Hacker News Reader

Comment by brador | Hacker News Reader

Existence of language requires 2 mutation trees, one for hearing, one for sound making. Could this be why it took so long?

View on HN

Sign language doesn’t need hearing or sound making!

I suppose language requires a means of communication and someone to communicate to at a minimum. Although actually we think in a language so I guess we don’t need someone to communicate to.

Then maybe language creation just requires the right sort of thoughts?

Edit:

I should have read the article first LOL!

They say as much:

> "Language is both a cognitive system and a communication system," Miyagawa says. "My guess is prior to 135,000 years ago, it did start out as a private cognitive system, but relatively quickly that turned into a communications system."

A good question would be whether sign language can exist at all without spoken language (and its related adaptations) having first existed within the species.

There’s a lot of this in evolution. Look into how possibly unlikely the emergence of eukaryotes was.

The most likely explanation for the Fermi paradox is just that high intelligence is incredibly rare.

Why are we here? Because we are having this conversation over a global digital network. The universe is probably full of bubbling mats of bacteria.

Why is emergence of bacteria not rare? We don't know in sufficient detail how Origin of Life happened to constrain its probability very well.

We of course don't know. But I think the claimed evidence is that bacterial life arrived quite early in Earth's history, perhaps a few hundred million years or less after there were permanent basins of water. So the assumption is that it arrived almost as soon as it possibly could (whereas intelligent life (us) took a few billion years longer to show up).

But hearing and sound making both have many other uses. Jellyfish can "hear", crickets can make noises. I'm guessing we had both of these long before language.

I can't speak for the OP, but I think what he means is the ability to map sounds into a structured analysis of a sequence of words, and the ability to map thoughts into the same kind of structure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com