BuddhaThu wrote:

Do you really mean "trade off" instead of "bad effects of a necessary
trade off?"

If there are bad effects what good effects would be necessary for
natural selection to chose these traits?

Could there be pressure both ways tugging and pulling the larynx, and
for that matter any structure or trait in our bodies, this way and that
till it snaps into its current place?

To begin with logically, you have not made it a contradiction for the
larynx to move in particular ways but have presented negative theories
as to why such selection may be resisted.

But you are proposing a theory of the counter-intuitive nature of some
body parts. In evolutionary theory there is the subject of bodily
imperfections, bottlenecks and odd ways of doing things biologically
when there are easier biological ways. I

Another implication of your position is that you can determine that a
slow progression of small unrelated mutations could not be herded by
natural selection into full human speech abilities. Can you weaken that
theory by proposing more than particular complication selection must
traverse in the changing structure?

As the use of larger and more precise repertories of meaningful sounds
began to pay off in enhanced reproductive success, the portion of our
ancestors' respiratory tract known as the pharynx became uniquely
flexible and elongated. In all other mammals the pharynx is small
because the larynx, or upper trachea, is positioned close to the base
of the skull, leads almost directly to the rear of the nasal cavity,
and gets shut off from the mouth during breathing. Because of
lengthening of the pharynx in humans, the food passage and the air
passage cross each other, with the strange consequence noted by Charles
Darwin that "every particle of food and drink which we swallow has to
pass over the orifice of the trachea, with some risk of falling into
the lungs." Indeed, "swallowing the wrong way," which can be fatal for
us but is impossible in other mammals, is a cost we pay for having deep
throats. But as I've already indicated, the benefits of this
arrangement outweigh its dangers, for possession of an enlarged pharynx
is what makes it possible for us to form the vowel sounds "ee," "ay,"
and "ooo," which are essential components of all human languages.

OUR KIND by Marvin Harris 1989
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060919906/

Accourding to Harris above it may also alow more diverse pronunciations
and articulations. Obviously anyone born with any vocal advantage by
having even a slightly lower larynx may gain more reproductive
advantage by access to more resources of social communications, leaving
more offspring and spreading the trait further through the species.

Grooming and picking off lice is a social activity but each primate
takes their turn at grooming and getting groomed. Therefore you are
lowering or diminishing the distribution of comunicability
fallaciously.

All talk and small talk probably have some hint of an ongoing and
constant "status advertisement."

Plus your theory doesn't negate the possibility that even if small talk
about nothing at all were possible that it couldn't be selected for
some reason or other. But you are right to claim that if some talk is
not of cooperation and coordination then it is about something else but
what does this negate? Small talk is probably some sort of
advertisement like hours of bird chirpin' gibberish.

Lice picking is for picking lice and most all primates get their turn
at this style of communication. Beside the lice pickin' theory is just
the most popular right now. Wilson has a cool theory to.

Points from the text below the ######### line;

"The traditional wisdom of linguistics is that language originated in
the form of pure symbolism and was added to the bestial sounds and
gestures of the ancestral prehumans. Animal communication is
fundamentally iconic; it imitates the object or action that is intended
or desired."

"Mary LeCron Foster, a comparative linguist, has proposed that human
language originated by a ritualization process of the movements of the
mouth and tongue and of primitive sounds. Like many contemporary
students of human evolution, she believes that true human language is
only about 50,000 years old and arose in conjunction with art and the
rapid evolution of the materials-based culture."

"In the minds of the Paleolithic inventors of language, the way the
mouth is moved and the parts of the air tract utilized might have been
directly linked to the meaning of the sound. For example, the m sound
is articulated by pressing the lips tightly together while air is
forced through the nasal passage and the vocal cords are vibrated. This
sound is used in words across many languages to denote surfaces that
touch, press, and hold together; words that mean crushing or resting
against; and words that refer to fasting, chewing, and swallowing.
Familiar examples include mouth (English), mano (hand in Spanish), and
main (hand in French). Sounds created well back of the lips and nose,
in other words with the tongue, teeth, or alveolar ridge, typically
have more internal meanings, such as the experiencing of emotion."

"· The isomorphism rule: when counting a group of objects, one and
only one number (or, more precisely, enumeration tag) may be assigned
to each object.

· The stable-ordering rule: numbers must be applied in an order that
does not change from one count to another.

· The cardinality rule: the last enumeration tag in a counting series
signifies a cardinal number representing the quantity of the objects or
process measured.

· The order-irrelevance rule: the assignment of objects to numbers,
although fixed for the direction of a count, is arbitrary; in other
words, the order of enumeration is irrelevant."

