One possibility is that the first species that masters language, by virtue of being able to access intellectual superpowers inaccessible to other animals, has a high probability of becoming the dominant species extremely quickly. (Humans underwent the agricultural revolution within 50,000 years of behavioral modernity—a blink of an eye on evolutionary timescales—after which their dominance as a species became unquestionable.) Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time, this would imply a simple anthropic argument for our unique capacities for language: we shouldn’t expect to see more than one species at a time with mastery of language, and we just happen to be the species that made it there first.
I agree with the first two sentences of that passage, but I’m not sure I see the logic behind the third sentence. Depending on how we define a “dominant species”, perhaps we necessarily can only see one at a time, or should expect to only see one at a time. But the prior sentences were about how the first species to master language will become dominant. If another species now mastered language, we’d have a very strong lead on them in terms of cultural institutions and technology, so it seems exceedingly unlikely that they’d become dominant. So on that front, it seems like we could see another species master language, without anthropic issues arising.
The other question is whether we’dallow another species to master language. I’ve never considered this question before, but my guess is that we would. From examples so far where individual animals have appeared to get a handle on aspects of language, people seem fascinated and delighted, rather than afraid that we’ll be overthrown. And species that are able to at least imitate human communication, like parrots, seem to often be kept as pets specifically for that ability, because some humans enjoy it.
So I’d guess that if we discovered that another species was mastering language, we’d become fascinated and/or delighted, and study them a lot, and make extra efforts to preserve them if necessary (e.g., if they were endangered). I think we’d quite reasonably not be afraid, because that species abilities, culture, power, etc. be so far behind ours. I think if that species started becoming especially capable, we might limit their advancements or even wipe them out, but that would likely happen years to millennia after mastery of language, not immediately.
This means that it seems to me totally plausible that a dominant species could witness another species coming to gradually master language, without any anthropic issues arising, because neither species is necessarily wiped out in the process. If this is the case, then it seems like the fact we’re the only species that has mastered language remains as strong evidence as it seemed at first of the “difficulty” of mastering language (though I’m not sure how strong it is as evidence for that).
Is there a way I’m misinterpreting you or missing something?
The other question is whether we’dallow another species to master language. I’ve never considered this question before, but my guess is that we would.
At this point, we’d encourage it. (See people trying to communicate with dolphins, or dogs, or gorillas, or parrots, or...)
But the relevant time period was probably when there were multiple species in the homo genus; as most similar to humans, they were probably also the fewest steps away from language and also the most likely to be a competitor for the same ecological niche. There’s much more reward to anatomically modern humans for driving neanderthals to extinction than driving parrots to extinction, and so we don’t see our near competitors in the race to language anymore.
It’s not that we’d wipe out another species which started to demonstrate language. Rather, since the period during which humans have had language is so short, it’d be an unlikely coincidence for another species to undergo the process of mastering language during the period in which we already had language.
(I may be misunderstanding you or the OP. Also, I’m writing this when sleepy.)
I think that that’s true. But I don’t think that that’s an anthropic explanation for why we got there first, or an anthropic explanation for why there’s no other species with language. Instead, that argument seems itself premised on language being hard and unlikely in any given timestep. Given that, it’s unlikely that two species will develop language within a few tens of thousands of years of each other. But it seems like that’d be the “regular explanation”, in a sense, and seems to support that language is hard or unlikely.
It seemed like the OP was trying to make some other anthropic argument that somewhat “explains away” the apparent difficulty of language. (The OP also said “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”, which in that context seems to imply that a second species developing language would topple us or be squashed by us and that that was important to the argument.)
This is why I said:
If this is the case, then it seems like the fact we’re the only species that has mastered language remains as strong evidence as it seemed at first of the “difficulty” of mastering language (though I’m not sure how strong it is as evidence for that). (emphasis added)
Perhaps the idea is something like “Some species had to get there first. That species will be the ‘first observer’, in some meaningful sense. Whenever that happened, and whatever species became that first observer, there’d likely be a while in which no other species had language, and that species wondered why that was so.”
