wCHAP.25b

(9/16/98)

CHAPTER XXV - B

THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT is examined here because it raises some very important issues relevant to a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom.

As Pinker points out, (p. 16) "A common language connects the members of a community into an information-sharing network with formidable collective powers." And if this network could be extended to all of humanity, what a power could be unleased!

p. 17: "...I [Steven Pinker] will be writing not about the English language or any other language, but about something much more basic: the instinct to learn, speak, and understand language."

p. 18: "Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. For these reasons some cognitive scientists have described language as a psychological faculty, a mental organ, a neural system, and a computational module. But I prefer the admittedly quaint term 'instinct.' It conveys the idea that people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs."

p. 19: "Once you begin to look at language not in the ineffable essence of human uniqueness but as a biological adaption to communicate information, it is no longer as tempting to see language as an insidious shaper of thought, and, we shall see, it is not."

RESPONSE: To think that language and thought can be totally separated because thought has a fundamental dimension in which it is hard-wired into the brain, to me seems wrong. There is some level at which thought is language-dependent. It may not be in the Whorfian sense (see Pinker's page 57, below), but it is in some sense. Language captures concepts that come out of new human experiences. These things can not be thought of in the absence of words and ideas to do so. When people think disease comes from evil spirits and hexes, they react to them very differently than when they understand germs, toxins, and vaccinations. The foregoing is true of scores of situations. No matter how good of a biology module the brain may possess, it is clear that it depends upon a great deal of empirical data in order to properly interact with the world in which we live.

p. 21: "In this century, the most famous argument that language is like an instinct comes from Noam Chomsky, the linguist who first unmasked the intricacy of the system and perhaps the person most responsible for the modern revolution in language and cognitive science."

p. 22: "...children develop...complex grammars rapidly and without formal instruction and grow up to give consistent interpretations to novel sentence constructions that they have never before encountered. Therefore, he [Chomsky] argued, children must innately be equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages, a Universal Grammar, that tells them how to distill the syntactic patterns out of the speech of their parents."

RESPONSE: Chomsky seems ecstatic about the realization that something very fundamental about language appears to be innate and genetic. Certainly this insight is worthy of recognition and acclaim. However, Chomsky also appears to be nonplussed because environmental factors are taken by many to be of fundamental importance in understanding language. This strikes me as strange. Why should it be taken as unreasonable that individuals should deem it important to understand the ways that it is possible to influence and improve language and the individual's use of language? Is it really an achievement to think that everything must be as the genes decree and there is nothing more of importance that can be said. If the language we speak depends on our environment is it really naive to think that other factors of language are also related to our experience?

p. 22: Chomsky: "The development of personality, behavior patterns, and cognitive structures in higher organisms has often been approached in a very different way. It is generally assumed that in these domains, social environment is the dominant factor."

RESPONSE: Rather than saying dominant factor, perhaps, we should say, is a factor. Would this be wrong? Is there any evidence that says, social environment is totally irrelevant to one's development? That there is no relationship to one's experiences and what one becomes? Would any reasonable person look at a prison, a slum, a science laboratory, and say don't be curious about these people. It's all in the genes. There is nothing to be done that can affect whether someone becomes a mass murderer, or a Nobel prize winner. It's all in the genes. Don't worry about improving society, building schools, educating individuals. Human nature is explained by the genes and when you've said that you've said it all. Such statements are the essence of ignorance and the core of stupidity. They encapsulate the kind of sterile thinking that characterizes human history. The fact that modern thinkers from our most lauded universities can say such things should at least raise an eyebrow.

If one thinks a "human nature" can be divorced from all of one's life experiences than I think they are ignoring the best and most hopeful thinking that human beings have produced. No matter how much of who one is is determined by their genes, the only part we currently have some influence over is the part effected by experiences. Even if that is only 1% of one's "nature" that is currently able to be influenced it is the part that is most important and deserves the bulk of our attention and thinking.

p. 23: "...Chomsky attacks what is still one of the foundations of twentieth-century intellectual life -- the 'Standard Social Science Model,' according to which the human psyche is molded by the surrounding culture."

p. 26: : "No mute tribe has ever been discovered...."

"The universality of complex language is a discovery that fills linguists with awe, and is the first reason to suspect that language is not just any cultural invention but the product of a special human instinct.... There are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as a Stone Age language."

RESPONSE: All of this is well and good, and certainly of fundamental importance. However, a Stone Age society does not talk about quarks; a heliocentric solar system made up of planets, comets, asteroids, and solar winds. Nor do they discuss polio and small pox, cylinder compression ratios, calculus, chaos theory, fuzzy logic, the meaning of life, or any of a million things essential to a Science of Religion.

p. 32: "...the universality of language does not lead to an innate language instinct as night follows day.....The crux of the argument is that complex language is universal because children actually reinvent it, generation after generation...."

