The standard model roughly goes along these lines: chimpanzees have hoots and grunts for conveying information, and so our shared, last common ancestor (LCA) evolved cognitively due to some external stimuli, allowing them to communicate more detailed information, producing human language’s words and symbols. Edward Gibson recently said on Lex Fridman that we invent words for things we want to talk about. So the transition from grunt to word appears logical: we want to say more, and external, ecological pressures, with random mutations, will make this easier to do. This is the perspective of the “communication sciences,” and it’s wrong.
Do apes really want to say more? It doesn’t seem they are very concerned about this. In Deacon’s Symbolic Species, after learning how to utilize symbolic communication with a “lexigraph,” the apes in the study demonstrate no need for such symbolic language outside of the lab. There is no evidence of chimpanzees or gorillas using sign language outside of the lab, despite how useful it would be in conveying information. Apes, and all animals, are already optimized for their communications systems, which correlates closely with their combat systems (see my white paper here for more: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380099651_The_ROBA_Hypothesis_-_A_Thermodynamic_Model_of_Human_Violence_and_Language). The fact that humans can teach apes some new tricks so they can acquire rewards in a lab is not evidence that apes have a desire or need to learn those tricks.
Did the LCA yearn for the ability to communicate better than it was already optimized for? The standard model says, Yes, because there were new environmental factors impinging on it. For Dunbar, it was the need to groom in bigger groups. For Wrangham, it was to gossip. For Bickerton, it was to scavenge competitively. For Deacon, it was dual evolutionary tracks of tool development and symbolic development. These ecological stimuli all imply a need to protect one’s self, kin, and clan from crises of plague, famine, predation, disasters, and infertility.
The model also states that, Such environmental factors were never faced by apes before or since, as no other primates (or animals) have evolved language.
This is the paradox of modern evolutionary linguistics: 1) animal calls evolved into human words due to a situation which 1) was very unique such that no animal ever faced it before or since, and 2) was comprised of criteria which all animals constantly face.
It’s natural that the theorists can only vaguely describe what these stimuli might have been. Language evolution theories continue to be vague. They’re less useful than guesswork in today’s AI LLMs.
Despite this, the belief persists that we evolved language out of the desire or need to communicate better. The analogy is akin to crossing a Rubicon on an evolutionary “bridge.” Without this bridge between chimp calls and human language, no transition can happen. And yet here we are, so there must have been a bridge.
We have crossed this theoretical Rubicon into what we think is human language. But this isn’t “language” at all. Gibson and Deacon, Tomasello, Wrangham, Dunbar, Frank Wilson, and all the others are not looking at human “language.” They are looking at human “communication.”
What is communication? Conveying information. All animals do this. Plants communicate a need for water by turning brown. A volcano communicates an “intent” to explode by releasing smoke. Photons communicate with silver halide to make pictures. “Communication” is basically a tautology: something communicates something, and something else responds.
Having crossed this Rubicon we find ourselves in a strange, parched landscape called “human communication.” It’s not language. We have no theory on language. We have no theory on what this landscape is or how it works, or how we got here. We can model “communication” using AI and LLMs, but that’s just because we feed computers a lot of data about “communication.” You could also feed the LLM a lot of data about how people respond to such communication, and you’d have a model on “human behavior.” It will help you simulate communication and behavior. It isn’t “language” and it isn’t “intelligence.” Those things requires recursion.
The bridge is not crossing into recursion. The theorists do not know what recursion is because they think that only language has recursion, but they ignore the recursion inherent in violence (recursive object based aggression / ROBA). Only humans have language and ROBA. So only humans have recursion.
One way to understand this is by looking at the color “red.” In the Lex episode, Gibson talks about is the introduction of color words into ancient languages. Some native languages only have 2 color words: light and dark. These are arguably the first 2 color words in human language. Any time a third color color is introduced, it’s red. Then come yellow and green, then blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, gray, in roughly that order (see Donald Brown’s Human Universals). Gibson would say that everyone apparently would like to talk about red before any other color. Why? He doesn’t say. There appear to be 2 theories: 1) salience of the color red (how noticeable it is in nature) making it “important to distinguish and communicate about early on in language development”, and 2) it’s “biological factor”, since our eyes respond strongly to red. However, there are 2 other kinds of cones that respond strongly to green and blue.