But again, this doesn’t seem to me to increase or decrease the strength (whatever it happens to have been) of the evidence that “the gap we’ve observed with no second species developing language” provides for the hypothesis “language is hard or computationally expensive or whatever to develop”.
Perhaps the argument is something like that many species may be on separate pathways that will get to language, and humans just happened to get there first, and what this anthropic argument “explains away” (to some extent) is the idea that the very specific architecture of the human brain was very especially equipped for language?
Perhaps the idea is something like “Some species had to get there first. That species will be the ‘first observer’, in some meaningful sense. Whenever that happened, and whatever species became that first observer, there’d likely be a while in which no other species had language, and that species wondered why that was so.”
I think this is the idea. You’re right that it doesn’t change our estimate of how difficult language is from the non-existence of a second species with language; the thing that it does is point out that “even if you observe 1 element of a rare set, you shouldn’t think the set is common instead of rare, because you were conditioning on observing at least one element of that set.” [That is, we’re not seeing any of the planets that have life but no language, or directly observing any of the 50 kiloyear time periods when Earth was one of those.]
(Not sure the following makes sense—I think I find anthropics hard to think about.)
Interesting. This sounds to me like a reason why the anthropic principle suggests language may been harder to evolve than one might think, because we think we’ve got a data point of it evolving (which we do) and that this suggests it was likely to evolve by now and on Eath, but in fact it’s just that we wouldn’t be thinking about the question until/unless it evolved. So it could be that in the majority of cases it wouldn’t have evolved (or not yet?), but we don’t “observe” those.
But I thought the OP was using anthropics in the other direction, since that paragraph follows:
If language isn’t a particularly difficult cognitive capacity to acquire, why don’t we see more animal species with language? (emphasis added)
Basically, I interpreted the argument as something like “This is why the fact no other species has evolved language may be strong evidence that language is difficult.” And it sounds like you’re providing an interesting argument like “This is why the fact that we evolved language may not provide strong evidence that language is (relatively) easy.”
Perhaps the OP was indeed doing similar, though; perhaps the idea was “Actually, it’s not the case that language isn’t a particularly difficult cognitive capacity to acquire.”
But this all still seems disjointed from “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”, which is true, but in context seems to imply that the argument involves the idea that we shouldn’t see a second species to evolve language while we have it. Which seems like a separate matter.
One could say that ants have a global population, need mainly only consider other ants and have way more other species adapt too them rather than them adapting to others. The kind of arguments that would “disqualify” a weird kind of species can be used to make checks whether a conception of domination past muster.
For example the earth is not 100% covered in cities (human nests). In that way one could say that humans are only in very small localised areas. Domesticating cows or dogs is somewhat tame compared to how ants harvest resources from other species.
Because of reproductive compatiblity other human species were more of a subspecies. Domination via direct competition is useful for comparin species that share ecological niches. If a species is going to further speciate they are in such direct comparability. But for species that occupy different niches it might not make sense to call one of them dominant even if one of them was way more complex than the other.
Humans do have outgroup hate behaviours which can lead to stuff like burning a competing village. But humans do not have a sense that they should try to drive bears or lions into extinction.
Culture also doesn’t need to monospecial. We have role for dogs and parrots to live in. We even have jobs for dogs and have given war medals and such. A big limitor on why animals are outside of culture is that they are not brought into upbringing or education programms. Humans raised by wolfes are not especially impressive but we let wolves rise wolfcubs. Chantek was a orangutan which was selected in a an experiment to be brough up as a human. He managed to atleast get to a point where he would clean up for money and use it in a fast food restaurant for treats. The limit to the development was community acceptance as city folks didn’t feel safe or didn’t want to have a monkey walking freely about so at assault/sexual misbehaviour drama he was sentenced to life in prison ie taken out of the human society. The limit probably isn’t neurological there. As he was a working sign language conversational partner one gets insight how that felt. When asked about his conspecies living mates in zoo “Who are they?” he answered “dogs” as used to interacting with humans which he probably saw himself as a person and the usually brought up organisms as non-persons.
I think what the author meant was that the anthropic principle removes the lower bound on how likely it is for any particular species to evolve language; similar to how the anthropic principle removes the lower bound on how likely it is for life to arise on any particular planet.