RESPONSE: But as indicated in the remarks above whatever children re-invent, their ability to think about countless things depends on the words their society teaches them. Without these words their thinking is very limited except in concrete experiences that they have as they grow up.

p. 33: "Pidgins are choppy strings of words borrowed from the language of the colonizers or plantation owners, highly variable in order and with little in the way of grammar."

"The language that results when children make a pidgin their native tongue is called a creole."

RESPONSE: This is certainly very interesting and expands the understanding of language.

p. 36: "Contrary to popular misconceptions, sign languages are not pantomimes and gestures, inventions of educators, or ciphers of the spoken language of the surrounding community. They are found wherever there is a community of deaf people, and each one is a distinct, full language, using the same kinds of grammatical machinery found worldwide in spoken languages."

"ISN [Idioma de Signos Nicaraguense] appears to be a creole, created in one leap when the younger children were exposed to the pidgin signing of the older children...." "A language has been born before our eyes."

RESPONSE: This is truly mind-boggling!

p. 37: "...because the deaf are virtually the only neurologically normal people who make it to adulthood without having acquired a language, their difficulties offer particularly good evidence that successful language acquisition must take place during a critical window of opportunity in childhood."

RESPONSE: It seems to me that if one relates this to Piaget's findings that children up to the age of five or six, communicate with their age mates with gestures not language we have the hint of something important in Homo sapiens history. It appears most reasonable to believe that early Homo and probably their ancestors communicated more by gestures than by words. But at some critical point words became more important. Up to this point change was very slow and similar tools were used for hundreds of thousands of years. "Then, around 50,000 years ago, something profound happened. New technologies associated with modern humans -- finer blades and projectile weapons -- began to appear."

"Scientists can only speculate on what triggered this technological spurt. 'I think there was a mutation in the brains of a group of anatomically modern humans living either in Africa or the middle East,' Says Richard Klein, an anthropologist at Stanford University. 'Some new neurological connections let them behave in a modern way. Maybe it permitted fully articulate speech, so that they could pass on information more efficiently.'"[2]

A structure such as Chomsky postulates may have evolved and produced the modern human brain. With this magnified language talent human culture was then ready to really take off and produce all the effects we are learning more about every year: agriculture, tools of every variety, alphabet, writing, etc.

It is my thesis that this mutation produced an effect that has yet to be stabilized. This effect was to provide the individual a different role in the group because the individual rather than genes became the mechanism for change. A whole new relationship between the individual and society became necessary to create a stable unit that would not either destroy the species or its environment. A Religion of Wisdom based on aScience of Religion is seen as a mechanism for producing this stability.

p. 38: "Simon's superiority to his parents is an example of creolization by a single living child."

p. 39: "...let us do away with the folklore that parents teach their children language."

(p. 40) "Children deserve most of the credit for the language they acquire. In fact, we can show that they know things they could not have been taught."

(p. 46): "There are several kinds of neurological and genetic impairments that compromise language while sparing cognition and vice versa....Broca's Aphasia....Specific Language Impairment (SLI)."

p. 51: "For reasons no one understands, hydrocephalic children occasionally end up...significantly retarded but with unimpaired -- indeed, overdeveloped -- language skills....The various technical terms for the condition include 'cocktail party conversation,' 'chatterbox syndrome,' and 'blathering.'

p. 52: William's syndrome: "elfin-faced" or "pixie people" "They are significantly retarded, with an IQ of about 50, and are incompetent at ordinary tasks like tying their shoes, finding their way, retrieving items from a cupboard...and suppressing their natural tendency to hug strangers. But...they are fluent, if somewhat prim, conversationalists."

p. 56: "Is thought dependent on words? Do people literally think in English, Cherokee, Kivunjo....Or are our thoughts couched in some silent medium of the brain -- a language of thought, or 'mentalese' -- and merely clothed in words whenever we need to communicate them to a listener? No question could be more central to understanding the language instinct."

RESPONSE: I would agree with Pinker that we don't actually think in words. However, it seems clear to me that our thinking is not independent of words. In my mind, what is actually going on in our brains when we think and talk remains to be clarified.

p. 57: "And supposedly there is a scientific basis for these assumptions: the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language...."

"But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes....Think about it. We have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn't exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a 'what we meant to say' that is different from what we said. Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought....And if thoughts depended on words, how could a new word ever be coined?"

RESPONSE: It seems to me that Pinker has a valid point. The mind does not use words to do its actual thinking. But did anyone actually think it does? Everyone realizes that the brain and nervous system translates all external stimuli into electro-chemical signals that carry some kind of associations. But it is still unclear as to what all this means. Certainly it is clear that the mind does not come with any built-in symbols that are tied to the external symbols.

