← You Are Not So Smart
You Are Not So Smart
326 - The Origin of Language - Madeleine Beekman
00:46:11
Biologist Madeleine Beekman, author of The Origin of Language, presents a completely new and fascinating theory for how language emerged in homo sapiens, in human beings, in you and me and the rest of us.
Loading summary
Transcript41 lines
- [00:00]
David McRaney
Limu Emu and Doug Here we have the limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [00:18]
Madeline Beekman
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [00:21]
David McRaney
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts welcome to the you Are not so Smart Podcast Episode 326 welcome to the you are not so Smart podcast. My name is David McRaney, and in this episode we sit down with Madeline Beekman, a professor emerita of of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology at the University of Sydney, Australia. And Dr. Beekman is our guest because she wrote a book titled the Origin of Language, in which she presents a completely new and fascinating hypothesis model theory for how language, complex spoken communication using words and sentences and metaphors and similes and so on, emerged in Homo sapiens, in human beings, in you and me and the rest of us. This is something I've been obsessed with for a while, and thanks to that obsession, I ran across Beekman's work and asked if she could explain it on this program. She said, yes, and that's what you are about to hear. But before we get into that, I just want to briefly mention, I think it's worth explaining, or at least sort of just covering in general, that this is still a great and fundamental mystery. This question how did language begin? How did spoken language emerge in human beings as an actual scientific investigation? We've been trying to get to the answer to that question for more than 150 years or so. Getting to the answers to these questions, it's been a strangely frustrating pursuit. We do know some things. We know around about when our ancestors began to walk upright. We know roughly when we began to tame fire and begin building tools, and pretty much when we started to paint images in caves. But we can't be sure when language emerged or why it emerged when it did and not sooner or later. The major models, the leading hypotheses, they can be grouped into a few major camps. There's the gesture first camp, which argues we likely began using our hands to point and mime and coordinate long before we had precise control over our voices. And then there's the vocal first camp that argues speech evolved from simple sounds like grunts and calls and mating melodies, similar to birds and such, which became more structured over time. Then there's the idea here that Darwinian pressures led to changes in the vocal tract and within the brain, and this complexified those sounds into the building blocks of speech. And then there's the social cooperative camp, which argues language evolved as a mechanism for coordination among social primate collectives that grew too large for physical grooming and face to face bonding. In this camp, they see language as a form of vocal grooming that grew more complex as it aided in the passing of our genes in ways that became more and more useful. From that we evolved gossip, coordination and methods of communicating trust as we solved shared problems and reached shared goals. And then finally there's this cognitive and cultural co evolution camp which doesn't necessarily disagree with the other camps, but it sees language as more of an emergent property of big complex brains interacting in big complex cultures together that led to abstract thought and theory of mind and thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking ad infinitum. And in this view, genes, culture and cognition created feedback loops of mutual reinforcement, which led to language. And then after that, language became a tool like any other, which we use to escape the savanna and eventually invent lasagna and go to the moon. Across all these camps, the consensus seems to be that language emerged gradually. It did not appear suddenly. Basically there was no first word. It just sort of arose slowly, somehow, some way. And our guest in this episode, biologist Madeline Beekman, believes that language emerged via a long chain of evolutionary happenstance which began with our ancestors leaving the trees and, and beginning to walk upright. So there's a lot of biology in here. There's a lot of physical bodily changes. The largest of these are changes to the shape of the pelvis, which came about from becoming bipedal and that made childbirth difficult. It required help from others to just engage in childbirth to have babies. And these forces led to hyper specialized social cooperation in our ancestors. And then after that, then you had all these evolutionary forces that selected for minds that could understand others intentions, because you had these social dynamics that were now so important. And that led to a rudimentary theory of mind. And amid all of that, thanks to chance alone, a genetic mutation in glial cells caused the brain to rapidly expand in size. And this would have ended most other species, because these newly giant brains would have needed an enormous amount of calories that their kind couldn't acquire. And in addition, this leads to infants that need to be born a bit prematurely to get through a pelvis with that big skull in which there's this big brain and that pelvis could not get any wider. So the brain has to come out not quite baked yet. And together this meant that human infants arrived helpless and in need of a lot of cooperative care, equipped with an existing theory of mind inside of groups, with existing sociality and cooperation and lots of protein, thanks to existing persistence, hunting and tool use. Basically, what she's saying is the stage came first for brains to do what they do, and then this big brain came second, and then language came third. And after that, language grew more and more complex as a social tool that evolved to sustain and organize the cooperation, cooperative networks made necessary by our weird anatomies and massive brains. It's a wild and complex model for the emergence of language. And after this commercial break, you'll hear Dr. Madeline Beekman, author of the Origin of Language, tell us all about it. All that right after this.
