Evolutionary biologists’ research shows that humans and their biological cousins split from their common ancestor about 1.5 million years ago.
The competitive advantage of recent primates over their common ancestor through the “natural selection” mechanism led to the extinction of the common ancestor, and the current cast apes, with all their differences, continued to live a similar life pattern.
But another “gene mutation” that occurred about 200,000 to 300,000 years ago completely separated human destiny from its biological cousins. The recent mutation caused a part of the modern human brain (homosapien’sapiens) to be completely larger than its cousins. This part of the brain is called the prefrontal lobe.
Everything we call the “human psyche”, which has a completely different function from the function of the nervous system of other animals, is the product of the action of this prefrontal cortex of the brain.
The prefrontal lobe itself has three components: “orbitofrontal”, “median” and ” dorsolateral “. The dorsolateral part of the prefrontal lobe has a function called “abstraction”. “Abstraction” means discovering a common denominator between different phenomena.
For example, crows, parrots and swallows are different in many ways; But the prefrontal lobe of the dorsolateral part makes it easy for us to see that we can fit these three into one “class”: the birds.
Abstraction is the first step in forming a “word”. Think of the words flight, growth, power, growth, destruction, and love. Each of them has hundreds of examples. When we talk about “power”, do we mean the power of an elephant or the power of a bomb? Physical strength or mental strength?
There is not the slightest “objective” similarity between the power of an elephant and the power of an earthquake and the mental power of a patient. But the dorsolateral part of our brain can detect and see something that lacks “common objectivity.”
When man was able to discover “commonalities,” he was able to “simplify” the world. Now, instead of having tens of thousands of phenomena in mind, he could think of hundreds of phenomena, and just as zero-one system based computer has a computational speed of tens of times the human brain with a decimal basis, so does the human brain with this mutation and gain power.
Abstraction became much more powerful than animal brains. But the word did not make so much difference as the “sentence”! From Chomsky’s point of view, Chomsky’s reproductive linguistics is not a language of words, but a sentence. Sentences make communication more accurate and faster. Consider, for example, the three words “child,” “mother,” and “kiss.”
If language were just words, we could think of the kissing event between mother and child by presenting these three words, but who was active in the event, who was the object, and when did the exchange occur? These three words are not clear, but when we say, “Mother, kiss the child,” it is clear that the mother was the perpetrator of this event, the child is the object of this event, and this event occurred in the past. According to Chomsky, our brain is linguistic.
Research by Chomsky et al. Has strongly demonstrated that the formation of language is completely dependent on the brain, which is genetically predisposed to language acceptance, and this talent is not created gradually but all at once under the influence of a gene mutation.
This is a point that has a cultural meaning for me. Chomsky’s discovery is a common ground between theories that denied each other until this discovery:
The myth of creation in the known religions tells of the sudden creation of man, while the findings of biology indicate gradual evolution.
Until now, mythical beliefs with scientific findings have prevented the aggregation, but the mutation that made our brains language is a common chapter between Darwinian myths of creation and the gradual evolution of science:
Although man and the other cast apes separated from each other step by step, at one point in this step-by-step separation, man reached the steps of a ladder that, like a “snake game,” drove him miles away from his biological cousins. It also has a more important implication:
A small finding (small not in importance but in insignificance in the mass of scientific findings that are constantly increasing in geometric progression) can lead to a huge change in the principles of our attitude (paradigm).
Proof of the genetics of language can play an important role in the centuries-long debate between philosophers of rationalism and philosophers of empiricism in favour of proponents of microcosm, as it proves that the mind has the same body as the body. Instincts that are innate and have an “a priori” presence.
What the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung calls the “Archetype” (which in Persian is called equations such as archetype, parable, parable, etc.) is nothing but the instinct of the mind, the innate tendency for a particular way of thinking.
Earlier, the Frenchman René Descartes used the term “innate ideas” and the German “Emmanuel Kant” introduced the concept into “philosophical theory of epistemology” by using “categories of thought”. But the “associationism” of behaviourists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prevented the entry of these theories of rationalist philosophers into the mainstream of science.
“Psychoanalysis” was a weight that prevented the flow of psychology from falling into the theory of “empiricists” cognition, and psychology played a role between these two theories of cognition!
Interestingly, Chomsky’s findings are based on inductive practical methodology, a method based on the theory of cognition of British empiricists, and this is another example of how the end of a path can lead to a path that was initially in the opposite direction:
“Everything that reaches the end turns against itself!”
I have tried to explain this concept of “Taoism” in simple language in the book “Ten Unanswered Questions”. This book, along with five other volumes of my book, will be published in the six-volume collection of Life Skills by Hamnashin Publications.
Dr. Mohammad Reza Sargolzaei – Psychiatrist
Translated By: Negar Kolkar
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PS:
You can read Chomsky’s arguments for the inherent nature of language in the first four chapters of the following book:
“Psychology of Language”, written by Jane Echson, translated by Dr. Abdul Khalil Hajati, Amirkabir Publications
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