I am willing to accept Pinker's theory as a working hypothesis that the brain is pre-wired to handle in-put in certain ways we call grammar. This is very likely the evolutionary tool that was created some 40,000 to 200,000 years ago when homo sapiens began to do all the wild and wonderful things we think of as being human. But when we examine the other side of Pinker's argument that people don't think in words we get to the critical point, What is the relationship between words and thinking? I would say people think not with words, but with concepts. It seems to me we would have to say words are one way people have to learn about the external world.

How does one learn a concept? Many concepts don't need words to be learned. Other's do. Political freedom is an abstract concept. To learn what it means requires many other concepts. It is difficult to imagine how this concept could be learned by a society without words (including words based on signing). In the absence of those concepts one would have to invent them in order to utilize these ideas. Words that refer to actual things that can be observed, touched, smelled may not need to exist for persons to have a concept in their mind. We all know one can have a concept and only later have the word. This is usually what happens. The parent points to the car and says, "Car." This way the concept in the child's brain becomes associated with the word.

My Son, Jared, once told his mother, "I don't want to wear those sticking-out-of-legs pants" referring to shorts. Obviously, he had the concept without having the word.(Deacon in THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES uncovers all of these things in detail -- more detail than the average brain will care to cover!)

p. 70: "Many creative people insist that in their most inspired moments they think not in words but in mental images."

p. 81: "To get information into a listener's head in a reasonable amount of time, a speaker can encode only a fraction of the message into words and must count on the listener to fill in the rest."

"People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought....presumably it has symbols for concepts, and arrangements of symbols that correspond to who did what to whom...."

p. 82: "People without a language would still have mentalese...."

p. 82: "So where does all this leave Newspeak [George Orwell's, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR]? Here is my predictions for the year 2050. First, since mental life goes on independently of particular languages, concepts of freedom and equality will be thinkable even if they are nameless. Second, since there are far more concepts than there are words, and listeners must always charitably fill in what the speaker leaves unsaid, existing words will quickly gain new senses, perhaps even regain their original senses. Third, since children are not content to reproduce any old input from adults but create a complex grammar that can go beyond it, they would creolize Newspeak into a natural language, possibly in a single generation. The twenty-first-century toddler may be Winston Smith's revenge."

RESPONSE: I think Pinker misses something very fundamental in his efforts to convince us there are language modules in the brain. It seem clear to me that there are such modules, and that all kinds of research supports Pinker's point of view on them. However, we also have voluminous evidence that peoples' behavior is significantly affected by the words they use and the definitions their society provides for those words. People may not think in words, but the concepts they do use for thinking are fundamentally tied to the words they are taught.

p. 83: Ferdinand de Saussure, Swiss linguist who observed "the arbitrariness of the sign" meaning words are unrelated to their meaning.

p. 84: Wilhelm Von Humboldt: "language 'makes infinite use of finite media.'"

Use of generative grammar -- order important.

"A grammar is an example of a 'discrete combinatorial system.' Individual units maintain their meaning while providing a new meaning to the combination."

p. 85: "The way language works, then, is that each person's brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar)."

p. 101: "...with a phrase structure grammar the connectedness of words in the tree reflects the relatedness of ideas in mentalese. Phrase structure, then, is one solution to the engineering problem of taking an interconnected web of thoughts in the mind and encoding them as a string of words that must be uttered, one at a time, by the mouth."

p. 106: "A part of speech...is not a kind of meaning, it is a kind of token that obeys certain formal rules...."

"Nouns are often used for names of things, and verbs for something being done, but because the human mind can construe reality in a variety of ways, nouns and verbs are not limited to those uses."

"One of the most intriguing discoveries of modern linguistics is that there appears to be a common anatomy in all phrases in all the world's languages."

1. "What the entire phrase is about is what its head is about." [head = primary noun](p. 107)

2. "The second principle allows phrases to refer not just to single things or actions in the world but to sets of players that interact with each other in a particular way, each with a specific role." (p. 107)

3. "The third ingredient of a phrase is one or more modifiers (usually called 'adjuncts')."

"[The] distinction in meaning between role-players and modifiers ('arguments' and 'adjuncts' in lingo) dictates the geometry of the phrase phrase [sic] structure tree."

4. "The fourth and final component of a phrase is a special position reserved for subjects (...'SPEC'...'specifier'...)(p. 109)

p. 110: "There may be just one pair of super-rules for the entire language...."

p. 111: "The piece of information that makes one language different from another is called a parameter."

"In fact, the super-rule is beginning to look less like an exact blue-print for a particular phrase and more like a general guideline or principle for what phrases must look like. The principle is usable only after you combine it with a language's particular setting for the order parameter. This general conception of grammar, first proposed by Chomsky, is called the 'principles and parameters' theory."

p. 124: "The workings of syntax are important for another reason. Grammar offers a clear refutation of the empiricist doctrine that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses."