So our language capability constitutes zero evidence for “evolving language is easy” (and thus dissolving any need to explain why language arose; it could just be a freak 1 in 10^50 accident); similar to our existence constituting zero evidence for “life is abundant in the universe” (and thus dissolving the Fermi paradox).
I think that makes sense. This seems similar to Vaniver’s interpretation (if I’m interpreting the interpretation correctly). But as I mention in my reply to that comment, that looks to me like a different argument to the OP’s one, and seems disjointed from “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”.
Interesting post.
I agree with the first two sentences of that passage, but I’m not sure I see the logic behind the third sentence. Depending on how we define a “dominant species”, perhaps we necessarily can only see one at a time, or should expect to only see one at a time. But the prior sentences were about how the first species to master language will become dominant. If another species now mastered language, we’d have a very strong lead on them in terms of cultural institutions and technology, so it seems exceedingly unlikely that they’d become dominant. So on that front, it seems like we could see another species master language, without anthropic issues arising.
The other question is whether we’d allow another species to master language. I’ve never considered this question before, but my guess is that we would. From examples so far where individual animals have appeared to get a handle on aspects of language, people seem fascinated and delighted, rather than afraid that we’ll be overthrown. And species that are able to at least imitate human communication, like parrots, seem to often be kept as pets specifically for that ability, because some humans enjoy it.
So I’d guess that if we discovered that another species was mastering language, we’d become fascinated and/or delighted, and study them a lot, and make extra efforts to preserve them if necessary (e.g., if they were endangered). I think we’d quite reasonably not be afraid, because that species abilities, culture, power, etc. be so far behind ours. I think if that species started becoming especially capable, we might limit their advancements or even wipe them out, but that would likely happen years to millennia after mastery of language, not immediately.
This means that it seems to me totally plausible that a dominant species could witness another species coming to gradually master language, without any anthropic issues arising, because neither species is necessarily wiped out in the process. If this is the case, then it seems like the fact we’re the only species that has mastered language remains as strong evidence as it seemed at first of the “difficulty” of mastering language (though I’m not sure how strong it is as evidence for that).
Is there a way I’m misinterpreting you or missing something?
At this point, we’d encourage it. (See people trying to communicate with dolphins, or dogs, or gorillas, or parrots, or...)
But the relevant time period was probably when there were multiple species in the homo genus; as most similar to humans, they were probably also the fewest steps away from language and also the most likely to be a competitor for the same ecological niche. There’s much more reward to anatomically modern humans for driving neanderthals to extinction than driving parrots to extinction, and so we don’t see our near competitors in the race to language anymore.
It’s not that we’d wipe out another species which started to demonstrate language. Rather, since the period during which humans have had language is so short, it’d be an unlikely coincidence for another species to undergo the process of mastering language during the period in which we already had language.
(I may be misunderstanding you or the OP. Also, I’m writing this when sleepy.)
I think that that’s true. But I don’t think that that’s an anthropic explanation for why we got there first, or an anthropic explanation for why there’s no other species with language. Instead, that argument seems itself premised on language being hard and unlikely in any given timestep. Given that, it’s unlikely that two species will develop language within a few tens of thousands of years of each other. But it seems like that’d be the “regular explanation”, in a sense, and seems to support that language is hard or unlikely.
It seemed like the OP was trying to make some other anthropic argument that somewhat “explains away” the apparent difficulty of language. (The OP also said “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”, which in that context seems to imply that a second species developing language would topple us or be squashed by us and that that was important to the argument.)
This is why I said:
Perhaps the idea is something like “Some species had to get there first. That species will be the ‘first observer’, in some meaningful sense. Whenever that happened, and whatever species became that first observer, there’d likely be a while in which no other species had language, and that species wondered why that was so.”
But again, this doesn’t seem to me to increase or decrease the strength (whatever it happens to have been) of the evidence that “the gap we’ve observed with no second species developing language” provides for the hypothesis “language is hard or computationally expensive or whatever to develop”.
