From Bacteria to Bach and Back

When you can’t get her name out of your mind, is it always capitalized, or pronounced with a sigh?

Can your children read road maps as easily as you do or have they become dependent on GPS to guide them? How concerned should we be that we are dumbing ourselves down by our growing reliance on intelligent machines?

Perhaps a gesture language rather like the signing languages of the Deaf came first, with vocalizations used for attention-grabbing and emphasis (Hewes 1973; Corballis 2003, 2009). Speaking without gesturing is a difficult feat for many people, and it might be that gesturing and vocalizing have traded places, with gestures now playing the embellish

Competence without comprehension is as ubiquitous in human life as in animals, bacteria, and elevators, but we tend to overlook this possibility and assign appreciation of the rationales of successful human action to the clever actors involved. This is not surprising. After all, we tend to attribute more understanding to wolves and birds and honey

There seem to be two competing orientations, the first-person point of view of the Defenders and the third-person point of view of the scientists, much like the two ways of seeing the philosophers’ favorite illusions, the duck-rabbit and the Necker cube. You can’t adopt both orientations at once.

The most influential argument for a dedicated, innate Language Acquisition Device (or LAD) (Chomsky 1965, p. 25) is the “poverty of the stimulus” argument, which claims that a human infant simply doesn’t hear enough grammatical language (and ungrammatical language corrected—trial and error) in the first few years of life to provide the data require

How could a slow, mindless process build a thing that could build a thing that a slow mindless process couldn’t build on its own?

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t. —Emerson M. Pugh, The Biological Origin of Human Values

Asking better and better questions is the key to refining our search for solutions to our “mysteries,” and this refinement is utterly beyond the powers of any languageless creature. “What is democracy?” A dog will never know the answer, to be sure, but it will never even understand the question. We can understand the questions, which radically chan