RESPONSE: Pinker is correct in his conclusion, but as it stands it isn't worth much. In Volume I, Chapter Two, I clarify this idea by pointing out the necessity of considering the observer in an empirical observation. In that connection the attributes of the observer must be considered such as -- in the case of human beings -- the way their brain works.

But in the final analysis, Pinker is playing with words. The senses provide a stimulus which is processed in our body in accordance with its structures. Some of these structures have been modified by past experience and processing. But without empirical input there is no language, no grammar, no syntax. Therefore, although the empiricists are wrong on the specifics of this statement, they are right in the point they are trying to make.

p. 153: "We all get away with induction because we are not open-minded logicians but happily blinkered humans, innately constrained to make only certain kinds of guesses -- the probably correct kinds -- about how the world and its occupants work."

RESPONSE: Wouldn't that be the day!

p. 154: "Many thinkers...have claimed that the distinction between an object and an action is not in the world or even in our minds, initially, but is imposed on us by our language's distinction between nouns and verbs."

p. 157: "...in the sense of a listeme[3], a name is a pure symbol, part of a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the texture of reality."

p. 161: "As we shall see, information about each component of a word is smeared over the entire word."

"Speech perception is another one of the biological miracles making up the language instinct."

p. 162: "...speech is by far the fastest way of getting information into the head through the ear."

p. 172: "The linguist Sarah G. Thomason has found that people who claim to be channeling back to past lives or speaking in tongues are really producing gibberish that conforms to a sound pattern vaguely reminiscent of the claimed language."

p. 178: "It is a nice demonstration of one of the main discoveries of modern linguistics: a morpheme may be stored in the mental dictionary in a different form from the one that is ultimately pronounced."

p. 179: "These facts show that features, not phonemes, are the atoms of linguistic sound stored and manipulated in the brain. A phoneme is merely a bundle of features. Thus even in dealing with its smallest units, the features, language works by using a combinatorial system."

p. 185: "The top-down theory of speech perception exerts a powerful emotional tug on some people. It confirms the relativist philosophy that we hear what we expect to hear, that our knowledge determines our perception, and ultimately that we are not in direct contact with any objective reality. In a sense, perception that is strongly driven from the top down would be barely controlled hallucination, and that is the problem. A perceiver forced to rely on its expectations is at a severe disadvantage in a world that is unpredictable even under the best of circumstances. There is reason to believe that human speech perception is, in fact, driven quite strongly by acoustics. If you have an indulgent friend, you can try the following experiment. Pick ten words at random out of a dictionary, phone up the friend, and say the words clearly. Chances are the friend will reproduce them perfectly, relying only on the information in the sound wave and knowledge of English vocabulary and phonology....Though we may call upon high-level conceptual knowledge in noisy or degraded circumstances...our brains seem designed to squeeze every last drop of phonetic information out of the sound wave itself. Our sixth sense [our language instinct], is something that connects us to the world, and not just a form of suggestibility."

RESPONSE: The above follows by just two pages a description of an exercise in which a sentence was altered by deleting an "s" and replacing it with a cough. "Listeners could not tell that any sound was missing."

I think, Pinker totally misses the boat in the above. Obviously, sound waves are a basic source of the words we hear. But under various circumstances expectations totally overwhelm the "objective" message. To downplay this fact is to seriously distort how the human being works.

But for me the above has some very important points: 1) Do we hear what we expect to hear? 2) Does our knowledge determine our perceptions? 3) Are we in direct contact with any reality? All of these are key ideas a Science of Religion has to come to grips with. Chapter X lays out my clear claim that we are not in direct contact with any reality. Everything is interpretation. All reality is mediated by the ways in which it is perceived and the transducer that is effected by it. There may be brain structures that respond to external stimuli in particular ways but this does not indicate a direct contact with reality, but only contact with some aspects of reality.

Do we hear what we expect to hear? Obviously, the question is yes and no. The more clearly our brain is functioning and the more clear the signal, the more likely we will hear it correctly regardless of what we are expecting. But if the signal is unclear and/or the brain is confused, tired, upset, malnourished, anxious, stressed, unfamiliar with the signal, etc. it is very likely that we will hear what we expect to hear. Everything lies somewhere along these continua.

Does our knowledge determine our perception? Again yes and no. Under some circumstances we will perceive exactly what is said regardless of our knowledge. However, I think this is very rare. In most cases a stimulus cannot even be made sense of unless one has sufficient knowledge.

When we randomly pick words out of the dictionary and say them to our friend we are depending upon many years of learning and therefore much knowledge to help them clearly reproduce them. Obviously, we are connected to the world by our sense organs and they are designed (evolved) to give us accurate data about what they perceive. But our knowledge and experiences are essential parts of this process and cannot be ignored or taken lightly.

p. 186: Mondegreens: Misunderstandings when hearing something unfamiliar. "And laid him on the green." (from the folk ballad The Bonnie Earl O'Moray ) becomes: And Lady Mondegreen.

