When you need a job done right, send in the women.
Continuing a riff I started with Cat Bohannon.
Let's begin here with Dr. Beekman.
…In essence, the human origin story is simple. More than 4 million years ago, our distant ancestors permanently swapped a life in the trees for one on two legs. Their skeletons changed, to make walking much easier and more efficient. Indeed, walking upright was a great innovation. It allowed our ancestors to literally walk out of their ancestral environment and start to explore the world. But nothing ever comes for free, and so the adaptations that made for efficient walkers also led to a series of problems—problems best addressed by forming strong social bonds. As with ants and bees, a social life requires some form of communication. Nothing too complicated initially—just enough to keep the group together. For a few million years, our human family expanded and spread around the globe. I refer here to all our ancestors, cousins and the like, to include every species of human-like creature that evolved after we split from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees and bonobos. As soon as our species made its appearance, about 300,000 years ago, everything started to change. In no time, we had become the sole survivor; all others in our extended family swiftly went extinct. We have been exceptionally lucky. Truth is, we shouldn’t be here.
Our species, Homo sapiens, has a design fault that should have been the end of us. As our skeletons adjusted to walking upright, our hips became narrower. Then, by a fluke of nature, our brain started to expand, forcing our head to change to make space for all that gray matter. And while changing our head was relatively easy—our skeleton had already shown how bony structures can change quickly—the consequences were significant. Babies with a large head and mothers with narrow hips do not make a good combination. But there is more. Growing a large brain is expensive—so expensive that mothers cannot allow their babies to stay in the womb until that brain is more fully grown. The consequence of this is that our babies are born early; their heads are too large, their brains are too expensive, and their mothers’ birth canals are too narrow for them to be born any later than they are. Thus, the babies are seriously “underbaked.” So underbaked, in fact, it takes them almost two decades to catch up, a time during which they have to rely on others.
So far, the story is not that new. Many have told similar origin stories, but I remained puzzled. Why did natural selection allow our species to get away with producing these useless and needy babies? I soon realized that the design fault that started the problem in the first place also provided its solution. That solution is language.
As the brain expanded and the head changed shape, the throat did too. The larynx descended, pulling the tongue with it. And that change led to two uniquely human characteristics. One is a high risk of choking on our food and drink, and the other is the ability to mold sounds like no other creature. Sounds we crafted into the language needed to organize our childcare.
I will argue here that talking and caring for underbaked newborns co-evolved, in an episode of runaway selection initiated by the genetic anomalies we now know spurred our species’ neurological growth. Because here is another surprise. We are the result of a short series of discrete mistakes that made us what we are today. Our descent from other apes in the last few million years or so boils down to a mere handful of genetic and morphological turning points. These small changes incrementally built on each other, as in a multiplayer game in which the outcome is never quite predictable, setting in motion our transformation from tree-swinging apes to chatty apes.
The picture, in the end, is of an odd species that stumbled into global dominance through a relatively quick succession of simple mistakes. A species forced to speak up, or let its helpless infants perish.
The Origin of Language tells the story of how we learned to speak and why. It exposes a strong force—natural selection, solving problems by using whatever’s lying around. A strong force that rarely over-delivers. If a simple solution will do the trick, natural selection usually won’t bother with bells and whistles. And so we hone in on the small changes that made a huge difference in our evolutionary history…
…this art of language kicked off an unstoppable process that led, ultimately and for better or for worse, to the global dominance of Homo sapiens. I should emphasize that this is not a report of scientific consensus. We have no consensus, and perhaps never will, because the soft tissue involved in thinking and talking doesn’t fossilize. And because it’s often difficult to test whether a given feature was selected for or was just a “spandrel”—a side effect of something useful. But when you arrange the current puzzle pieces side by side, and apply Occam’s razor, you find a new origin story for our species that was hiding in plain sight...
Beekman, Madeleine (2025). The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why Kindle Edition.
OK, back to Cat:
CHAPTER 8: VOICE
Someone found him in a heap on the side of a country road, his motorcycle yards away. It was one of the worst traumas the community hospital had ever seen. The man was only forty-one. Underneath the mash of bone and flesh that used to be his face, he was struggling to breathe. The nurse tried to intubate him, but getting in through the nose was hopeless. When she attempted to slide the tube down his throat and into his airway, she hit swollen tissue. His heart was beating. His lungs and liver were fine. But if she didn’t open his airway, he was still going to die.
