How Language Transformed Humanity?

The evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel states, in his speech, that language is the most powerful, dangerous and revolutionary attribute of the human ever developed. The purpose of the speaker is to notify about the terrific and powerful features of this quality. Pagel discusses to us that when we talk, we have the ability to transfer ideas in somebody else's mind and vice-versa utilizing such a kind of telemetry. To put it simply this procedure is similar to what takes place in between TELEVISION push-button control and television.

According to this biologist language is one of the most subversive methods that we can use to express ourselves. One extremely representative example is the censorship and the awareness that we need to take notice of when we state or compose anything. Going on, Mr Pagel presents 2 crucial concerns: he asks the reason that language progresses itself, and why it evolved in our types and not in others. The answer is that only humans have a special feature called "social knowing", which lets us enhance ourselves by enjoying and copying the actions that somebody else did.

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Such an advanced attribute might also prevent us from making the same mistakes and enables us to do the exact same action better than before. So we make advances, whereas the smarter animals stay doing some activities over and over again, without big developments. As a result of the social knowing or, as anthropologists call it, cumulative cultural adjustment we can make things, and all the important things that surround us are effects of this process.

Now we are moving towards a crucial point, which is: "Why do we have language? ".

First, Mr. Pagel states that social knowing is visual theft. We can learn taking concepts and gain from the very best qualities of somebody else, without working on something or standing firm on it. Second of all he exposes us that when humans discovered this aspect of social learning (countless years ago) developed a problem: "How can we maintain our finest ideas and avoid that others steal them? ". Our forefathers might have acted in the following ways: focusing themselves in little groups so as to bestow the obtained information to offspring.

But the result would have been isolation and a slight improvement. Or they could have created a system of communication to start cooperating with one another and share everything useful. Obviously they had chosen the second option and in this way language was born. So the solution to the previous dilemma is communication. Then Mr. Pagel points out how peculiar the fact is that we have 8000 different languages spoken on Earth. More surprising is that the greatest density is located in the smallest areas such as islands.

This is related to the tendency of people to isolate in small groups in order to protect identities and cultures. On the other side nowadays we communicate a lot more than in the past. But our modern world founded on connectivity and cooperation is limited by the variety of languages. This raises the question: “is it possible in our globalized and standardized world to have all these different languages? ”. Mr. Pagel has no answer but it seems inevitable that our destiny might be a one language world.