"mondegreens...are generally less plausible than the intended lyrics."

RESPONSE: To whom?

p. 190: "Obviously, alphabets do not and should not correspond to sounds; at best they correspond to the phonemes specified in the mental dictionary. The actual sounds are different in different contexts, so true phonetic spelling would only obscure their underlying identity."

p. 191: "...[English] is already much better than people think it is. That is because writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear."

RESPONSE: Probably, Pinker is right on this one. However, in PART D I include information on George Bernard Shaw's phonetic English alphabet because I think it has value in some places.

p. 211: "It is well known that when a person hears one word, any word related to it is easier to recognize, as if the mental dictionary is organized like a thesaurus, so that when one word is found, other similar in meaning are more readily available."

p. 228: "...listeners tacitly expect speakers to be informative, truthful, relevant, clear, unambiguous, brief, and orderly."

p. 232: "According to Chomsky...aside from their mutually unintelligible vocabularies, Earthlings speak a single language."

p. 237-38: "It is safe to say that the grammatical machinery we used for English in Chapters 4-6 is used in all the world's languages...."

p. 241: "Differences among languages, like differences among species, are the effects of three processes acting over long spans of time. One process is variation -- mutation, in the case of species; linguistic innovation, in the case of languages. The second is heredity, so that descendants resemble their progenitors in these variations.... The third is isolation....To understand why there is more than one language, then, we must understand the effects of innovation, learning, and migration."

p. 259: "...the first modern humans, who lived some 200,000 years ago."

"...between 3,600 and 5,400 languages, as many as 90% of the world's total, are threatened with extinction in the next century."

p. 266: "Deaf children's babbling is later and simpler -- though if their parents use sign language, they babble, on schedule, with their hands!"

"Why is babbling so important? The infant is like a person who has been given a complicated piece of audio equipment bristling with unlabeled knobs and switches but missing the instructions manual....By listening to their own instruction manual; they learn how much to move which muscles in which way to make which change in the sound. This is a prerequisite to duplicating the speech of their parents."

"Shortly before their first birthday, babies begin to understand words, and around that birthday, they start to produce them."

p. 267: "Around eighteen months, language takes off. Vocabulary growth jumps to the new-word-every-two-hours minimum rate that the child will maintain through adolescence."

p. 269: "If we divide language development into somewhat arbitrary stages, like Syllable Babbling, Gibberish Babbling, One-Word Utterances, and Two-Word Strings, the next stage would have to be called All Hell Breaks Loose."

p. 276: "The three-year-old, then, is a grammatical genius -- master of most constructions, obeying rules far more often than flouting them, respecting language universals, erring in sensible, adultlike ways, and avoiding many kinds of errors altogether. How do they do it? Children at this age are notably incompetent at most other activities."

p. 277: "Occasionally...modern children have grown up wild because depraved parents have raised them silently in dark rooms and attics. The outcome is always the same: the children are mute, and often remain so. Whatever innate grammatical abilities there are, they are too schematic to generate speech, words, and grammatical construction on their own."

RESPONSE: It is my assumption that these kids could be taught sign language and they would become relatively proficient in it. If this is in fact the case it would support the idea that the language area of the brain has different structures, and gestures and related are more basic than talking.

p. 278: "Deaf parents of hearing children were once advised to have the children watch a lot of television. In no case did the children learn English."

RESPONSE: Isn't that amazing! It defies everything we would naively expect.

p. 285: "This guidance [in learning a language] could come from two sources. First....to put it crudely, the V-bar theory of phrase structure could be innate. Second, since the meanings of parents' sentences are usually guessable in context. The child could use the meanings to help set up the right phrase structure."

p. 289: "Synapses continue to develop, peaking in number between nine months and two years (depending on the brain region), at which point the child has fifty percent more synapses than the adult!"

RESPONSE: Could this be capturing the evolution of structures in the brain as it goes from an earlier stage when more synapsis were needed to a later stage when less are needed because better organization requires fewer?

p. 292: "'Chelsea' was born deaf in a remote town in northern California....At the age of thirty-one she was...fitted with hearing aids that improved her hearing to near normal levels. Intensive therapy by a rehabilitative team has brought her to a point where she scores at a ten-year-old level on intelligence tests, knows two thousand words, holds a job in a veterinarian's office, reads, writes, communicates, and has become social and independent. She has only one problem....[her] syntax is bizarre."

p. 295: "[The brain] consumes a fifth of the body's oxygen and similarly large portions of its calories and phospholipids."

p. 302: "The right hemisphere is known to specialize in visuospatial abilities, so one might have expected that sign language, which depends on visuospatial abilities, would be computed in the right hemisphere. [Ursula] Bellugi's findings show that language, whether by ear and mouth or by eye and hand, is controlled by the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere must be handling the abstract rules and trees underlying language, the grammar and the dictionary and the anatomy of words, and not merely the sounds and the mouthings at the surface."

p. 306: "Even righties with left-handed relatives (presumably, these righties possessing only one copy of the dominant right-bias gene) appear to parse sentences in subtly different ways than pure righties."

p. 310: Broca's area and Wernicke's area: "Wernicke's aphasia is in some ways the complement of Broca's. Patients utter fluent streams of more-or-less grammatical phrases, but their speech makes no sense and is filled with neologisms and word substitutions."