What he needed was a cricothyrotomy—a “crike.” By slicing a hole in his throat, they could bypass the swelling and feed fresh air to his lungs. The nurse couldn’t do it, so she paged the surgeon on staff.
Cutting into a human throat is asking for trouble. The blood vessels that feed and drain the brain run through there, along with huge tangles of critical nerves. You also need to dodge the blood vessels and voice box. Cut in the wrong place, or in the wrong way, and you damage a patient for life, maybe render him mute. Or kill him. Most patients who have trouble breathing can be intubated. But most people don’t usually fly off a motorcycle at speed and land directly on their face. The surgeon on call hadn’t done a crike in twenty years.
Luckily, the community hospital was part of a new program that Vermont was trying out: telemedicine. The surgeon was able to hail a doctor who worked at a Level 1 trauma center at a faraway hospital and turned on the video camera, giving his expert colleague a live close-up of the patient’s gory face and neck. The doctor on the screen agreed it had to be a crike, and it had to be now. Speaking slowly and clearly into his small microphone, he walked the surgeon through the procedure.
First, find the Adam’s apple on the patient’s throat. Now feel for the next bump, down about an inch.[*1] Between the two is a membrane. That’s your target.
The patient wheezed, his lips turning blue.
The country surgeon, feeling as if he were in med school again, focused on the trauma doc’s voice. His left finger found the spot. With his right hand, he brought the scalpel into position, gently touching the razor edge to the skin in the middle of the dying man’s throat.
Vertical incision. One centimeter deep.
The skin gave way to the blade, uncovering a slick, fibrous membrane just underneath.
Now horizontal.
It was tough and took some pressure, but the doctor’s blade sank through.
Now flip the scalpel. Push the handle in and twist it ninety degrees.
The membrane opened like a buttonhole in a jacket. Blood oozed around the metal of the scalpel handle and down the sides of the man’s throat. The nurse was ready with the plastic tube, and the surgeon slipped it into the hole as he pulled the scalpel out.
The man on the table started breathing again, ragged at first, then slow and deep. On a monitor nearby, the numbers started going up: 60 percent oxygen, 70 percent, 80 percent, 85 percent.
They had no time to celebrate. Now the surgeon needed to relieve the pressure on the patient’s swelling brain. He picked up the drill and bored a hole through the bone. It worked. When the man was stable, they transferred his broken body to the state’s only trauma center, hours away in Burlington. The man would live.
ORDINARY MAGIC
It really is like a magic trick. Without moving anything, without building anything, with little more than a skittering of electricity along tiny threads spindling off the ends of cells, your brain tells your throat and mouth to make a sound. With just a few pulses of air, the sound jumps across space to someone else’s ears, and in hardly any time at all—milliseconds—your idea arrives in that person’s brain.
You didn’t have to show her anything. You didn’t have to pee on a lamppost or wave your hands. And yet you can deliver a dense package of information from an organ inside your body into another person’s body.
No other animal in the world is able to do this. No dog can teach another dog how to do a crike by barking into a mic from hundreds of miles away. No chimpanzee can make that happen. No whale. Homo sapiens are the only animals, in the entire history of animals, that have managed this phenomenal trick.
We are the only talking ape.
We’re so linguistic, in fact, that we’ve even managed to figure out ways to create language without any sound at all. Those among us who aren’t able to hear, or hear less well than most people, can use their hands to make language. Just a few thousand years ago, we even figured out how to make marks to represent the words we make. That means brains can miraculously download ideas into other brains they’d never even met.
It might seem ridiculous for me to be making such a big deal of this. After all, to speak to another human being is such an ordinary, everyday thing. But it’s not ordinary. Here on Earth, peeing is ordinary. Sweating is ordinary. Moving your body so that another member of your species can see what you’re doing, and maybe even loosely understand what you want, is quite ordinary. So are most animals’ vocalizations—they sing, they squawk, they bark and growl and hiss, conveying rudimentary “messages” that other animals can understand.
But those messages are usually as simple as a smoke alarm. And they produce simple, automatic responses that are hardwired from birth. Most animals emerge into the world ready to communicate with one another. Puppies already know how to “bow,” hunching down on their forelimbs, to signal that they want to play. No one has to teach them this. Cuttlefish know how to change their color to say they’re angry, rattlesnakes know how to shake their tails, and honeybees know how to perform their strange waggle dances to tell the rest of the hive where the flowers are.