- [08:17]
Madeline Beekman
Our state has changed a lot in the last 140 years.
- [08:21]
David McRaney
We know because MultiCare has been here guided by a single purpose, making our communities healthier.
- [08:29]
Madeline Beekman
That comes from making courageous decisions, partnering with local communities to grow programs and.
- [08:35]
David McRaney
Services, and expanding healthcare access to those.
- [08:38]
Madeline Beekman
Who need it most.
- [08:40]
David McRaney
Together, we're building a healthier future. Learn more@ multicare.org Limu and Doug here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [09:05]
Madeline Beekman
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [09:08]
David McRaney
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Ferry Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates Excludes Massachusetts and now we return to our program. Dr. Beekman, Madeline Beakman, who are you and what do you do exactly?
- [09:34]
Madeline Beekman
What am I or who am I? Well, I'm an academic by training, a biologist. Always been interested in evolutionary biology. Never had any interest in plants or humans, interestingly. And then I started to realize the plants are actually very interesting. I started working on a weird slime mold for the same reason, because we figured out that slime molds can make decisions. And what does it mean then to make a decision if you're just a blob of slime that doesn't even have a central nervous system or anything that looks like a central nervous system. I spent most of my career working on honeybees, just to make it even more strange. So then why did I write a book on humans, even though I started off saying I had no interest in humans, and that is because I wanted to write a book on how evolution works because my Focus in biology had always been to look at evolution individual. So how does natural selection act on an individual? And my focus was mainly behavior. So how is behavior shaped by natural selection? So the behavior is sort of geared towards making sure that the organism survives and reproduces. You know, just traditional Darwinian natural selection. But of course, for evolution to work, that has to have an effect on, on genes or gene expression, because otherwise you can't have evolutionary change. And I could not marry those two levels. So I decided if I write a book, that's a good reason or good excuse to try and figure out how this really works. As I said, I had no prior interest in human evolution whatsoever. I always associated it with stuffy professors in some godforsaken place, were they trying to, you know, dust off the dust of ancient bones, etc. And then come up with a story that no one can ever test because you're looking at bones. But then I came to realize it's actually really interesting. It's because I was on sabbatical at an institute in Berlin. So it's a great place to be for academics. There's just two obligations. One is you have to give a colloquium or a seminar to the whole group. And the other one is you have to join for a joint meal every day that they organize for you. So that's not too bad. You can survive doing that for a year. And while I was working on that colloquium, all the puzzle pieces sort of fell together and it all led to this weird increase in brain size because of this gene that was non functional, became functional, started copying itself. Brain started to expand. Babies need to be born prematurely, but we were already social because we started walking on two legs, or we is now our ancestors. So we have a social environment with a large brain. The need to look after those tiny babies already probably some primitive form of communication, because all social species have some form of communication, otherwise it couldn't be social. And then you get this feedback. And that feedback loop then led to the reason why I'm not talking to you.
- [12:53]
David McRaney
I'd love. You start out talking about ants and he's talking about bees, and you're talking about how communication takes place. Many species communicate, but clearly human beings have this enormously complex and dense and rich form of communication that has led to fairly recent debates as to whether or not that's an eight or that's just because we're very. We have big brains. And so we, we happened our way into it. There's even suggestions that language could be looked at as almost a living entity all of its own that has become a viral co evolving living thing that just dwells within cognition. Let's start with, okay, for all this stuff to be true, we need to be have big brains and be smart. And often what's lost in that, it seems to me, is we also need to have larynxes and tongues and teeth and have the ability to make these complex sounds. But we also need to have weird things like theory of mind and a desire to communicate. So going back to the beginning of all this, well, what came first? These big brains or sociality? Which came, which came first? The having a, a large complex ability to generate cognition and, and reason and stuff like that, or being very interested in hierarchies and statuses and reciprocity. Like which came first in as far as we can understand what's going on there?
