Here's the second of (what will be) four posts covering Chapter 2 in this endeavor to review Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time.
Today's topic is language, which emerged thanks to what we read about last time: the "Tree of Knowledge" mutation.
I'm guessing he didn't call it the "Tree of Language" mutation because that would be straying too far from Genesis? Besides, he's arguing--as does just about everyone who thinks about these things--that without language there is no sapiens-level knowledge. The human mind and human language are inextricable now and always were--at least, according to the 21st century human imagination.
But assuming this phenomenon started 70,000 years ago (see prior pages) is baseless. Assuming it started at any time more specific than prior to recorded writing* is unwise.
[*Never mind that it's difficult to know (a) what counts as recorded writing and (b) if it necessarily pairs with language.]
It's interesting (isn't it?) that people feel the need to ground discussions of human evolution in unknowable, unverifiable "facts" like a 70,000 year old Tree of Knowledge mutation. Why isn't discussing how profound our abilities are, right now, compared to other animals--sticking to what we actually know and can verify and probe and explore with our bodies, right now--sufficiently evolutionary? Evolution is true. It has been true for several generations of science. Can we stop with the making stuff up about the past yet? Isn't the point of evolutionary science to provide an alternative to creationism?
Anyhow.
Let's focus on language. Whenever it emerged, it did. And it's key to building Harari's major point about the human imagination that makes this book so exciting and so special to so many readers.
Page 22
Right away you may have noticed my circling of "All" and scribbling of "do tell." Let me explain. One of the things that stuck since graduate school is being trained to flag broad assertions. In anything I read or hear, claims like, "every animal has some kind of language," ping my radar immediately.
I'm thinking of the smallest little animals, like tardigrades, and wondering, what about their biology could someone call "language"? Probably not a whole lot. Unconscious chemical signaling, or communication, is where we're at, since I doubt that tardigrades vocalize. Usually vocalizations are what people will include under the "language" umbrella--that is, people who aren't the anthropology and otherwise types who argue that "language" only applies to human behavior.
But, okay, I'm used to seeing "language" apply to vervet monkey calls. These are monkeys that Harari calls green monkeys because that's another name for them. And, so is "velvet monkey," which you may have heard if you've ever been to Kenya.
Vervets make slightly different squirrely shrieks for "eagle!" and "snake!" and "leopard!" that cause their companions to react accordingly even if they themselves did not see the threat. Scientists have played recordings of these shrieks, which induce the appropriate reactions in the monkeys. They also report that monkey kids have the ability to make all these vocalizations and use them inappropriately, as you might expect, but learn quickly not to. Harari adds something to the interpretation of the alarm calls that's unlike I've ever heard (and it reminds me of how he captioned the hand print on the very first page of the book). He writes out their screech for "eagle!" as "careful! eagle!" which is not an insignificant difference and, again, one I'd bet the people who research these monkeys would not endorse. But let's move on...
As Harari points out, no one has ever observed these monkeys or any primates, employing these gestural or verbal communication abilities when the subject is not present. The kids who cry "eagle!" don't count because they're just babbling. The point is, monkeys don't talk about eagles when eagles aren't around--not eagles in the past who swooped down and stole their baby and not eagles in the future who could swoop down and do it again.
Interestingly, this is an example of how "language" IS extricable from sapiens-level thinking. They have different calls for different threats/animals but they do not reason abstractly about those threats/animals. At least, they don't with one another.
By the bottom of the page we're back to la la land. Here he's introducing a theory that human language evolved for gossiping. As if we could ever know.
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He sums up the gossip theory like so: "It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat."
Well, I'm no primatologist but I would bet you that language-lacking chimps know who hates whom, who is fucking whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat. So I'm not so sure this is a great abstract of the gossip theory of language evolution. Or else, if it is, then the gossip idea is pretty weak. Either way, we need more here to entertain that our story is thanks to SURVIVAL OF THE GOSSIPEST.
Now we see that Harari is adding nuance: "All apes show a keen interest in such social information, but they have trouble gossiping effectively." Dry humor can be fun. I'm trying to appreciate it, even though it's sitting in the middle of bullshit human evolutionary storytelling.