No other animal has human grammar. They don’t have language. They can’t cook up complex ideas and dump them into each other’s brains simply by swapping around the order of a few sounds. They can’t teach someone how to open up a man’s windpipe with a scalpel and insert a bit of tubing and then drill a hole in his skull to save his life.
Speaking to someone isn’t ordinary at all.
And it’s entirely unclear how, or when, our ancestors managed to pull it off. But every living human culture has language. We might have started talking as far back as 1.7 million years ago. Or as recently as 200,000 years. Some think it was only 50,000 years ago, which might as well be yesterday in our evolution…
Bohannon, Cat. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (pp. 297-300). (Function). Kindle Edition.
OK, now let me go back 50 years.
Other Senses, Other Worlds
CH 8: Other Ways of Telling
WHETHER WE ARE scientists or lay people, when we think of the possibility of contact with intelligent creatures from another world, one of our first thoughts is: How shall we understand their language? How will they understand ours?
It goes without saying that the modality of expression does not have to be, and rarely is, the same as the modalities of perception. While we human beings perceive the world via sight, hearing, smell, sound, and so on, we communicate with the world vocally. We use many kinds of nonverbal communication also, as do all animals, but our deliberate or voluntary expression is via spoken language.
For this reason—and perhaps also because so many other species also use various kinds of vocal expression—we come to think of it as almost a prerequisite for communication. We usually find an unexpressed assumption that another intelligent being, no matter how totally different its form may be from ours, will express itself vocally, as we do.
This assumption has no merit. Human beings came to the ability to use speech and language because a previously four-legged creature began to run and then to walk on two of its legs only and eventually assumed a completely upright posture. This fortuitous development, causing a rearrangement of the structure of the vocal organs in relationship to each other, became the means by which the production of far more, and more complex, sounds became physically possible. Without the change of posture no change in mental development, of itself, could have produced the complexities of human speech.
Why should we suppose that this happenstance, coinciding as it did with other circumstances that favored brain development (the use of the freed hands and eventual increase in brain volume) to produce the highly refined vocal communication of speech, should also occur in another intelligent organism, formed by an entirely different set of circumstances? In our own world the means of communication are varied beyond belief. Each creature gains from its environment the information it needs and has a means of utilizing that knowledge and conveying whatever information is necessary to further its own purposes.
Almost every one of the senses through which various creatures receive news of their world is also, with modulation, a possible channel for sending out information—for communication. To offer what is to us an exotic example, a creature that receives information via sense organs that monitor infrared radiation might also be able to send messages by giving off heat in varying degrees, or pulses, allowing for sufficient modulation to be useful for communication. All one needs for a symbolic language similar to our own is a system of from fifteen to thirty distinguishable elements in whatever modality, recognizable by touch, smell, electricity, or any other means, that can be arranged in various permutations, as can the letters of our alphabet.
As rich in possibilities for communication as any of the sense modalities may be, however, we wish to elaborate here on a means of communication that is far simpler, and that is grossly underrated by most of us. It is the language of gesture and posture.
On earth such communication systems are highly evolved in monkeys and apes, and form the basis of their capacity to express motivation in individuals and to facilitate social relationships. Without this ability to express mood, monkeys and apes would not be able to engage in the subtle and complicated social interactivities that are a feature of their adaptation.
The fact that for long years human language was considered to be the sine qua non of intelligence, proved to be a handicap when scientific attempts were first made at interspecies communication, especially with chimpanzees. (Advanced work on interspecies communication has also been undertaken with dolphins.) Chimpanzees do have a vocabulary of vocal expressions, and it was probably this that misled early researchers into thinking it might be possible to teach them the sounds and meanings of human speech…
This book was published in 1976. I read a "new release" hardbound copy I'd checked out from my local library. It went out of print in 1989 when the publisher (Stein & Day of NY) BK'd and went out of business. I bought my own hardcopy. You can still find used paper copies on the 'net via 3rd parties, but there are not many. That's a shame.
I have managed to put together my own complete PDF copy of the Jonas' book, inclusive of the sourcing. I am as yet unable to locate the authors or their estate--assuming that the copyright reverted to them in the wake of Stein & Day's 1989 bankruptcy. I would offer them a copyright license deal to re-publish the book as at least an eBook. It has really aged welll overall. We'll see.