- [14:41]
Madeline Beekman
I don't, I wouldn't think in terms of hierarchy. So the way I see it, ever since our ancestors and now we're talking about Lucy, so that's, you know, Astropolithicus afarensis, 4.4 million years ago, give or take, they decided to come down from the trees and to become bipedal. Now if you think about the environment they lived in, you know, a bipedal creature in an environment full of predators, you can't run fast anymore because no bipedal thing. Now we have, in Australia we have the new Hussein bolt called Gout Gout. This amazing teenager who can run really fast, but he will not be able to outrun a leopard, say, or even a lion. So that's just not possible. So we now have this creature that is extremely vulnerable in a very dangerous environment. And the only way by which it can survive is by sticking together as probably versus a family group. So you don't need a hierarchy. I don't think in a family group you need trust. And that trust, of course comes sort of natural. You have a large component of your genes are shared so natural selection can act on that family group to trust other individuals within that group because you have a shared interest. You all want to survive. With the change in locomotion. So becoming bipedal, the pelvis changed because the skeleton needs to change. And the skeleton is a very malleable thing. You know, if you decide I'm now going to walk on four legs or you can't, but you know, on all fours for your whole life, your skeleton will change if you start young enough, I guess if you're much older and it becomes much more difficult. So the skeleton, we think of it as a very fixed thing, but it's actually quite malleable, that's what I'm trying to say. And of course, over evolutionary time it's even more malleable because you have selection on individuals that are better able to walk on two legs, et cetera. But let's now just stick to the beginning. So the beginning, when I have this bipedal thing that has decided no longer to want to climb up in trees, or the hand has changed, the hands are now much more grippy thingies instead of climbing thingies, but the pilfers as a started off, changed slightly. So in all other apes, when a, in monkeys, when a baby is born, it faces mom. So you can imagine when you give birth, the mother could help the baby out because she just grabbed or, you know, hold the back of the head and gently help it out of the birth canal when it's facing down, which now probably happened with Lucy, because of the change in the rotation or the position of the pelvis, the baby is now facing down. So if you would then grab its face and help it out, you basically run the risk of breaking its neck. So that's another indication why sociality became really important, because mothers needed help with getting the baby out. But the other thing is, if you now walk on two legs, you can't have your baby on your back anymore, despite even if you would have hair. So the other indication, the other assumption is that Lucy had already lost most of her hair or their hair, which we can never be sure of. But even if she would have complete set of hair, like chimpanzees still do today, if you're walking upright, the baby can't hold onto the back like the chimp babies and the gorillas, etc, they just chuck them on the back and oh, you hold on little one, otherwise, you know, end of view, it's not actually true. I think they start on the belly, but then the mum still has to hold it with one arm. So now you have to carry those babies so you can't run faster than your predators. You can't give birth by yourself, you can't do anything with your hands if you have a baby. So you basically have to be social. So I think that was the first step in changing the brain to become much more sensitive to any social cues. That's, I think, where the theory of mind started. I don't think you need language for a theory of mind. So I think that's where our social life started and that's where everything then was built on. And then when you had these weird flukes with the brain growing like crazy, forcing babies to be born so prematurely that their brain is nowhere near finished, but that makes them very neuroplastic, so even more sensitive to social cues.
- [19:42]
David McRaney
Is there any consensus as to why we became why our ancestors decided, let's go walk on two legs and get out of the trees? And risk being predated?
- [19:53]
Madeline Beekman
Well, is there ever a consensus in science? I think the prevailing theory is that the landscape changed so that the landscape became drier and when you came down out of the trees, there were more options to find food available. Of course, that's not. That can't be the right answer because the ancestor to chimpanzees and bonobos, they stayed up in trees. It's. It's one of those things that's hard to really know. We do know that the landscape changed at the same time it became more savannah, like et cetera. But with most of these things, they were just accidents or maybe sometimes stupidity. And that's what I like about evolution by natural selection. It's just making the best out of a bad job. Whereas often people. Evolution is this massive creative force that knows all and shapes species into making being the perfect species for that particular environment. It's not at all, oh, bugger. Something strange happened. So what are we going to do? We'll either go extinct or we're going to make it work. And I think that's the essence of natural selection.
