This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 31 Aug 2008, by Rudy Garns.
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31 Aug 08
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This pattern-hunger doesn't require even average intelligence, nor is it limited to speech. Deaf children can do the same four levels of pattern discovery by observing body movements -- but only if they are immersed in a fluent sign-language environment, and equally early in the first few years of life.
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a slow convergence in copying errors toward written recipes with a combination of ingredients, amounts, times, temperatures, and assembly procedures that -- with some common-sense tweaking -- will satisfy "good taste."
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flexibility during life (learning and creativity) eventually helps to reward genetic variations leading in a similar functional direction. This form-follows-function principle has been known for a century but it's still poorly appreciated.
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The Baldwin effect allows unrecorded tweaking from flexible behavior to secondarily drag along relevant genes ("recipe items") in the long run; it's Darwinian but at one remove. Thus relevant gene combinations "fill in" behind the behavioral advance.
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"The Baldwinian perspective suggests... that the first stone tools were manufactured by australopithecines, and that the transition to Homo was in part a consequence rather than the cause.... The large brains, stone tools, reduction in dentition, better opposability of thumb and fingers, and more complete bipedality found in post-australopithecine hominids are the physical echoes of a threshold already crossed [in behavior].... Another way to look at this is to say that many of the physical traits that distinguish modern human bodies and brains were ultimately caused by ideas shared down the generations."
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But selection favoring language need not be via the success of language per se
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the nonlanguage task of remembering who owes what to whom sets you up for understanding structured sentences. They carry over into linguistic argument structure (those word categories involving actors, recipients, beneficiaries, and so forth), which provide major clues to understanding a story-like sentence about who did what to whom.
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