I don't mind when I read an occasional knocking us humans down a peg or two, or the elevation of other creatures in our estimation.
In fact I also find it useful and enjoyable to occasionally point out our
sweaty, butt-scratching animalness. I
have not read evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi's book Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man but his essay linked above, which explains the main theses of his book, shows a most glaring misunderstanding of
culture and cultural evolution on his part.
His rhetorical question “what if spoken language got structured
via cultural evolution to sound like the events occurring among solid objects” expresses
a profound misunderstanding of language – that is, in particular, its almost
total arbitrariness. In comparative
linguistics of current and past languages such an onomatopoeic theory of the evolutionary
emergence of language is unsupported.
Worse is his notion that cultural evolution in humans was somehow underway
before language emerged. A better
argument can be made that they co-evolved.
His statement “speech would have gotten rigged to harness the
solid-object auditory processing mechanisms we already possessed” begs the
question of what was going on in the mind of our proto-language ancestors when
this rigging of speech sounds to the sounds occurring in the natural
environment took place? What kinds of
mental abilities did they have to do such “rigging?” Again, the co-evolution of language and
culture provides a more parsimonious model.
When he proposes that “music having itself culturally
evolved” I was done. Music does not on
its own evolve. Music is a cultural
artifact that when “made” by humans becomes an expression of a certain range of
sound wave pitches and tempos that are acceptable or not acceptable to others. Humans act on music and music thereby
evolves. It does not evolve by itself.
Finally, when Changizi writes “language and the arts
developed to fit the capabilities of our ancient, non-language, non-musical
brains by mimicking fundamental aspects of nature. Culture evolved to
harness us, and it did so, in a sense, by ‘dumbing down’ language, writing, and
music into shapes we could process” I had to close the link to his essay and
find more productive reading. In this
statement he separates “culture” from language, writing, and music. His statement implies that language, writing,
and music appeared in our evolutionary history then, somehow, our super-organic “culture”
got revved up and dumbed them down into something our basal primate brains
could handle. Language, writing, and
music, in all their diversely expressed forms, are human artifacts and therefore
are part of the cultural repertoire of our species, not emergent behaviors
separate from culture that culture somehow turns its attention to and modifies.
I doubt that I will be reading “Harnessed” unless a very compelling
review comes along.