- [21:03]
David McRaney
Okay, I love that. And so for some reason or another, our ancestors get go bipedal and we may never 100% know exactly what happened there, but it happened. And that leads to evolving different kinds of postures and different muscle groups and bones. And our. Our heads are. Are positioned differently, which gives us slightly different jaws and the pelvis changes so that we can run. And then we also have to sweat because we're running and doing all these other things and our hair is getting finer and thinner. We also started getting having the ability to not chase down a prey, but wear it out. And so we exhaust them, which gives us the ability to have much richer diets full of lots of calories and protein. All this stuff is contributing, but there's a trade off here. There's a real. These are great, but also one of the things you're gonna have to deal with is your babies are going to have to kind of come out kind of sideways. And that's going to require some help from your kin in addition to all the other things that are happening. You need help from your kin to deal with predation and helped your kin to do with all the hunting and all these other things that I, I In the book, you're making a case that there's a, a lot of sociality is coming online ahead of other things that you might assume, like Darwin and others thought that it was like we got big brains and got smart and then we did the other stuff. And it seems, the evidence seems to suggest it's the other way around for a lot of these things. So that leads to my next question, which is, okay, sure, but you've got other animals that are doing other similar things out there, but their brains didn't get very big. And you've got other ancestral lines in the primate world that didn't get big brains. And even our closest relatives, like the bonobos and the chimps, like, they're smart, but they don't have like giganto brains like us. What contributed to the big brain stuff?
- [23:23]
Madeline Beekman
That weird gene.
- [23:25]
David McRaney
Hey, just dropping in to say the weird gene that we're talking about is something like arhgap11b or srgap2c. There are a lot of these genes. They have lots of names, but it's a weird gene. You're saying there was a gene involved that led to this?
- [23:42]
Madeline Beekman
Yes. So that gene is a pseudo gene. So it's called a pseudogene because it used to be a functioning gene but then stop working, but you can still find it in the DNA. So that's when geneticists call it a pseudogene. You can find it in gorillas, you can find it in chimpanzees. I'm not sure if they're looked in bonobos. In Homo sapiens, for some weird reason, that gene regained its function. So it was copied first and that copy started doing stuff. Well, what is that stuff? That stuff is when the brain grows. So you've heard of stem cells. So stem cells are totipotent cells that you find in an embryo. So they can decide to become a liver cell or a heart cell or a skin cell or whatever. But once they're on that trajectory, they lost their flexibility. They now geared towards becoming a liver cell or a heart cell or a skin cell. The same is true in the brain. So when the brain is growing in the embryo, it starts off with what they call glial cells, and they are the stem cells, if you want. So they, the totipotent cells, they can still become anything. So they sort of start, see it as the outside of a balloon. So now you Have a balloon with a tiny little bit of air in it, and all the glial cells sit on the inside of the balloon, pushing out. So a glial cell has two choices. It can either make a sister cell so it duplicates, and then that sister cell sits next to it. So if you have all these glial cells duplicating, just making more glial cells, and they sit on the periphery of your balloon, the balloon will start to become bigger and bigger and bigger because you have a bigger ring of those glial cells. At some stage, a glial cell decides, I'm not going to make a sister anymore. I'm not going to clone myself anymore. I'm going to start differentiating into a neuron. And then it can no longer make copies of itself. It is that delay that that gene determines when a glial cell stops making copies of itself. So if that gene is in humans and Homo sapiens, that gene started to affect the number of copies that a glial cell makes. The gene got duplicated. I think in humans with a normal brain development, we have three copies. If you have a microcephalus, which means that you have a very small brain, which is a disease, you have two copies. And if you have a massive brain, which is also a human disease, then you have more than three copies. So I think it's five. The number of copies really has an influence on the size of the brain. So that gene was repaired, started making copies of itself, and the effect was that the glial cells started to copy themselves many, many, many, many, many, many times before they start to differentiate, to become neurons. And that led to this ballooning of the brain, literally ballooning of the brain. It could have been the end of our species, But I think because it allowed this real big brain with all this neuroplasticity that could be fed. Because Homo erectus already figured out how to start hunting, how to eat meat. So we were able to feed that brain with a lot of calories. Because of the increase in the brain size, the skull needed to change because otherwise it wouldn't fit. That led to weird changes in our throat that allowed us to make more precise sounds that then fed into this already being very social, already having a theory of mind, already having to communicate with your kin. And then it went from there. The sociality was the necessary background, if you wish, or foundation, that made our species be able to deal with this weird fluke, this massive brain size, massive increase in brain size. Thanks to this, Gena got repaired and then duplicated and then you get this positive feedback.
