The Human Story by Dunbar Robin

Author:Dunbar, Robin [Dunbar, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780571265206
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

Whatever else may be the case, humans differ from all other species of animals – including our ape cousins – in one obvious respect: language. There are some 4000 species of mammals, and around 10,000 species of birds (just to consider the so-called ‘higher’ vertebrates), yet we are the only species that has this particular faculty. To be sure, all these other species communicate with each other, sometimes in surprisingly sophisticated ways. But none of their communication systems can match human language for sheer flexibility and information-carrying capacity. Bees can tell each other in which direction and how far away they have found a nectar source, but they cannot comment on the merits of this nectar source relative to the one they visited yesterday. Nor can they comment on the flying conditions today or how atrociously the queen bee behaved towards her drones last week … or what they should all do next year when the season for founding new colonies comes around. And in the final analysis, neither they nor any other animals have ever used their communication systems to produce a literature of any kind.

Yet human language can do all these things, and more. It allows us to engage in such exotic projects as constructing rockets to send people to the moon and beyond, something that would be genuinely impossible without the cooperation of many individuals (each engaged in a carefully orchestrated set of very complex tasks) and the accumulated knowledge of many generations of individual scientists (whose individual, sometimes quite specific, discoveries were passed on to successive generations only because of language). For both of these, language is crucial. Language is essential if we are to coordinate the activities of so many individuals scattered in so many different places. Without the knowledge handed down from one generation to the next, it would not have been possible for all those individual scientists and engineers who eventually put together the first rocket to the moon to develop the technology needed to do it.

Why, then, do humans have this unique capacity? Indeed, why is it unique to humans? How may this remarkable capacity for language in fact be intimately tied up with several other equally unique, but often ignored, aspects of human behaviour, namely laughter and music?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.