Apes with Tales: Why the Humans?

By Dimitri Philippides

No shaman would have predicted that the pleasure and comfort of sharing a fable around a campfire in a cave some hundred-thousand years ago would be such a revolutionary act, a game-changing emergence in the fascinating play of life. Our primitive ancestors would never have foreseen the complex societies to be invented, neither the discontentedness that still drives their change. Humans’ audacious shaping of their environment for convenience led them to expand their perceived domain beyond their planet. Today’s blatant and real question which has to be answered is whether the human cultural ‘blanket’ is large enough to cover the needs of our species. In this work, our basic qualities that brought us thus far and on which we have to rely, for an optimistic outcome from our quandary, are explored.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jul 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528998550

Dimitri Philippides

Dimitri Philippides holds two degrees, one from Athens University and another from Cambridge University. He has spent his professional life in academia and industry. He currently lives in Athens with his wife and two children.

Book preview

Prologue

When scientists try to study an obscure component of human nature or define the efficacy of a human endeavour, be that ordinary or unusual, they are always aware of the context that fostered the emergence of this new biological property or that innovative cultural trait, of course within the permutations of the planetary environment.

It is difficult not to assign a moral value to the new findings, attributing to them and explaining some good or not so good human propensities. Thus, morality’s obtrusive head emerges from essays such as the one you are about to read, unless you have already regretted having picked it up.

Well, I must confess it has been a running battle.

To add to your early misgivings, I might as well confess from the onset that I have failed to methodologically identify the mechanism or step that separates non-fictive from fictive language, although, I have indicated a plausible origin described in the Appendix II. On the other hand, insofar the impact the fictive language had on the ascent of man I feel it will be strongly delineated in this book.

Well, although the evidence I’ve gathered is mostly circumstantial, I hope you shall find the fiction as fascinating as I have.

ΔΦ

Chapter 1

Intro

Hominidae was a family of small to average size animals who, through anatomical peculiarities and societal structures, mastered tool making and fire control and thus expanded its territories from Africa to the most diverse environments around the globe. Homo sapiens came to be through various evolutionary paths sprouted within the Hominid Family. By the time of his appearance in his present modern form, he had already achieved an outstanding level of group cooperation and offspring upbringing as well as refined tool making and speech usage to such a degree that more organised hunting techniques and more complex social organisation were achieved. This language evolution was endowed with operational, educational and also entertaining aspects. All of these rendered group cohesions and encouraged cooperation – a dominance trait never seen before on the planet. The fictive aspect of his language gave rise to a virtual cosmos full of symbols that seemed to offer explanations for all life-threatening or rewarding phenomena. It may also be seen as a slow beginning of widening the fissure that existed between H. sapiens and his more primitive predecessors, akin to tectonic plate separation. The gap widened and became an ocean separating his purely biological self from whatever he is today.

The major non-biological emergent quality of H. sapiens seems to be myth creation, which apparently co-evolved in harmony with his prosocial prefrontal cortex² and in good resonance with the limbic system³ of his brain.i These, in turn, encouraged the formation of larger groups which afforded enhanced survivability mainly through cooperation. This eventually, climate allowing, led to the domestication of plants and animals which in turn led to larger groups, which in turn led to more efficient production modes that led to larger villages, then to cities and then to empires etc. etc. To this day, several cultural constructs have emerged that both describe and hence help exploit the world around H. sapiens and offer him tools for managing his social constructs. From politics to genetics, from chemistry to religion and psychology to economics, we have helped ourselves to overpopulate the planet, eliminate hunger, cure disease and look at the stars and ourselves with a measure of understanding. These H. sapiens’ endeavours proved to be both useful and effective despite being based only on descriptive concepts which rarely, if ever, sought the fundamental principles that these emergent constructs percolated from. We were happy that our methods worked even if sometimes we didn’t know exactly how. The introspective study of these emergent constructs was traditionally trusted for explanation to divine intent or at best to philosophy.

The core of this meddler’s onion was the fictive language expressing abstract ideas probably initially embedded in maternal anxiety, gossip, fairy tales or bragging. An additional value must have been the introduction of the reassuring element of deities, which are present in all H. sapiens early cultural constructs. Deities, at their best, rendered an element of societal cohesion, planning and protection; values greatly appreciated by those who must have felt their existence relentlessly threatened from birth.

As with any evolving complex system, the above emergent constructs overlapped, interacted and utilised their interconnections giving rise to new emergent structures of increasing complexity, such as a variety of cultures, a multiplicity of political systems, a plethora of religions and a veritable galaxy of art forms.

Given time, H. sapiens went through multiple onion skins of emergent phenomena, each one elaborating on previous ones as well as adding new ones. Periodically, the interactive plethora of emergent phenomena created system multipliers; revolutions such as the cognitive, the scientific and the industrial ones. The significance of these revolutions was not just a quantitative improvement of the H. sapiens lot but they also qualitatively changed his life and his phenotypical impact over his immediate as well as remote environment.

The language’s flexibility enabled H. sapiens to think, articulate and actualise the fiction based cultural constructs. This ability to create wishful stories and then make them happen, or at least make something useful, pleasing, destructive or funny is something rare and should be cherished but more ambitiously, studied and even mathematically modelled. Because that’s what we do, that’s who we are, and in any case, we are the only game in town. We do indeed appreciate our contributions and we are happy to pay for a good book, a song, an actor, a soccer team not to mention universities, hospitals, armies etc. Regrettably, the flipside is the suffering attached to any inadequate or inappropriate fiction. Once the nature of this ability is comprehended, H. sapiens should exercise it with considerable responsibility since he may already be reaching the limits of his box.