- [28:28]
David McRaney
This is such a hot take. And I haven't seen this anywhere before. And this is something I've always been obsessed with and fascinated by. And I had never seen someone take this angle that you're taking. And so here we are, we've got these bipedal hominids who have already become social, already have theory of mind, already have jaws who are chewing up stuff and are sweating and are running and have, are hunting and they have lots of calories coming in. You've got all these foundational things that are already in place. Then some weird gene thing happens and their brains are getting way too big. But because of all the other stuff that's already there, instead of it being a thing that might have ended the, the line, it's manageable. The issue it brings up though is, oh no, our babies are going to have big heads in addition to all this other weird stuff we're having to deal with. With the baby coming out sideways and birth and pelvises. Now we got big heads on in addition to it. This seems to lead to, and it's a really important bullet point. The baby's going to come out earlier than might ought to. In another, other species, will, will grow the baby for a long time and it'll come out after an incredibly long period of incubation, whereas ours seem to almost be born premature. Even when they're born, we expect them to come out the. Am I, am I getting things right here? Our babies are coming out way earlier than, as a way to kind of manage all of this. The big brain babies come out earlier than they ought to. Is that. Was that where we're going?
- [30:13]
Madeline Beekman
The issue is the development of the baby itself. So in that respect, they're very premature. They're premature in the sense that their brain is so underdeveloped it's not funny. So I recently, she's now three months old, have a granddaughter and I was just. Because I've just written this book, I look at her very differently. For one thing, her head is, is gigantic compared to the rest. And when she was just born, if you would just leave her, she would be dead within maybe an hour. So it's insane to produce these extremely underdeveloped babies. So it's not the length of the pregnancy that's weird, it's the underdevelopment of the brain that is weird in that respect. Our babies are just completely complete exceptions. But then when you look at these, when they're a few days old, These little things connect with you. They look in your eyes. It's almost you feel. And of course I'm biased because I'm.
- [31:17]
David McRaney
Also related, but this is a bias that, that billions of human beings have experienced. So it's totally a thing. Yes, yes, please.
- [31:25]
Madeline Beekman
And of course they, they're born in a kin group because we already lived in kin groups. So you have this tiny little thing that just cries out. It almost looks at you and says, look after me because I can't look after myself. And it will benefit you because I've got half of your genes or 25% of your genes or whatever. So it's this total manipulative. Well, actually, all young are totally manipulative. I think I give that example in a book that I once gave a lecture on parental care. I had this, this collage of young animals and they all look totally adorable. You just all want to pick them up and look after them. And Conrad Lorenz, who probably was a genius, he did win the Nobel Prize in 1976, I think he came up with this idea that young animals are born weird characteristics that just make them irresistible. Why they have to be irresistible because they can't look after themselves. So as soon as they're born, they have to give off these signals. Well, you have to look after me. And I think human babies have just perfected it. So there's this beautiful studies too, that looked at the effects that the smell of a baby has, but on particularly young women, there is also effect on young men, but the effect on young women is much stronger. It's just, it's, it invites these motherly feelings. Even in women who don't have children themselves, they are just the master manipulators. And they can, because we already had this theory of mind.
- [33:12]
David McRaney
So you've got this underdeveloped brain, thanks to all these conditions we've, we've described. And the, this underdeveloped entity that is adorable and irresistible has all of these needs that must be met, but also is connecting with you, looking at you in the eyes and very quickly making sounds and babbling and if, if not that, wailing when in distress, all of this sets the stage for where you make the argument. Language emerges in this space, that there's a function here. And it's all because all these foundations are in play. And that's where I would like to head next. You make this beautiful argument and instead of saying it for you, what are you saying here about, about the emergence of language in this space?