(p. 311) "A striking symptom of Wernicke's aphasia is that the patients show few signs of comprehending the speech around them."

"Wernicke's areas seems to have a role in looking up words and funneling them to other areas, notably Broca's, that assemble or parse them syntactically."

p. 313: "...brain damage can lead to language deficits that are startlingly specific."

p. 315-16: "Perhaps each word is like a hub that can be positioned anywhere in a large region, as long as its spokes extend to the parts of the brain storing its sound, its syntax, its logic, and the appearance of the things it stands for."

p. 317: "I will present you with a dramatization of what grammatical information processing might be like from a neuron's-eye view....it is simply a demonstration that the language instinct is compatible in principle with the billiard-ball causality of the physical universe, not just mysticism dressed up in a biological metaphor."

p. 322: Pinker discusses how a grammar gene might work.

p. 325: "In other words, they [individuals with SLI, Specific Language Impairment] treat a sound differently when it is a permanent part of a word and when it is added to a word by a rule of grammar."

"Equally interestingly, the impairment does not wipe out any part of grammar completely, nor does it compromise all parts equally."

"You can expect to read about some interesting discoveries about the neurology and genetics of language in the next few years."

p. 332 ff: Re: Comparing an elephant's unique trunk with human being's unique language.

(p. 334) "Language is obviously as different from other animal's communication systems as the elephant's trunk is different from other animal's nostrils."

p. 337: "...the apes had not learned any true ASL signs."

(p. 338) "Actually, what the chimps were really doing was more interesting than what they were claimed to be doing. Jane Goodall, visiting the project remarked...that every one of Nim's so-called signs was familiar to her from her observations of chimps in the wild."

RESPONSE: I agree. This does sound important. It implies that chimpanzees in their natural state communicate with sign language that is to some extent hard-wired. In my mind this lays a good foundation under how human language might have developed.

p. 339: "The chimp's abilities at anything one would want to call grammar were next to nil."

p. 340: "Most of the chimp's object signs can refer to any aspect of the situation with which an object is typically associated."

p. 348: "The interesting question is whether human language is homologous to...anything in the modern animal kingdom."

RESPONSE: If one truly believes in Darwinian evolution it seems to me bizarre to totally discount the language skills of primates because they lack grammar. If human language developed out of simpler brains its roots must lie there just as the trunks of the elephants must be seen as extensions of simpler structures that exist in their relatives.

It seems to me that the challenge is not to demonstrate that other primates can use language the way we do, but to understand the roots out of which language developed. To me it makes sense to believe that human ancestors, early homo sapiens, had a language somewhat more complex than those of trained chimpanzees. At some point the part of the brain responsible for Pinker's "language instinct" began to evolve as those individuals with better brains were favored because of their superior ability to communicate and thereby deal with the challenges of life -- food, shelter, reproduction. Some 200,000 to 40,000 years ago a critical mutation occurred that allowed the species to benefit in ways that vastly increased their abilities to do the things that human culture and civilization depend upon.

p. 350: "...areas in monkey brains [have been discovered] that correspond in location, input-output cabling, and cellular composition to the human language areas....Wernicke's and Broca's areas...."

p. 352: "...sign language [is]...every bit as complex as speech. Also, signing seems to depend on Broca's and Wernicke's areas...."

p. 354: "Babies become human at three months when their larynx descends to a position low in their throats. This gives the tongue the space to move...."

"[A.M.] Lieberman suggests that until modern Homo sapiens, language must have been quite rudimentary."

p. 357: "Darwin noted that his theory made strong predictions and could easily be falsified." They are: The existence of a trait only for the beauty of nature, but whose mates are not able to see it. Second, a complex organ that can exist in no useful intermediate form. Third, an organism that was not produced by an entity that can replicate. Fourth, would be a trait designed to benefit an organism other than the one that caused the trait to appear."

p. 366: "[D.] Bickerton suggests that Homo erectus spoke in protolanguage."

