http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we4ZzjKxFHM
CB: Definitely. Language and other symbolic thinking is the essence of humans' greater sociality than other species. Language _makes_ human social history as social as it is.
``--And also the other way round: Human social history makes language what it is.'' Miles
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I just listened to this lecture. It was great lecture and an excellent reminder of some of the flawed thinking that goes on about evolution, adaptation, and so forth.
A couple of points. Lewontin after putting down the idea that development as such exists as an unfolding process from genes, then goes on to use the word in the dialectical manner, as a co-interaction between say A and B to form C, in the Hegelian sense of a dialectic. He offers a prize to anyone who knows where some quotation on the consumption-production system he gives came from. It was obviously Marx, but I didn't know where. It was a Berkeley lecture, so somebody yelled out Grundrisse.
So then to apply that concept to societies and languages, we arrive at the idea they co-evolved. But there is no reason to draw the line at Homo sapien sapiens. I prefer to think the concept itself helps define what we call the hominid branching of primates. The bottom theoretical line is society and language co-evolved along with what we call culture and those cultures characterize the hominids. And we can help understand these branches better by looking at them, their eco-systems, diets, and artifacts.
CG