Speaking of: "Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens probably also had a hard time talking behind each other's backs--a much maligned ability which is in fact essential for cooperation in large numbers."
1. There is no reason to give language to Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens but there is equally no reason to withhold it. It's unknown and unknowable. The only reason to ignore that scientific truth is so that you can tell the story you want to tell about human evolution and, by extension, human nature. Or... you just don't know what is knowable and you've been influenced by people who are telling the story that they want to tell about human evolution and, by extension, human nature. Either way, when will it end?
2. To claim that talking behind each other's backs is "in fact essential for cooperation in large numbers" is circular and made-up and untrue about sapiens. Clearly he's only talking about hominins, because he's obviously not talking about starlings or termites
or penguins or red-billed quelea. And the only way to claim that about sapiens is to claim #1 which we just said is unknowable and therefore not true.
This is awkward. Obviously cooperation in large numbers is a special sapiens phenomenon. Obviously so is our language. And so to link the two is common sense and I don't think anyone should take issue with that. I certainly don't. It's the casual storytelling about human evolution ... blah blah blah blah... I'm a broken record. I'm parroting nearly every post I've written about this book. But it's so important.
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"The gossip theory might sound like a joke, but numerous studies support it." Ummmm. Studies about present day animal behavior, including humans', do not illuminate our ancestors' behavior, let alone link it to their reproductive success so that we can know if the theory is correct. I know that some people believe that studying human behavior today is a legit basis for scientifically theorizing about our ancestors, so I cannot blame Harari entirely for doing the same. At least he actually cites some, here!
Now here's where he basically says "who cares how language originated or why it first evolved, because we need to talk about why it's so important." And I'm all ears.
The key is "the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all." YES. I agree. This is huge. As far as we know, animals' imaginations are full of their own experiences but we have no evidence that they imagine what they have not experienced, let alone that they imagine what cannot be experienced. So they can think of an eagle of if they've seen one, but they cannot think of a fire-breathing dragon. And one reason we don't have any evidence that they can think about what they never experienced is because we cannot ask them and they cannot tell us. Could there be our wild imagination in an ancestor (or another living species) without language? Maybe. You don't have to be able to tell others about your mind, but we have both abilities and so we link them. And that we can tell others about our minds and hear about others minds makes our social world extraordinary compared to any other animal's.
So, says Harari, our "ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens Language." And his example is imagining our ancestors believing that "the lion is the guardian of our tribe."
So, what he's done is delve into anthropology and so readers, at least American ones in the American academic tradition, may be wondering when we'll hear about it. We won't. He's going to take us on a journey through "fictions" and "imagined orders" in a similar way that anthropologists have long done with culture and myth and folklore and norms and mores and customs and etc. But it's almost like anthropology doesn't exist. He has cited only a news story on the first cooking and one book by an evolutionary psychologist so far.
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Still, the excitement is palpable because here is the foundation for something that feels fresh and powerful. He says, "fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively."
Interesting that his examples include "biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the national myths of modern states," but not the stories he's just told over the last 25 pages. Because "such myths" including the last 25 pages, especially the last 25 pages, recounted in our STEM-loving world, where evolutionary stories jibe so nicely with the Bible, probably help "give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers."
What would happen to society, I wonder, if uncertainty and unknowability were the scientific facts about so much of our evolutionary history to the point that there was no story for Harari to tell for the first 25 pages of the book?
Without traditional evolutionary "truths"--that are sustained, even if only indirectly, by confident storytelling, like Harari's human evolutionary "science"--would people have to admit that race and patriarchy are just what they prefer as their reality?
Would people have to admit that Harari's "scientific" spin on original sin (a.k.a. "tribalism" and "us versus them" that's laced throughout Sapiens, and which is rooted in the sex, gender, and racial separation of humans by traditional evolutionary theorizing that essentializes outward differences into invisible inner ones) is entirely faith about human nature, not science?
And if they did have to admit that, would those fictions, imagined orders, myths whatever you want to call them, last without the authority of science?
Many pages are next. To be continued...