RESPONSE: Since an infant's larynx descends around three months of age, and they don't start speaking till around a year of age this should tell us something about how long ago these traits evolved. The relationship between the descent of the larynx and the development of the language instinct should be guessable by studying modern infants. It is my guess that no species prior to Homo sapiens sapiens' successor, Modern Humans, was able to truly speak. It seems to me that it was the evolution of the language instinct that is the defining event for modern humanity. However, I would guess that speech got better and better and became co-equal with sign language until the evolution of the language instinct made it the superior form of communication. Further, I would guess that this evolution was driven by sexual selection which would explain why it was able to evolve so fast once the basic structures or structure evolved.

p. 369: "The brouhaha raised by the uniqueness of language has many ironies. The spectacle of humans trying to ennoble animals by forcing them to mimic human forms of communication is one."

p. 373: "Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore....The rules conform neither to logic nor to tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all."

RESPONSE: Pinker's depth of understanding about language provides very liberating insights. It's nice to know that all those things that English teachers tried to teach us that sounded dumb, really are!

p. 379: "Some languages are considerate and offer their speakers different words for referential pronouns and for variables. But English is stingy...."

p. 391: "The maven's case about case [I/me] rests on one assumption: if an entire conjunction phrase has a grammatical feature like subject case, every word inside that phrase has to have that grammatical feature, too. But this is just false."

p. 400: "Many prescriptive rules of grammar are just plain dumb and should be deleted from the usage handbook."

p. 404: "Having a language, of course, is part of what it means to be human...."

p. 405: "...the fixed structure of human nature...."

"...a universally structured human mind, the same in all places and times, that would allow people to agree on what is just and true as a matter of objective reality rather than of taste, custom, and self-interest....Modern intellectual life is suffused with a relativism that denies that there is such a thing as a universal human nature, and the existence of a language instinct in any form challenges that denial."

RESPONSE: Now we're getting somewhere! The key issue becomes what are we meaning when we use the term "human nature"? Traditionally human nature has been used to discuss human behaviors like aggression, good/evil, selfishness, etc. However, the foregoing things are not innate and unchangeable, but are rather the product of cultural experience. Current confusion about relativism and how it relates to justice, truth, and objective reality would be a prime concern of a Science of Religion. But until one recognizes HBAURS (Human Beings Are the Ultimate Reference System)and sees that justice and truth are human perceptions not innate in the universe there is little chance of finding clarity on these issues. Nevertheless, underneath these characteristics there are things that are true about all human beings regardless of one's culture, "a universal human nature." It is these things that a Religion of Wisdom based on a Science of Religion would focus on and be concerned about understanding.

p. 405-6: "The doctrine underlying that relativism, the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), began to dominate intellectual life in the 1920s. It was a fusion of an idea from anthropology and an idea from psychology."

"1. Whereas animals are rigidly controlled by their biology, human behavior is determined by culture, an autonomous system of symbols and values. Free from biological constraints, cultures can vary from one another arbitrarily and without limit."

"2. Human infants are born with nothing more than a few reflexes and an ability to learn. Learning is a general-purpose process, used in all domains of knowledge. Children learn their culture through indoctrination, reward and punishment, and role models."

RESPONSE: But as indicated above this relativism is superficial. Underneath it lies a "universal human nature" whose general features are clear, but that requires further study to discover its full nature. The most obvious feature of this universal human nature is that human beings are social beings. In order to live well they must live as part of a community. As a generalization human beings are sexual creatures that require a nurturing love relationship to live well. Human beings are curious they want to learn new things and experience new experiences. Human beings have a yearning for infinity. Although each of these statements can be questioned on particulars, the main task of a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom is to examine these and all the other characteristics of a universal human nature and to clarify how these can be achieved.

p. 407: "I think that our understanding of language offers a more satisfying way of studying the human mind and human nature."

p. 408: "For we can now do justice to the complexity of the human brain, the immediate cause of all perception, learning, and behavior."

RESPONSE: I enthusiastically agree!

p. 409: "...Integrated Causal Model...seeks to explain how evolution caused the emergence of a brain, which causes psychological processes like knowing and learning, which cause the acquisition of the values and knowledge that make up a person's culture. It thus integrates psychology and anthropology into the rest of the natural sciences, especially neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Because of this last connection, they also call it Revolutionary Psychology."

RESPONSE: All of this is important. However, without a Religion of Wisdom based on a Science of Religion there can never be adequate integration of all these factors.

p. 410: "Just as there is a universal design to the computation of grammar, there is a universal design to the rest of the human mind...."

"People are flexible, not because the environment pounds or sculpts their minds into arbitrary shapes, but because their minds constrain so many different modules, each with provisions to learn in its own way."

RESPONSE: And of course it is just this approach that a Science of Religion involves. It postulates a SFLIHM as a unifying principle and says its attributes must be discovered by empirical study.

p. 411: "Though languages are mutually unintelligible, beneath this superficial variation lies the single computational design of Universal Grammar, with the nouns and verbs, phrase structures and word structures, cases and auxiliaries, and so on."