Next we'll go back to current writing.
I've cited her before as well. Scary smart.
...“Unique to Earth (as far as we currently know) are dissipative structures also visible from space that are indeed examples of life: these we call cities. Cities provide an interconnected web of lights visible beyond Earth because of the electromagnetic radiation they give off at night. Like storms, they “self”-organize, only under far-from-equilibrium conditions. Hurricanes and cities are formed by some of the same physics: they are both examples of states of organization maintained far from equilibrium. Many things we observe can be explained in terms of the exchange of energy and work to construct organized assemblies of matter.
Dissipative structures include examples where life exploits the fact that open, far-from-equilibrium systems can locally maintain order. It is necessary that this be true for life as we know it to exist, but it does not explain why life exists. It does not explain the key way in which storms and cities differ. The current Great Red Spot has no memory of the multitude of similar systems that may have preceded it over the several-billion-year history of Jupiter; studying the storm won’t allow us to extract a detailed history of storms that persisted in Jupiter’s past. By contrast, cities are the direct consequence of evolutionary processes that began on Earth more than 3.7 billion years ago, with the gradual acquisition of information leading to the emergence of what we call cellular life, multicellular life, societies with language, and eventually the artifacts of those societies that we call cities. This memory is encoded in the very existence of a city, and you can find evidence of this history by peeling back the different architectural and biological layers much like a palimpsest. Cities do not spontaneously fluctuate into existence because a disequilibrium exists; they require a long causal chain of events—a lineage, as I’ll describe throughout this book—for the universe to construct them. The memory that leads to the construction of a city is acquired over eons via selection; it is not spontaneously self-organized in space, but instead assembled across time.
As hard as we look, there is no evidence that life violates any of the known laws of physics. But being consistent with known laws of physics does not mean life is explained by those laws. In What Is Life?, Erwin wrote:Living matter, while not eluding the laws of physics as established up to date, is likely to involve other laws of physics hitherto unknown.From Atoms to Agents
That was over seventy-five years ago. To this day, despite the efforts of generations of talented scientists, we cannot derive life from the known laws of physics, even if we are pretty sure it must be consistent with them.
You may be wondering what any of the foregoing discussion has to do with the actual experience of being alive. Perhaps it sounds like scientists are focusing on all the wrong problems. The ideas of reproduction, metabolism, entropy, order, etc., while possibly relevant to your or my existence, do not instill in us the visceral sense of what it is to be alive in our day-to-day experience.
When asked what it is like to be alive, the most characteristic features we humans usually point to are ones related to the concepts of agency and free will. As technical terms these have defied ready definitions or explanations because right now they are based more on our experience of the world than what is captured by our scientific understanding of it.
Free will is a familiar subject to popular debate, so let’s start there. You probably feel like you have free will. I do too. In fact, I feel like I chose to write this book, and you may feel like you chose to read it. Current popular accounts in physics would claim this cannot be true. For example, Brian Greene, the acclaimed science communicator and string theorist, writes, “The processes of life are molecular meanderings, fully described by physical laws that simultaneously tell a high level of information-based story.” I first came across this quote from his recent book, scrolling through posts on Twitter (now X) while cooking breakfast. What stopped me cold on both fronts (cooking and scrolling, which can be risky when done simultaneously) was not the posting of this quote by a fan of Brian’s book. Instead, it was Brian’s own response. He tweeted back, “Reducing life/ mind to its molecular basis does not in any way diminish life or mind, but rather aggrandizes both: look at the amazing and wonderful things particles can accomplish.” I had seen videos of Brian arguing how physics has no need for free will, and therefore neither should we: current physics provides an elegant enough description of the universe. But could anyone really believe physics at this moment in history provides an ultimate explanation for what and why we are?
Let’s take a step back to illuminate the conflict between free will and current physics. Free will is generally considered the capacity to act at one’s own discretion, independent of your current state or history. The laws of physics, at least as we understand them now, describe a universe that is fully determined from the beginning. Everything that happens is literally unfolded in the dynamics of elementary particles and fields. Your thoughts and feelings have no impact on reality, let alone you. There’s no room for free will, because everything about you was already determined in the initial state of the universe. End of story. Or is it?”
— Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence by Sara Imari Walker
'eh? Y'all catchin' my implicit aggregate drift here in light of just the foregoing? A bit more teasing. Dr. Bohannon:
Lordy Mercy.
_____
LIFE: WHAT IS "IT?" WHY DID IT BEGIN? HOW DID IT BEGIN? HOW DOES IT PERSIST AND EVOLVE? WHAT ABOUT LIKELY FUTURE(S)?
Lots of dots to connect and Venn ovals to overlay.
[Full House, pp 149-151] … Before presenting the full argument for all of life, I must first explain why a dribble moving in one direction need not represent the directed thrust of causality within a system-but may actually arise as a consequence of entirely random movement among all items within the system. I will then demonstrate, in the next section, that apparent progress in the history of life arises by exactly the same artifact-and that, probably, no average tendency to progress in individual lineages exists at all.
I shall first illustrate the argument as an abstraction-using a classic pedagogical metaphor beloved by teachers of probability. Then I shall provide an intriguing actual case for a lineage of fossils with unusually good and complete data. Since we live in a fractal world of "self-similarity ," where local and limited cases may have the same structure as examples at largest scale, I shall then argue that this particular case for the smallest of all fossils-single-celled creatures of the oceanic plankton-presents a structure and explanation identical with an appropriate account for the entire history of life. Since we can approach these largely unknown plank-without the strong biases that becloud our consideration of life's full history, we can best move to the totality by grasping this self-similar example of oceanic unicells.
The overall directionality in certain kinds of random motion-an apparent paradox to many--can best be illustrated by a paradigm known as the "drunkard's walk." A man staggers out of a bar dead drunk. He stands on the sidewalk in front of the bar, with the wall of the bar on one side and the gutter on the other. If he reaches the gutter, he falls down into a stupor and the sequence ends. Let's say that the sidewalk is thirty feet wide, and that our drunkard is staggering at random with an average of five feet in either direction for each stagger. (See Figure 21 for an illustration of this paradigm); for simplicity's sake-since this is an abstract model and not the real world-we will say that the drunkard staggers in a single line only, either toward the wall or toward the gutter. He does not move at right angles along the sidewalk parallel to the wall and gutter.
Where will the drunkard end up if we let him stagger long enough and entirely at random? He will finish in the gutter-absolutely every time, and for the following reason: Each stagger goes in either direction with 50 percent probability. The bar wall at one side is a "reflecting boundary."8 If the drunkard hits the wall, he just stays there until a subsequent stagger propels him in the other direction. In other words, only one direction of movement remains open for continuous advance-toward the gutter. We can even calculate the average amount of time required to reach the gutter. (Many readers will have recognized this paradigm as just another way of illustrating a preferred result in coin tossing. Falling into the gutter on one unreversed trajectory, after beginning at the wall, has the same probability as flipping six heads in a row [one chance in sixty-four]-five feet with each stagger, to reach the gutter in thirty feet. Start in any other position, and probabilities change accordingly. For example, once the drunkard stands in the middle, fifteen feet from the wall, then three staggers in the same direction [one chance in eight for a single trajectory] put him into the gutter. Each stagger is independent of all others, so pre vicious histories don't count, and you need to know only the initial position to make the calculation.)
I bring up this old example to illustrate but one salient point: In a system of linear motion structurally constrained by a wall at one end, random movement, with no preferred directionality whatever, will inevitably propel the average position away from a starting point at the wall. The drunkard falls into the gutter every time, but his motion includes no trend whatever toward this form of perdition. Similarly, some average or extreme measure oflife might move in a particular direction even if no evolutionary advantage, and no inherent trend, favor that pathway…
8. In more complex cases involving several entities, the wall might be an "absorbing boundary" that destroys any object hitting it. No matter (so long as enough entities are left to play the game--certainly the case with life's history). The important point is that an entity can't penetrate the wall and continue to move in the wall ward direction-whether or not the entity bounces off or gets killed.
MORE ON "NARRATIVE"
Cat dwells at considerable length on the adaptive materiality of "narrative"--i.e., "stories." Historically it has been largely the women who pass on and preserve our stories.
I still recall a guest trial attorney speaker at my undergrad senoir "Psychology of Law" seminar. He said "he/she with the best story wins."
Stories. Narratives. "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
More broadly, as proffered by Simon Blackburn:
We have to have our "stories."
More shortly.
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