FAITH & SCIENCE News:

Faith and Science Series on “What Makes Us Human?”

The Los Alamos Faith & Science Forum is holding a winter series on the topic “What Makes Us Human?”, continuing Feb. 16. We meet at Kelly Hall at Trinity on the Hill Episcopal Church on the third Tuesday of the month. A video/presentation begins at 6 p.m. followed by a large group discussion at 6:30 p.m., then an optional small group discussion at 7 p.m. ending at 7:20 p.m. Please feel free to bring your dinner. All are welcome. Follow our blog at: www.lafsf.org.

Tuesday, Feb. 16: Why Is There Language?

We now know that animals are smart enough to do language — consider Kanzi the bonobo, for example. But such examples arise only after intensive, specialized training by another species (us). By contrast, any normal human child will spontaneously learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? Why is it that, in nature, only humans communicate using language?

How did the language facility arise? What is language, anyway? These are deep, difficult, and controversial questions, and I won’t come close to answering them definitively in this talk. But I do hope to give some definitions, describe some controversies, and list a few resources that you can use if you’d like to undertake a study of current thinking about this gnarly problem yourself. The talk will draw primarily from two books: Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans, by Derek Bickerton, and The Evolution of Language, by Tecumseh Fitch.

About our presenter:

Nels Hoffman is a physicist at LANL, who doesn’t claim to know a whole lot about language evolution, but hopes to point to some paths for exploring this fascinating field.