An observation-it seems that the idea of writing has appeared many times. The Maya, and likely the Near Easterners & Chinese stumbled upon the concept without outside input (there is a possibility that the Chinese were influenced by western Eurasia). Chinese writing comes from oracle bones & Near Eastern writing from the clay token accounting system, not quite the original idea that characters developed from pictures. The Inca with their quipu account system would probably have also advanced to literacy. On the other hand, phonetic script, which makes writing more than the preserve of scribes, seems to have been invented just once among the Aramaeans and Phonecians [1]. It spread by cultural diffusion from one end of Eurasia to the other by a chain so that Mongolian, Khmer and the Latin script all share a common ancestor amogn the city-states of Syria [2].

[1] The transition from the more archaic written systems to the alphabet was a quantum leap in efficiency. Likewise, the introduction of the codex, paper and finally the printing press has made universal literacy a possibility. Scribes of Sumeria were more like the rocket scientists of their day, dealers in a rare and precious art that required years of study of arcana.

[2] Mongolian was forced to become Cyrillic, and I now believe it is Latin, but its original script came from the Uighers (who I assume now use Arabic, though I’m not sure).

Catallaxy Files points me to this research:

Men whose ring fingers are much longer than their index fingers tend to have irregular, masculine features, such as the singer Lyle Lovett.

But men whose index and ring fingers are roughly the same length are more likely to have symmetrical faces, such as the even-featured Brad Pitt.

In women the opposite was found. Those with index fingers longer than ring fingers tend to have asymmetrical faces.

Like everyone else, I’m looking at my fingers now.

Is it just a coincidence that Bush announced his intention to send us to off on a holy war on St. Patrick’s Day? Maybe W sees himself as an inspired missionary to drive the snakes out of the Middle East.

God save us from the squalor of war.

Many updates on SARS from Randall Parker.

NOT-TODO:
Sex with Cantonese women….

Posted by razib at 04:04 AM

Marc Miyake of the blog Amritas (on our permalinks) had an article up on FrontPage yesterday blasting Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. His thesis is that UG is just another intellectual virus of the post-modern left. In it he quotes another of our favorite bloggers, Joanne Jacobs, who relates her school-day dissatisfaction with old Noam as well:

Structural linguistics was required for a degree in English at Stanford. I put it off till my last semester; finally I had to take the class. It consisted of uncritical worship of Noam Chomsky. I kept disrupting class by asking questions: Why do we believe this is true? Just because Chomsky says so? How do we know he’s right? Why is this class required?

So how about it, is UG the new Freudism, just another high falutin academic fad, or is the majority linguistic paradigm really deserving of its special regard within university hallways? Marc is adamant that it is the former:

Prior to Chomsky, linguists engaged in a lot of data collection to understand the diversity of human language. I’m vehemently anti-PC, but in this case, I think the word ‘diversity’ is justified. There’s a lot out there, and someone’s got to catalog it.

However, Chomsky rejected this approach. He wanted to look into something deeper’ (academese for ‘pretentious and nonexistent’). So he invented something called ‘universal grammar’ which is somehow programmed into us at birth.

Unfortunately this is all highly misleading. Tailored for a political audience of a certain persuasion[1], Marc would like to convey the story in a way that makes Chomsky out to be the left-wing baddie (that the audience is already prepared to think of him as) who subverts decent American science. In Marc’s moralized version the ‘good’ linguists were going about their proper duties collecting all kinds of data, while the ‘bad’ linguist decides to self-indulgently taint the field with PoMo gibberish (something FrontPage readers already outraged by Chomsky’s radical politics will be eager to accept). But what Frontpage readers won’t know is that the role Chomsky played was exactly the opposite- it was the gibberish he helped to contradict. Despite his poor reputation among modern conservatives, it should be made clear that Noam Chomsky was among the first to raise a serious challenge to the hegemony of the Boas school of thinking which denied the concept of a human nature and taught the infinite malleability of man.

What Marc doesn’t tell you is that all the other linguists, like so many at the time, were radical environmentalists (Skinnerists) who believed in the infinite variety of human language- that there was no form that human language couldn’t deviate from. Chomsky wasn’t being pretentious when he volunteered to “look deeper”, he was looking for the answer to pertinent question: Is language infinitely changeable, or does human language have fundamental commonality? Chomsky is a scientific hero b/c he dared to stand up, at a time when almost no one else dared, and question if an essential part of being human was innate.[2] I’ll let Steve Pinker summarize (far better than I could) the theoretical strength of Chomsky’s theory of language:

Language is a human instinct. All societies have complex language, and everywhere the languages use the same kinds of grammatical machinery like nouns, verbs, auxiliaries, and agreement. All normal children develop language without conscious effort or formal lessons, and by the age of three they speak in fluent grammatical sentences, outperforming the most sophisticated computers. Brain damage or congenital conditions can make a person a linguistic savant while severely retarded, or unable to speak normally despite high intelligence. All this has led many scientists, beginning with the linguist Noam Chomsky in the late 1950’s, to conclude that there are specialized circuits in the human brain, and perhaps specialized genes, that create the gift of articulate speech.[3]

Acquiring language is not a normal mental problem. Everyone sees small children pick up language so effortlessly that they might not realize how impossible a problem it is. No one would expect a three-year old to master calculus, it couldn’t be done! But when a three year old learns grammar he is doing something much more complicated, and w/o effort. Children must learn the rules of their native grammar (whatever it might be) through a limited set of sample sentences that they hear. This limited information is mathematically insufficient for determining grammatical principles (Linguists working on a language for decades cannot figure out what a small child does in a few short years). This is what is called “The paradox of language acquisition”. The normal computational function of the brain is insufficient to explain how children are able to do this- UG is the best current solution. Marc isn’t much interested in providing an alternative in his article though. He continues:

There are innumerable problems with [UG]. For starters:

Where did this ‘universal grammar’ come from, and how did it end up becoming part of our biology? Not many Chomskyans are interested in evolutionary biology. ‘Universal grammar’ simply IS. (I myself suspect that there may be a universal grammar sans scare quotes, but I doubt that it has much in common with Chomskyan ‘universal grammar’.)