###################################################

Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson - 1983
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/

Sapientization is a word used by students of human evolution to label
the essential changes that led to Homo sapiens from Homo erectus. The
exact timetable for this final step is still unknown. The process began
sometime during the long tenure of eredus and might even have roots in
the evolution of the ancestral Homo habilis. But on the final products
of sapientization there can be little disagreement: language, symbolic
thinking, and the deepening of long-term memory to store the vast
requisite information. Experts on classification have linked the three
species of Homo together on the basis of anatomical distinctions, a
sharing of certain properties of dentition and jaw structure, and the
enlarged brain with its expanded association areas. They have clustered
the man-apes together as a second genus, Australopithecus, and linked
them with Homo to form the family Hominidae. This arrangement is a
useful aid for remembering anatomical similarities. It is also an
absurd distortion. If the epigenetic rules and outward behavioral
traits were used instead of gross anatomy, and then if the probable
microscopic distinctions in brain structure were added, Homo sapiens
would almost certainly be ranked as a taxonomic family by itself. Homo
habilis and Homo erectus might also be justifiably separated from the
man-apes as a second family.

The succession of three whole mammalian families within three or four
million years, as suggested in this arrangement, represents an
extremely swift passage of evolution. One of the pivotal events was the
invention of words, sounds that summon concepts of long-term memory.
The concepts are in turn the knowledge structures of the mind by which
images are formed and shuffled to expand the stream of consciousness.

#############################################

The traditional wisdom of linguistics is that language originated in
the form of pure symbolism and was added to the bestial sounds and
gestures of the ancestral prehumans. Animal communication is
fundamentally iconic; it imitates the object or action that is intended
or desired. The nestling songbird begs food by thrusting its head up
and opening its beak wide, while the rhesus monkey threatens by staring
and slapping its hands on the ground. More sophisticated signals evolve
in animal communication by the process of ritualization, during which
the original movement lose their original function and become
increasingly conspicuous and stereotyped. The male of the European
cormorant, a crow-sized fishing bird, courts the females by flashing
his wings and raising his head in a garish imitation of the takeoff
leap. African chameleons defend their territories with a striking
display in which the sides of the body are pumped in and out in
exaggerated respiratory movements. At the same time, the head is wagged
and jerked in ritualized thrusts. Often the ritualization process has
been carried so far that the original function is no longer clear. In
such cases the communication superficially resembles the pure symbolism
that supposedly characterizes all human speech.

Mary LeCron Foster, a comparative linguist, has proposed that human
language originated by a ritualization process of the movements of the
mouth and tongue and of primitive sounds. Like many contemporary
students of human evolution, she believes that true human language is
only about 50,000 years old and arose in conjunction with art and the
rapid evolution of the materials-based culture. Although modern
languages change over a period of only a few thousand years in the
construction of their words and phrasing, the basic one-syllable sounds
composing the words change much less rapidly. By examining the branches
of the great Indo-European family of languages (Germanic, Italic,
Hellenic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian), linguists have deduced the ancestral
tongue, proto-Indo-European, that was spoken in the third millennium
B.C. A family tree of the words exists, and the most persistent sounds
can be identified. These primitive elements do appear to be at least
partially iconic. In the minds of the Paleolithic inventors of
language, the way the mouth is moved and the parts of the air tract
utilized might have been directly linked to the meaning of the sound.
For example, the m sound is articulated by pressing the lips tightly
together while air is forced through the nasal passage and the vocal
cords are vibrated. This sound is used in words across many languages
to denote surfaces that touch, press, and hold together; words that
mean crushing or resting against; and words that refer to fasting,
chewing, and swallowing. Familiar examples include mouth (English),
mano (hand in Spanish), and main (hand in French). Sounds created well
back of the lips and nose, in other words with the tongue, teeth, or
alveolar ridge, typically have more internal meanings, such as the
experiencing of emotion.

As languages evolved, most words lost their direct representational
content and became progressively ritualized until their iconic
beginnings were entirely erased, just as in the evolution of the most
advanced forms of animal communication. At that point the resemblance
stops. Where animals are locked into the particular repertory of their
species, note by note and gesture by gesture, human beings invent
signals and freight them with arbitrary meaning. The primitive
languages of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers might have been conjured
from iconic visions of the mouth and vocal apparatus. But an act of
will, a mere whimsy, can produce a neologism that severs the ties with
the archaic sounds.

Even so, the considerable maneuvering room of the human mind does not
leave it entirely free to create any language with equal ease. The mind
is guided by epigenetic rules, powerful enough so that the combined
languages of the world, and probably all the languages that could
evolve with any ease in the future, form only a microscopic subset of
the verbal languages that can be imagined. The rules forbid entry into
most of this theoretical domain. The child-in-the-maze, to return to
our original metaphor, is guided far more quickly to the adult tongue
than could be the case if every sound and grammatical rule were equally
easy to learn.

Since Noam Chomsky argued the evidence for the existence of innate
grammatical rules in the late 1950s, researchers have made substantial
progress in identifying such constraints and charting their effects on
language. Much of the information accumulated by the linguists is
technical in nature, but it boils down to the special ways in which
children acquire knowledge about their own language and transfer it
into the coherent sentences of speech ("transformational grammar").
These procedures are the equivalent of what we have been calling the
epigenetic rules of mental development, with special reference to the
ways words are strung together to create meaning.

