The Language Race

My last post reviewed Donald M. Morrison ’s bookThe Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse among Humans. This entry is a brief meditation inspired by my reading.The fossil skulls of our Homo ancestors show an amazingly rapid growth of theHomobrain.Homo habilis(2.8 million years ago) had a brain only slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee. By 200 thousand years ago, the brain had tripled in size. 2.6 million years is long by most standards but is very fast for an organ to triple in size, and is especially impressive when you realize that sustaining neurons requires much greater support in calories than say muscle. The growth of the brain indicates a steady improvement in diet during those same 2.6 million years. How does that kind of steady growth persist for millions of years?Morrison argues, reasonably enough, that the pressure to evolve so steadily over a prolonged time is usually an arms race and as predators gain speed so prey species improve their speed too and   the circle continues. Predators kill and eat the slower prey, so the faster prey is selected. The slow predators starve while the faster predators survive to have descendants. The enlarged brain permits theHomo genus to remember more, develop language, technology, and culture to a much higher level than our chimpanzees. Chapter 4, “An Evolutionary Explosion,” does a fine job of considering the suite of changes made to the body of our ancestors to produce us, not just our brain size but ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: blogs