CO-EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN BRAIN AND LANGUAGE

CO-EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN BRAIN AND LANGUAGE: A DISCUSSION OF HOW NATURAL SELECTION MAY HAVE EFFECTED BOTH THE PHYSIOLOGICAL AND NEUROLOGICAL CHANGES THAT BROUGHT ABOUT LANGUAGE AND SPEECH

During the Middle Ages, scholars accounted for human thought and speech by assigning a central part of the brain as the area where the "straw of raw sensory input got turned into the gold of thought" (Gutin 86). This is where the picture of the steeple and sound of the bell combined to mean "church" in the human brain. These scholars assumed that this area, which they called the common sensorium (where we get the term "common sense")(86), was the sole property of humans -- an idea that has persisted for centuries.

There have been many theories put forth since then as to why and how human speech has evolved and why animals do not seem to have the same capacity for language that humans do. This has been the primary motivation for attempting to teach non-human primates, who share 98% of the same genes that humans do, how to communicate (Hart 437). This paper will examine several different areas of theory regarding the co-evolution of the human brain and language, specifically, Chomsky's "Innateness Theory", how variations in climate may have changed the body through natural selection, how adaptations to complex communications may have spurred natural selection, and physical changes that needed to occur outside of the brain for speech to take place. First, however, there

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symbolically (Gibbons 1251). In response to these unusual cognitive demands, the brain not only enlarged in the prefrontal cortex area, but it also usurped other areas that had previously been used for vision, smell, and specialized vocalizations for the purpose of speech, language, and empathy (1250). This dovetails with research by William H. Calvin, theoretical neurphysiologist, who asserts that, we must seek a neurological basis of the linguistic actor-action-object equivalence relations in the anatomy and physiology of the brain. If language is a system which is superimposed upon another older sensory-motor-regulatory neural system, then we might hope to see the actor-action-object paradigm in the more primitive system (1983 156). Further research has been done in this area and this does seem to be a possibility. McKinney (1998) takes this argument further by pointing out that though brain and body size have both increased between Homo habilis, for example, and modern humans, the brain has increased relatively faster to produce a high brain-to-body ratio. Along with brain growth is growth in complexity, a main component in cognition. For example, it has been demonstrated that the fetal brain growth phase of modern

Category: Science - C