The claim that, “Not many Chomskyans are interested in evolutionary biology.” is an utter falsehood. Evolutionary biologists_love_the idea of universal grammar. Evolutionary biologists swear by universal grammar. Tooby and Cosmides essentially developed their evolutionary psychological model off of Chomsky’s idea. Instead of one undifferentiated mass, scientists began, largely thanks to Chomsky, to imagine the brain as a sort of Swiss army knife, with many specialized sub-systems adapted for unique problems; and in many ways this view of the brain has found powerful evidentiary support. Marc confuses viable questions as damning critiques. It isn’t necessary to know any of the things Marc asks before UG can be useful as a theoretical solution (although they would certainly enrich the theory). In fact many evolutionary biologists are searching for those answers, and with progressive success. Theoretical Biologist Martin A. Nowak (Princeton) is one important scientist who is looking into the role of language in human evolution (and the role of evolution in human language). The beginning of the answer to Marc’s questions can be found in Nowak’s 2001 paper in the journal Science titled the Evolution of Universal Grammar.

[Part II later. . .]

[1] Marc got all sorts of props for this article over at the FreeRepublic, which is world-famous for its concern with issues relating to neurological theories of syntax 😛

[2] Similarly, around the same time, it was widely assumed that facial expressions could vary arbitrarily and w/o limit until psychologist Paul Ekman demonstrated that facial emotions had continuity across all cultures. Don’t ask me how, but somehow it’s “programmed into us at birth”.

[3] Seven years after Pinker penned that introduction in The New Republic the first of such language genes was found.

You gotta check this out. This girl is insane!

Seems like the Quebecky-Frenchies are going Protestant [1] and dabbling with eugenics:

Quebecers who have a child, within five years of finishing college or university, would be eligible for a 50-per-cent refund of their student loans if the Parti Québécois is re-elected April 14, Premier Bernard Landry announced yesterday.

The Parti Québécois, for those of you who don’t care, is the nationalist party up there in Franco-America. It has a traditionally social democratic slant when you subtract the hard-core Anglophobia (just like the Scottish National Party in fact).

I found this via appalled Latinist Evan McElravy.

I want to cut to the chase-does anyone know of a study that has surveyed how much money we would have to push toward a smart woman to make her agree to get pregnant and pop out a kid with decent diction and a non-sexually predatory reproductive strategy?

For my fellow wack-jobs who have no sense of politically correct decency or ostrich-head-in-the-sand-syndrome, could you postulate an equation that would spit out appropriate remuneration for an individual having a child that is proportional to some measure of g?

How about this:
y = x/(IQ percentile) – x

This way people of average intelligence would get a minimum standard of living, while those at the right end of the bell curve would make bank. And let us not speak of those to the left….

{Please take this all with a grain of salt-I was putting on my social engineer’s cap-when bareheaded I tend to frown upon government intervention with anything copulation-associated}

[1] The eugenics programs were resisted pretty well by Catholic nations-they went farthest in Protestant countries, or nations with dominant Protestant majorities.

I visit the Brainboard 3 fairly regularly as it sometimes has quite fascinating discussion on cognitive science and IQ-related issues. It’s one of the few sites besides GNXP which takes a lively interest in such matters, though without the HBD aspect. However, there appears to be some quite knowledgeable people there and I’ve noticed that the usual suspects (Eysenck, Rushton, et al) get cited there from time to time. The regular posters are currently talking about average IQ of Indian Institute of Technology students and if you scroll down further there’s quite a long thread on whether and how you can estimate the IQ of talk show hosts (!) based on the idea that g is correlated with working memory.

The_Alpha_Male emailed me today about something we had been talking about earlier-why are some groups more hirsute then others? He watched the ice age documentary on human evolution on The Discovery Channel (standard PC pap masquarading the more realist implications) and it mentioned that hair might have been detrimental when it became wet and frozen (ergo Northeast Asians are not very hairy). Of course, that would imply that northern Europeans should be less hairy than their southron brethren or the peoples of the Levant. I invite you to do some research and come back with what you find [1]. OK, you get my point, something is fishy in this explanation.

Anyone hear of anything more plausible? I think it probably has to do with neoteny, as in my experience people continue to get more & more body hair as they age (past puberty obviously). I think this is analogous to northern Europeans who tend to lose their blondeness after puberty.

[1] Woe unto he who fetishes hairy wide-hipped Chinese women….

I hear people talking about “International Law,” all the time, they should change it to Civilized Norms-because no one bleats about “International Law” where savagery reigns-to whom much is given, much is required….

Posted by razib at 02:22 PM