- [34:14]
Madeline Beekman
Now, earlier you asked, well, why Are we the only ones that have a big brain? And I started off talking about their gene, which is. I'm not backtracking from that. But another question, okay, why are we the only one that had this weird fluke that could get away with it? And that is because of the sociality. Again. So this is thing that people call the gray ceiling. So why doesn't brain size keep increasing in other species, especially social species, species like the chimpanzees that you mentioned, but also corvids, birds like crows and Caledonian crows in particular. They are very clever. But yet you don't see this increase in brain size. That is because at some stage the brain can't get any bigger because there's no way you can get enough resources to keep feeding that expanding brain. But we humans could because of our high sociality. And this is where language then comes into. Because if you. So we're talking about Homo sapiens. Homo Sapiens is about 300,000 years old, which is nothing in evolutionary terms. But if you look at the way we look now, or more precise, the way our head looks now, that is about 150,000 years. So for the first 150,000 years, we probably looked quite similar to Neanderthals. So I think the biggest change in our skull happened in 150,000 years, which led to the changes that allows us to make those precise sounds. Because you have to have. The tongue needs to be adjusted. The larynx needs to be high enough, but not too low enough, but not too low in the throat to be able to control speech. The muscle musculature needed to change so that we can change the size of our vocal cavity that makes the sound. We needed to be able to control our breathing. That fine tuning of this communication that is relatively new, As I said, 150,000 years was driven by the need to coordinate care with a large number of individuals to look after these children that needed 15 years of it. Then the other big change that happens sort of simultaneously is individuals, adults starting to live longer. So this is when you get grandmothers and grandfathers and menopause, where the female stops reproducing herself, but she's still present and helps the younger individuals look after the young. So grandmothers in particular, grandfathers too, but to a lesser extent, for reasons that we can go into if you want, started to help their daughters, particularly their daughters help their offspring. So you. You basically get a recruitment of other individuals that also help looking after those young. And if you have language that's much easier to Put that all together.
- [37:25]
David McRaney
So if I'm hearing you correctly and I'm understanding this, you get this. This are these positive feedback loops. And we see them in other species, but not to the extent that you see it in humans, which is the more social you can be, the more you can care for this underdeveloped being for the enormous amount of time you have to care for this underdeveloped being. And the more proficient you can be with language, the more social you can be. And all of these are multiple interactions acting positive feedback loops that lead to more care. So you end up with things that emerge like the culture and difficult and dense grammars and long childhoods with lots of learnings. And all this is very recent. I know that it always kills me when they talk about if you take the amount of time from 300,000 years ago to today, if you shrunk that down to being one year, that the, the written language emerges on December 26, I've seen that several times. That's really amazing to me. Like it's so much like, like that's we just got started in so many ways. And language emerges very recently and as a thing that exists as a entity that as a phenomenon on our planet, in our solar system, in this galaxy, the wing of the galaxy, language is at least on Earth it's a fairly recent phenomenon. I have never seen it put this way before that, that it was language is the feed. The positive feedback loop of language emerges because of how much sociality is required to take care of these very needy babies, if I'm hearing you correctly.
- [39:18]
Madeline Beekman
No, you're right. And the other thing is, so at the same time that we produce those extremely needy babies, we started to make many more of them. So the interbirth interval in humans, not modern humans, but if you go back to hunter gatherers is much shorter than it should be. Because why on Earth if you produce these babies that need so much care, are you going to produce more of them? That just doesn't make any sense unless you realize what does natural selection work on, acts on, I should say behaviors or whatever that increases reproductive output. And that's probably why we out competed Neanderthals and the Denisovans with whom we.
- [40:00]
David McRaney
Mated because we're having babies like every two point something years versus other primates have them much farther apart, four years.
- [40:11]
Madeline Beekman
I think in chimpanzees. But that's something that I find so sad that when our species came into existence there were probably about five other human like species or homo species on the planet. How interesting it would have been if I would now walk out of the door and bump into a different species of Homo.
- [40:30]
David McRaney
Yeah, yeah, I think about that. I think about, like with Lord of the Rings or Star Trek or Star wars, we have multiple different bipedal hominid is. You know, cultures that exist, that enter, that share space, and we don't do that. That. Yes, it makes me sad too. We should at least have hobbits. That would be nice.
- [40:55]
Madeline Beekman
Oh, we used to, but they did.
