they showed of the areas of the brain that light up when these two abilities are activated. Notice that these two parts of the brain are not adjacent. Two questions arise in my mind: how did a single spark ignite abilities requiring two different parts of the brain to be be realized and how is it that so much of one part of the brain manage to be recruited for this realization.

Perhaps I am being a bit too simplistic here but I am not at all sure that these two abilities are so different. If a crucial feature of humans, one shared by chimps, is our socialization then thinking about the future -- making plans for the future -- must crucially have involved making plans in connection with others. And making plans in connection with others would seem to require an ability to form views as to others' intentions. A Harvard professor did note that both abilities involve escaping one's present point of view. I can imagine that being able to escape one's present point of view could have been a precursor to the gradual evolving of these abilities over a very long time.

Labels: Alan Alda, brain storm, Human Spark, intelligent design, PBS, thinking about the future. other minds

I have been going through all my blogs the last few days to delete a 100% perfect spam job that attached some impenetrable gob of Chinese authored by someone or some computer named "sexy." In the process, I encountered one of my blogs on religion and decided to Google "The Language of God" to see what sort of nonsense there might be out there on the internet and found that some nitwit has a book titled just that. I am a couple of years late in noticing that but gratuitous slaps at religion are never too late or too early.

In an ABC news story prompting this diatribe, I discovered that former President Clinton and the "leader of the international Human Genome Project," one Francis S. Collins, are described as conspiring to claim, in the words of Clinton,

"Today," he said, "we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift."

I'm sure I have blogged on the idea that there could be a language of art or music, pointing out how silly such notions are, but worse than these is the notion that the code that determines our genetic make up is written in some sort of language

3 billion letters long, and written in a strange and cryptographic four-letter code

which is amazingly complex. Yo, dude, if this code is so complex and wondrous how in hell have humans been able to crack it? We linguists haven't been able to understand the structure of any human language. We must be dumber than geneticists or, more likely, the human genome just ain't that difficult to crack and certainly an unworthy candidate as an example of the language of anything but a very minor god.

Actually, if the human genome is a code then it isn't a linguistic system on a par with Chinese or Spanish or Xhosa, which are anything but code like. Human languages consist of expressions that refer to elements of the natural world as well as a multiplicity of quite abstract notions (justice, democracy, infinity). The strands of DNA don't refer to things outside the organizm from which the DNA is drawn.

This geneticist must be an admirer of the equally silly intelligent design (non)theory for like it, it is restricted to one phenomenon -- the origin of the species. There is no intelligent design theory of physics or linguistics or anything other than the origin of the species. Similarly, the "language" of DNA, while it might bear the slightest resemblance to the graphical representations of organic chemistry being taught way back when (and maybe even now), it bears no relationship to the "language" of physics. Are we to say that the mathematical representations in physics are not instances of the language of God or is it that He is bilingual or multilingual, with one language for the human genome, another for physics, another for statistics, and still another for syntactical structure, etc.?

How a scientist of this guy's reputation could come up with so silly a theory is beyond my simple imagination. But then, whenever my wife says I am imagining something, my reply is allways, "I have no imagination." Neither does this dude.

Labels: Francis S. Collins, intelligent design, President Bill Clinton, The Language of God