Here again the interpretations of language are only concerned with the communicative value of words, but they express no concern for the depth value of words. They assume that “red” describes red things in the environment, stuff that animals would care about. Any kind of sacred attributes are off the radar. In animals, blood and berries are identifiable as red, but there’s no need for a call for “red” because, we are told, animals have no need to communicate “red” to each other. Supposedly, once we cross the Rubicon we start using this word “red” as soon as it’s useful. So, human communication theory says that first red is an identifier of things, and only later does it symbolize sacred stuff.
But the ROBA Hypothesis rejects this simplification and would hypothesize that “red” entered the lexicon not due to ecological factors but because red is the most crucial color in the sacred domain. It is not the sight or presence of important red things like berries or blood in the environment which necessitates the word “red.” “Green” would arguably be more important as it could describe foliage where game is hiding, vegetation that is poisonous vs. edible, etc., and yet it only enters the lexicon after “red.” The Hebrew word for “red” is adom (אָדוֹם) and its etymology is instructional: “blood” is dam (דָם), “man” is adam (אָדָם), and “earth” is adamah (אֲדָמָה). (In Hebrew grammar, a hey (ה) at the end of a word implies “going toward”, giving a definition more like “going toward red.”) According to the Biblical Pentateuch, man came “from the dust of the adamah” and that because of his original sin, the “adamah is cursed”.
But communication science links these terms in a poetic way, such that the original, sacred meaning of “blood” is lost. The ROBA Hypothesis says otherwise: the redness of blood, its universality in humans, and its presence in certain sacrificial animals is a symbol that blood debt can be paid with bodies other than one’s own. Such a definition is incompatible with the communication sciences, but it is fully compatible with the anthropological record.
There is no bridge crossing from animal communication to human language. The bridge crosses instead into human communication, but human communication is not real: it’s a artificial construct of human language, where modern social scientists can measure the “communicative” value of words and grammar.
The communication scientists marvel at the stupidity of language, because so much of it is not communicative. What is the communicative value of Levitical food prohibitions? What is communicative about a totem animal? They ask the natives, “Why is your totem animal a turtle?” “Because our ancestors were turtle.” To the communication sciences this is a non-answer. “Why do you prohibit marriage between siblings?” “Because a beaver cannot marry a beaver.” Another non-answer.
So the sciences come up with communicative answers: Levitical food prohibitions are declared beneficial for health, blood type, etc., a turtle totem animal is a clan’s “mythology” which carries some psychoanalytic value like “the turtle is classically associated with pensiveness,” “they dream about turtles,” “turtle heads have some Oedipal meaning,” etc. (I’m making all this up), and incest is prohibited because after 10 generations it reduces IQ by 12 points or whatever.
A lot of smart people in the late 19th and early 20th century (Frazer in Totemism and Exogamy, McLennan, and others) attempted to explain the incest prohibition in scientific terms. None succeeded. I think this is why Rene Girard was a breath of fresh air to philosophy and the sciences: he re-introduced the concept of the sacred. To Girard, incest inflamed mimetic desire in an explosive way and so its prohibition was a violence-reduction measure. Whether or not his hypothesis is correct, this is the right way to begin thinking about such puzzles. Marriage is first sacred, second for pleasure and offspring. Animal sacrifice is first sacred, second for having communal meals and showing your wealth. Totem markers are first sacred, second for identifying with the local environment. Reversing the order produces a lot of confusion, but that’s how “human communication” works.
A Vio-linguistic approach to these issues would be 1) Levitical food allowances stem from domesticated herd animals for use in paying blood debt (though don’t ask me what’s up with the fish and bird rules, and it’s interesting how camels are not included in the Levitical allowances but camel sacrifice is common in wider Arabia), 2) totem animals are local clan markers to prevent incest, and 3) incest is tabooed because mimetic rivalry between siblings threatens to explode into feuds, and also intermarriage with other clans expands the peace network, keeping recursion in the symbolic state as long as possible.
These more “communicative” definitions are all based in some science, but these were not the original definitions. The sacred came first. “Green” follows “red” in the order of colors entering vocabularies, but before the word “green” could be useful, something sacred first had to be established. They did not want to “talk more about green things.” Rather, green things began to demand a sacred value, perhaps because animal sacrifice proved not to be enough. (In GA terminology, the center demanded that our attention be directed at green things.) Abel’s animal offering is accepted first. Cain just had to wait until vegetable offerings (first fruits, tithes, etc.) were accepted. This produces the word “green.”