The constraints on language are linked to even deeper rules that affect
our conception of reality. Philosophers use the word ontology to refer
to beliefs concerning what can and cannot exist. Recently this most
abstract of all inquiries has been turned into a scientific pursuit.
Psychologists such as Frank C. Keil have begun to investigate the
precise mental steps by which the human perception of reality is
created. They have focused their attention on the predicates of
language-those propositions that appear sensible, are automatically
acceptable, and hence are used to build up long-term memory. For
example, the predicate "is honest" may be applied to Napoleon. Whether
or not the emperor was in fact honest, and whether all the time or just
once in a while, the proposition at least makes sense. Beneath that
predicate can be placed subordinate predicates that seem to follow as
consequences or special conditions, such as "is reliable," "is
sincere," and so on. In contrast, the predicate "is geometric" is not
permissible. It cannot be linked at any level with the "is honest"
hierarchy without violating the sense of reality. This leads to the
M-constraint of human thought, first proposed by the philosopher Fred
Sommers. Stated concisely, the rule is that two predicates cannot be
linked to three terms if each predicate has a term that makes sense for
it alone. Thus the following combination is forbidden:

\-the chair / is made by hand \-the bat / was dead \-the cow

Faced with such intolerable ambiguity, the mind rushes to sever the
M-structure. It breaks up the predicates and terms to form alternative
branching trees that do not take the M-shape. When Keil tested 300
English- and Spanish-speaking children, he found that almost all had
the M-constraint. As people grow older, they build longer and more
complex trees of predicates that serve as the scaffolding of their
thought. Without understanding the process explicitly, they follow the
M-constraint.

In some way that neither philosophers nor scientists have fathomed, the
adoption of discrete symbols has also led to deep constraints in the
way quantity is envisioned; and from this sym-bolization of quantity, a
human mathematics has been formulated. From the earliest age at which
such matters can be examined, about two and a half years, children
acquire four regularities in counting from which they never deviate the
rest of their lives:

· The isomorphism rule: when counting a group of objects, one and
only one number (or, more precisely, enumeration tag) may be assigned
to each object.

· The stable-ordering rule: numbers must be applied in an order that
does not change from one count to another.

· The cardinality rule: the last enumeration tag in a counting series
signifies a cardinal number representing the quantity of the objects or
process measured.

· The order-irrelevance rule: the assignment of objects to numbers,
although fixed for the direction of a count, is arbitrary; in other
words, the order of enumeration is irrelevant.

Other intelligent species may not necessarily think of quantity in just
the same way as human beings. They are especially likely to differ
during the earlier stages of their mental evolution. To take one of a
vast series of imaginary cases, consider the eidylons during the
hunter-gatherer period of their evolution. Counting is performed only
under strict conditions and as part of a ritual. The rules are
genetically fixed (recall that the eidylons can transmit only one
culture). As hunters bring in game, the prey are counted by the shamans
according to the following procedure: the dead animals are enumerated
in strict order according to size, with the number 1 tagging the
largest, the number 2 denoting the next largest, and so on. Thus the
order-irrelevance rule of human beings is violated. If two animals
appear to be the same size, they receive the same number, violating the
isomorphism rule. In order to serve the deep religious belief of the
unity of nature, a group of the smallest prey are set aside and counted
in reverse order, violating the cardinality rule. The arithmetic of the
primitive eidylons is built solidly into their epigenetic rules of
mental development; they would have great difficulty coping with the
human way. Nevertheless, their procedures are highly advantageous for
them, just as ours are for us.

This fantasy shows that it is not at all difficult to imagine species
of mind elsewhere in the universe that work very differently from the
human mind and with greater or lesser efficiency. The human brain is
constructed to handle language, reality, and quantity in a special
human way and not in some other. The fact that much of this
particularity appears self-evident to the very minds operating within
its constraints does not diminish the sense of wonder we should feel by
distancing ourselves from our idiosyncrasy long enough to see it as a
product of organic evolution.

The origin of the epigenetic rules of higher reasoning was
sa-pientization itself: it constituted the final stage of human
evolution, which may have occurred as recently as the past fifty to one
hundred thousand years. The purely Homo sapiens epigenetic rules were
added to the surviving processes and regularities of mental development
that had evolved in Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and still earlier
ancestral species. This fundamental base includes incest avoidance,
color perception, the patterns of mother-infant bonding, facial
expressions, and the other forms of cognition and social behavior
described earlier.

The modern mind is a biological palimpsest. Over thousands of
generations the ancient script of epigenetic rules was partially erased
to make room for the new. By careful examination of the sometimes
jumbled pieces, using techniques from several scientific disciplines,
it should be possible both to read the contemporary message and to
reconstruct the history that produced it.

Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson - 1983
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/

We can sufficiently talk without a "pronounced art of talking."

There may be hope for some of Wittgenstein's philosophy but science
after him has put some of it in doubt, even though he devised many ways
to converse about these topics.

Even if the meaning of a bird's chirping is nonsense it can still
constantly advertise place, status, mood, etc... without saying
anything.

You know how good friends sometimes will bring up totally off the wall
topics just to find out what your mood is.

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=chimp