暗微幽光

Vaule of one word

“Cultural evoluation has shown us that one word can be worth a thousand genes.” This is the close setnence of the article on Nature 456:7218 that Szathmary and Szamado proposed. Thie title of this article is “Language: a social history of words“. This article beginnes from the common sense ‘ language as communication tool for socialized human being’, and emphasizes the history of language evoluation as long as the development of human societies. This notion leads toward the authors’ main point about the evoluation of human being: every cognitive trait of a human being depends on with each other. They list some cross-discipline studies to demonstrate the involvement of genes in the acquirement of cognitive traits. In the final part of this article , they propose some challenges to ‘Swiss army knife’ view assuming that the brain function underpinning language is independent of the others supporting the other cognitive traits. Research of language impairment has shown that, instead of “specific capicities”, the “intermediate capicities” are the results of evolution after generations of sperad and mutation.

I would say this is a fanstinatic concept to every one. This notion raise from the summarized knowledge of psychological and genetic research. The concern about human society in this article is a point engaging this thinking. In my reasoning, This concept combine the sides of micro-scope research such as psychology and genetics and macro-scope research such as sociology and anthropology. The empirical research they mentioned figure out that they emphasized the side of micro-scope than the side of macro-scope. Indeed, their conclusion is ambitious, but there is a big distance we have not pass if we have a firm empirical fundemental.