Perhaps the argument is something like that many species may be on separate pathways that will get to language, and humans just happened to get there first, and what this anthropic argument “explains away” (to some extent) is the idea that the very specific architecture of the human brain was very especially equipped for language?
I think this is the idea. You’re right that it doesn’t change our estimate of how difficult language is from the non-existence of a second species with language; the thing that it does is point out that “even if you observe 1 element of a rare set, you shouldn’t think the set is common instead of rare, because you were conditioning on observing at least one element of that set.” [That is, we’re not seeing any of the planets that have life but no language, or directly observing any of the 50 kiloyear time periods when Earth was one of those.]
(Not sure the following makes sense—I think I find anthropics hard to think about.)
Interesting. This sounds to me like a reason why the anthropic principle suggests language may been harder to evolve than one might think, because we think we’ve got a data point of it evolving (which we do) and that this suggests it was likely to evolve by now and on Eath, but in fact it’s just that we wouldn’t be thinking about the question until/unless it evolved. So it could be that in the majority of cases it wouldn’t have evolved (or not yet?), but we don’t “observe” those.
But I thought the OP was using anthropics in the other direction, since that paragraph follows:
Basically, I interpreted the argument as something like “This is why the fact no other species has evolved language may be strong evidence that language is difficult.” And it sounds like you’re providing an interesting argument like “This is why the fact that we evolved language may not provide strong evidence that language is (relatively) easy.”
Perhaps the OP was indeed doing similar, though; perhaps the idea was “Actually, it’s not the case that language isn’t a particularly difficult cognitive capacity to acquire.”
But this all still seems disjointed from “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”, which is true, but in context seems to imply that the argument involves the idea that we shouldn’t see a second species to evolve language while we have it. Which seems like a separate matter.
One could say that ants have a global population, need mainly only consider other ants and have way more other species adapt too them rather than them adapting to others. The kind of arguments that would “disqualify” a weird kind of species can be used to make checks whether a conception of domination past muster.
For example the earth is not 100% covered in cities (human nests). In that way one could say that humans are only in very small localised areas. Domesticating cows or dogs is somewhat tame compared to how ants harvest resources from other species.
Because of reproductive compatiblity other human species were more of a subspecies. Domination via direct competition is useful for comparin species that share ecological niches. If a species is going to further speciate they are in such direct comparability. But for species that occupy different niches it might not make sense to call one of them dominant even if one of them was way more complex than the other.
Humans do have outgroup hate behaviours which can lead to stuff like burning a competing village. But humans do not have a sense that they should try to drive bears or lions into extinction.
Culture also doesn’t need to monospecial. We have role for dogs and parrots to live in. We even have jobs for dogs and have given war medals and such. A big limitor on why animals are outside of culture is that they are not brought into upbringing or education programms. Humans raised by wolfes are not especially impressive but we let wolves rise wolfcubs. Chantek was a orangutan which was selected in a an experiment to be brough up as a human. He managed to atleast get to a point where he would clean up for money and use it in a fast food restaurant for treats. The limit to the development was community acceptance as city folks didn’t feel safe or didn’t want to have a monkey walking freely about so at assault/sexual misbehaviour drama he was sentenced to life in prison ie taken out of the human society. The limit probably isn’t neurological there. As he was a working sign language conversational partner one gets insight how that felt. When asked about his conspecies living mates in zoo “Who are they?” he answered “dogs” as used to interacting with humans which he probably saw himself as a person and the usually brought up organisms as non-persons.
I think what the author meant was that the anthropic principle removes the lower bound on how likely it is for any particular species to evolve language; similar to how the anthropic principle removes the lower bound on how likely it is for life to arise on any particular planet.
So our language capability constitutes zero evidence for “evolving language is easy” (and thus dissolving any need to explain why language arose; it could just be a freak 1 in 10^50 accident); similar to our existence constituting zero evidence for “life is abundant in the universe” (and thus dissolving the Fermi paradox).
I think that makes sense. This seems similar to Vaniver’s interpretation (if I’m interpreting the interpretation correctly). But as I mention in my reply to that comment, that looks to me like a different argument to the OP’s one, and seems disjointed from “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”.