- [41:01]
David McRaney
I, I want to, I do want to ask you a couple of last things here, which is, given all of this, if we go with this as where language comes from or how it emerges as a type of behavior that we exhibit, I know that we have certain brain regions like Wernicke's area and Broca's area that are vital to language. And if they are damaged or underdeveloped in some way, we'll either won't be able to produce language, won't be able to understand it. Well, but still, in the bigger picture, there's a question, there's a debate as to is language mostly acquired or is language straight up innate? Like, for the level of genes, do we have like a gene that says, with this gene you will now have language? And I'm wondering where you are on all that. Like, I know we have the sclera and, and I knew that from. I had an episode about gossip once where 68% of all human communication is gossip. And of course it is. You need to know who to trust. And there's all sorts of things that go into this. But there's still a question of are we super smart and super capable, and therefore we acquire language because it's this thing that has emerged in our behavioral routines, and it's like a virus that is so useful that it's more acquired than innate? And there's another wing that just thinks, no, no, we just, we come online and we start talking because we're genetically programmed to do so. I wonder where you are on that.
- [42:36]
Madeline Beekman
There is no gene for language. I mean, people have looked for the language gene, which they thought was Fuchs P2, which turned out, yes, it's important. It's a gene that's important in communication, but also in things like mice. Mice also have. All vertebrates have Fuchs P2. And yes, it has something to do with the ability to vocalize, but it's not the gene for language. So I think it's innate. It's innate in anything that is extremely social with a Brain large enough. But bonobos and chimpanzees don't have the morphology to be able to speak. So they can't go any further than just understanding if you raise them as almost as a human being.
- [43:19]
David McRaney
Let me ask you a final question, which is, who do you hope reads this book? And at the end of the day, what do you hope they get out of it?
- [43:27]
Madeline Beekman
The main thing. So if there's one thing that annoys me immensely is when people make the assumption that we are something special outside of nature. And people have been doing that since the Greeks. You know, you have God, angels, and us, and then you have nature. We are outside of nature. We are not. We really are just an ape. An ape that can talk, but we're an ape. And, you know, things like morality, that's not specific to humans. It. It all comes from our ancestors, which is the continuing line of evolved creatures or creatures that have been produced by natural selection. And it all comes down to, if you don't reproduce, if you don't produce more offspring than the other lot, then you're a Gorner. And we just happen to have fallen onto something that gave us the ability to produce more offspring, to become hypersocial. Humans are special. Humans are unique, but so is every other species on the planet. I guess that's maybe the point I want to get across.
- [44:44]
David McRaney
That reminds me of something. And I'll leave you with this is Richard Feynman. My favorite thing he ever wrote was. And it's just this, like. It's a little note. He was about to eat some potatoes, and he was writing it as a notebook, and he thought to himself, he's like, you know. You know, when you get down to it, these potatoes, they're going to eat them, and then they're going to be digested, and some. Some of these potatoes are going to become my brain. Like, they're going to be in here. And he was like. Like, every time I stick my fork in this potato and put it in my mouth, I'm inviting it to share my dreams. I can't. I love that so much that the idea that, yes, I am this. This is one enormously complex, interacting, gigantic system of stuff that's. And the idea that the potatoes are. Get the dream if I eat them is a really nice thought. Madeline Beekman, thank you very much for giving me so much of your time today. This has been wonderful.
- [45:54]
Madeline Beekman
Well, thank you. Yes, I really enjoyed the conversation. And of course, it's lovely when people like what I wrote. So that's. Yeah. It's very nice to hear. Thank you.
- [46:14]
David McRaney
That is it for this episode of the you're not so smart podcast. For links to everything that we talked about, head to your not so smart.com or check, check the show notes right there in your podcast player. You can find my book how minds change wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details are@davidmcraney.com and I'll have all that in the show notes as well. Right there in your podcast player. And for all the past episodes, you can go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible, Spotify. Yes, already said that. Spot it. Go to Spotify. That's a place you can get it. Apple Podcast also another place you can get it. And you can go to you are not so smart dot com. Follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and Bluesky and everything else. VidMcRaney. Follow the showtsmartblog Also, we're on Facebook at you are not so Smart. And if you'd like to support this one person operation, no editors, no staff, just me. Go to patreon.com you are not SoSmart. Pitching in at any amount gets you the show ad free. But at the higher amounts, you get posters and T shirts and signed books and other stuff. The opening music, that's Clash by Caravan Palace. And if you really, really, really, really want to support the show, just tell everyone you know about it. If there's a particular episode you really liked, share that one and check back in about two weeks for a fresh new episode. And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [48:01]
Madeline Beekman
Limu is that guy with the binocular watching us.
- [48:04]
David McRaney
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.