If this isn’t the exact origin of “green,” at least it’s more minimal than, “They wanted to talk about green stuff.” That’s sort of true, but it’s not minimal enough. Saying that “We came up with ‘green’ because we wanted to talk about it” is like saying “people invented the Marathon because they wanted to go a town over.”
The recursive language of humans is what forms the sacred. If the sacred comes before any communicative values of words, then we have a new model of how language works.
But this still won’t satisfy modern scientists: they will simply say, “Yes, but now we just need to find the ecological factor which caused animal communication to evolve into human recursion.”
Exhibit B – ROBA
The sciences have concluded that human language evolved from apes, but our aggression remains as some unfortunate vestige of a shared common ancestor.
And yet, human violence is particular to humans for 1) its use of objects in a recursive manner (a chimp might use an object in combat, but it will not learn from it, inspire others to use one, focus on it when disarmed, or bring an object in anticipation that another chimp will bring an object) and 2) its apocalyptic potential (chimps simply cannot destroy their own species; we are more than capable). The “mutual anticipation” phase (MAP; I’ve abandoned “Merge”, Chomsky can have it) in human violence is infinitely deep, since it’s apocalyptic, and humans get bogged down in endless tactics, preferring not to do anything, knowing that death is immanent. No skull can withstand a rock, no skin a sharp stick puncture. This infinite depth is recursive, just like language.
The ROBA Hypothesis’s thermodynamic model says that recursive object based aggression (ROBA) renders human combat unoptimized for creating a social structure, so language is the encapsulation of that violence into symbolic form, wherein we can continue “fighting” without destroying each other. Words do the fighting for us. This encapsulation is, and always has been, a sacred process. (I would argue that this is how any word is made: encapsulation of ROBA into a word, meme, art, contract, etc. We probably don’t even notice it happening most of the time.) The breakdown of language causes recursion to leak out into the active state of violence.
So there’s no transition from animal calls to human words, nor from animal combat to human violence, though the latter is more likely: chimps appear to desire ROBA, since they use objects for intimidation. They will hold up a stick, or rock, or shake branches in anticipation of battle, but they’re really bad at using these objects in a deadly way, and they only do so non-recursively. All animals are optimized for non-ROBA combat. I’m not in the business of tracing where/if/how/why a transition happened between animals and humans. The hypothesis is minimal enough: we are the only ones with ROBA and language, both use recursion, therefore recursion itself is a (the?) minimal human property.
Recursive language and ROBA come first. What order? Not sure. But it’s only after them that we use communication channels and all kinds of other processes, but such “communication” is secondary.
(Note that humans do use communication, but language is a far more complex, recursive process. Hunger, emotions, sex, etc. appear in animal communication too, but only in humans do these communicative functions acquire a linguistic dimension: food becomes cuisine, emotions are parsed in therapy, and sex… you get the idea.)
Failing to see this, the sciences will continue to fail with violence, especially with what it calls “religious violence.” All violence is religious. In the absence or decay of mainstream religions, recursion begins leaking into the active state and uses whatever linguistic structures it can to reform into the sacred. If we keep reducing language to “human communication,” attempting to remove the sacred from everything and denying the role of the sacred in symbol production, then violence will use whatever at hand to take an even more monstrous form. “Communication” can therefore take a violent, religious form with very lofty goals. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the new celebrity religion of mass shootings and bombings demonstrate that the primary foundations of modern religion are media and mass attention. These movements are not evidence of the dangers of “atheism;” nor are they traditional religions; they are religions of mass media.
Most concerning is the mainstream rejection of the sacred and the assertion of “communication.” The sciences constantly call humans “animals,” “primates,” etc., since these are merely communicative terms, and so they leave people thinking that there’s no role for the sacred. The sciences are always calling on humans to be more humble and accept the possibility of aliens, etc. The wording is religious, but it denies it is a religion, and so it has no idea what to do with violence.
Since violence is not on the other side of the bridge, where is it? Recursion is more like the water of the Rubicon itself, which is flowing constantly, taking the alternating form of symbolic language or active violence.