A compass would be nice.

---

²This brain region has been implicated in planning, complex cognitive behaviour and personality expression, decision making, and moderating social behaviour.↩︎

³ The limbic system is the portion of the brain that deals with three key functions: emotions, memories and arousal (or stimulation). ↩︎

Chapter 2

Ab Initio

We know that present-day non-human primates, although they share with us a common ancestor, they do not talk, albeit they have considerable social skills and can communicate their feelings and intents.

Trying to formulate the basic assumptions on which we shall base our hypothesis, we have to solicit several disciplines in order to describe, and possibly eventually estimate, the emergence of fictive language. To study the resulting explosive cultural dominance of Homo sapiens would necessitate fishing in several scientific buckets, some of them quite respected, such as psycholinguistics, coevolution of language with articulatory systems, prefrontal cortex specialization to social stimuli, spoken language as a result of behaviourismii and some controversial ones such as the innateness hypothesis,iii an expression coined by Hilary Putnam, an American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, who targeted linguistic nativism and specifically, the views of Noam Chomsky that children are born with knowledge of the fundamental principles of grammar. Whether the latter one is valid and has resulted from a favourable mutation or from an adaptation of skills evolved for other purposes remains unresolved. For recent hypotheses on the evolution of language based on primate brains and non-invasive scanning techniques, please read Appendix II. As for the fascinating and unexpected phenomenon that is called emergence, please refer to Appendix III. In any case, the conceptual areas of both complexity and emergence have to be approached with quantification in mind if they are to lead to models.

The origins of complexity are currently being studied in many different areas of science, ranging from chemistryiv to biology.v The general study of complex systems, which started in earnest in the sixties with the study of dissipative systems,vi synergeticsvii and chaos,viii is trying to identify general mechanisms that give rise to complexity. These mechanisms include evolution, co-evolutionix and self-organisationx as well as level formation.xi These mechanisms might prove insightful and contribute to the explanation of the origins and evolution of language. Identifying property categories of the constituent systems in our hypothesis would help to classify the type of complexity we are addressing.

A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a novel and unexpected outcome of some known properties, presumably a product of their interaction but different from them.xii Emergent properties are not identical with, reducible to, or deducible from properties of the substrate system they spring from. The variety of ways in which this independence requirement can be expressed lead to variant types of emergence. Consequently, there is a need for further classification of the cascade of emergent constructs that the H. sapiens mind keeps producing. It is likely that there is a context depended quality of any such emergent phenomenon.

Attempting to extrapolate all the factors that could have played a role in the appearance of fictive language in H. sapiens, there are several obvious considerations we should address: The co-evolution of the prefrontal cortex (PFC or some parts of it) and fictive language; was the emergence of fiction an explosive event? Probably not; the relation of the neural pathways of fiction and those of lying should be tested; we have also to consider selfish fiction and altruistic fiction. In addition, we have to examine morality and morality con-aversion; we have to address the fact that although present-day non-human primates have PFC and socialise, they don’t speak, hence the evolution of articulatory systems, that is, the structures such as tongue, lips, jaw, vocal cords and other speech organs (the articulators) that make speech sounds must be examined.

The main hypothesis is that language is an emergent phenomenon.xi The emergence of language and its fictive aspect can only be a mass phenomenon and it is realised through interaction between different agents. Since language is the medium of communication, regarding a single individual as a carrier of it is nonsense.⁴ Fiction and its possible consequent cultural constructs can also be viewed as opportunistically emergent when physiological conditions are present and appropriate environmental conditions are concurrent with social conditions. In any case, a novel idea may percolate from any individual brain but it requires the attendance, comprehension and acquiescence of others in order to be mimicked and thus multiplied on its way to become a construct.

Many linguists argue that a representation system is only a language when it also features a complex syntax. In experiments where robotic agents and software agents were set up to originate language and meaning, Luc Steels, the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, showed that although initially there was no syntax, there was a steadily increasing repertoire of adaptive lexicon, phonology and meaning. All these are the ingredients required for a protolanguage.xiii Although syntax is obviously important, these other aspects of language are just as crucial and no theory of the origins of language is complete without explaining how they might evolve. Nevertheless, the origin of syntax is an essential part of the problem. It has been hypothesised that that level formation may be the key towards solving it. Level formation is very common in biosystems. It occurs when there are a number of independent units which due to co-occurrence develop a symbiotic relationship eventually making the units no longer independent. Level formation has for example been used to explain the formation of cellsxiv and the origin of chromosomes which group individual genes.xv In the case of the cell, we assume that there could have been, initially before the formation of cellular membranes, free-floating organisms and structures which came to depend on each other, for example, because one organism produces products for another one or destroys lethal products. Gradually, the relationship between these organisms and structures becomes so strong that they give up some of their independence to become a fixed part of the whole. For example, mitochondria are organisms with their own genetic information that used to be independent but are now so much intertwined with the cell that they need the genetic information in the nucleus to duplicate. Thus a new unit emerges at a new level.

It is not an unusual practice to use natural systems that we have some understanding of to illuminate functions of as yet largely unknown systems, hunting for similarities.

All prerequisites for the emergence of a fictive language had come to be by the time H. sapiens had become an accomplished hunter-gatherer: societal structures and prefrontal cortex, (actually their co-evolution), fair-play perception aka injustice aversion, language, lying, gossiping, cooperation, singing, dancing, descriptive art (cave paintings), theory of mind, abstract thought. The relevance of all the above to group survival through societal cohesion and cooperation enhancement we take as evident.

My hypothesis