RESPONSE: It would seem that the above would provide a key to unlock the tangle that has prevented the development of talking machines. If Pinker's assumptions are valid (and I think it is very likely that they are) then they should provide the basis to develop computers that truly carry on conversation.

p. 411: "At first glance, the ethnographic record seems to offer a stark contrast. Anthropology in this century has taken us through a mind-broadening fairground of human diversity. But might this carnival of taboos, kinship systems, shamanry, and all the rest be as superficial as the difference between dog and hundt, hiding a universal human nature."

RESPONSE: I would say, of course!

p. 413: "...anthropologists could not understand or live within other human groups unless they shared a rich set of common assumptions with them, what Dan Sperber calls a metaculture."

p. 413: "Inspired by Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG), [Donald E.] Brown has tried to characterize the Universal People (UP). He has scrutinized archives of ethnography for universal patterns underlying the behavior of all documented human cultures....According to Brown the Universal People have the following:" [Pinker includes almost two pages of characteristics similar to the first paragraph given below.]

"Value placed on articulateness. Gossip. Lying. Misleading. Verbal humor. Humorous insults. Poetic and rhetorical speech forms. Narrative and storytelling. Metaphor. Poetry with repetition of linguistic elements and three-second lines separated by pauses. Words for days, months, seasons, years, past, present, future, body parts, inner states (emotions, sensations, thoughts), behavioral propensities, flora, fauna, weather, tools, space, motion, speed, location, spatial dimensions, physical properties, giving, lending, affecting things and people, numbers (at the very least 'one,' 'two,' and 'more than two'), proper names, possessions. Distinctions between mother and father. Kinship categories, defined in terms of mother, father, son, daughter, and age sequence. Binary distinctions, including male and female, black and white, natural and cultural, good and bad. Measures. Logical relations including 'not,' 'and,' 'same,' 'equivalent,' 'opposite,' general versus particular, part versus whole. Conjectural reasoning (inferring the presence of absent and invisible entities from their perceptible traces)."

RESPONSE: The above study would seem to have importance significance to a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom.

p. 416: "Similarity is in the mind of the beholder...."

"The unavoidable implication is that a sense of 'similarity' must be innate. This much is not controversial; it is simple logic."

p. 426: "...probably all of science and mathematics is driven by intuitions coming from innate modules like number, mechanics, mental maps, even law."

RESPONSE: Possibly so, but like everything else about human beings individually and collectively, their ability to learn though innate opens the door to all kinds of things that are not innate. Certainly the specifics of analyzing similarities usually involves a great deal of learning. The same is true for science and mathematics. Another consideration is Alan Cromer's claim that the concepts of objectivity and deductive reasoning were discovered only once in human history. He believes that without these concepts modern science could not have developed. To the degree that Cromer is correct in his assessment, to that degree it is necessary to accept that whatever is innate in the human brain, the environment in which it grows and develops is of vital importance.

And this is why a Religion of Wisdom based on a Science of Religion is so important. It will only be when those things are achieved that individuals can develop their "Wisdom" Potential.

p. 417: "...it is no paradox to say that flexibility in learned behavior requires innate constraints on the mind....the ability of children to generalize to an infinite number of potential sentences depends on their analyzing parental speech using a fixed set of mental categories."

p. 427: "So the language instinct suggests a mind of adapted computational modules rather than the blank slate, lump of wax, or general-purpose computer of the Standard Social Science Model."

RESPONSE: And certainly the model of the brain suggested by Pinker is very congruent with the ideas as currently developed in A NEW FOUNDATION FOR CIVILIZATION.

p. 430: "...the genetic difference between...two randomly picked Swedes is about twelve times as large as the genetic difference between the average of Swedes and the average of Apaches or Warlpiris."

RESPONSE: It is important that we be aware of the foregoing so we can call it to the attention of those who see superficial differences within the species as justifying "us" vs. "them" feelings and actions.

As conceded in response to Pinker's skepticism about George Bernard Shaw's efforts to reform English spelling (Pinker, p. 191), I think he is probably correct in his criticisms. However, I believe there is something to be learned from the phonetic English alphabet developed because of a prize set up in Shaw's will. Shaw left funds in his estate for the development of an efficient phonetic English alphabet. In order to ensure that the new alphabet was usable, a provision of the will required that one of his plays be printed in the alphabet.

In 1962 this alphabet was made public. Shaw's play ANDROCLES AND THE LION was published in 1962 by Penguin Books having parallel texts in Shaw and Roman alphabets on facing pages. This book is no longer in print so a sample using the opening of the play is included in PART D to provide an opportunity to practice and become familiar with it.

3. Listeme: term corresponding to one of the senses of "word." It refers to an element of language that must be memorized because its sound or meaning does not conform to some general rule. All word roots, irregular forms, and idioms are listemes.