science and mathematics: January 2008 Archives

Evolution explains why LOLCats control your mind. The basic argument extrapolates on this little bit from a Yale study

Since keeping an eye on predators and prey was important during our evolution, Joshua New and colleagues investigated whether animals, both human and otherwise, are more likely to grab our visual attention. [...] As predicted, subjects were faster and more accurate detecting changes involving animals than inanimate objects. If experience were producing this bias, then people should also be good at detecting changes involving automobiles, which as drivers and pedestrians they have been trained all their lives to monitor for sudden, life-or-death changes in trajectory. Yet subjects were much slower in detecting changes to vehicles than to more rarely experienced animal species, indicating that learning is not the source of this difference. The bias for animals, the authors conclude, is like the appendix: present in modern humans because it was useful for our ancestors, even if useless now.

And the captions are one of these changes that people notice in pictures of cute kitties, which is why they catch our attention. That's the argument, at least.

Now they've gone and done it: they've messed with linguistics. When they came for the biologists, I fought... so nevermind that train of thought.

Really, the Language Log entry does a good job of describing what's going on with a new wave of the Edenics phenomenon, which I thought was a rather unique or sporadic theological attack on science because of my Southern Baptist upbringing. But there are books, websites, and pages on Creationist Websites. From the book's author's website:

Here you will discover that ALL human words contain forms of the Edenic roots within them. These proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words were programmed into our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, before the language dispersion, or babble at the Tower of Babel -- which kickstarted multi-national human history. I congratulate you for investigating for yourself if language is an engineered miracle or merely the evolved gesturing of chimps.

Note that this author thinks that Hebrew is the source of English. Hypotheses like Edenics, i.e. the religious versions of the proto-world language theories, are based on two other hypotheses: Young Earth Creationism and the Tower of Babel As Origin of Language Diversity, a.k.a. Wrathful Dispersion. These religious theories of language origin and theories of language based on them are absolute shite for a variety of reasons, one of which is that living, breathing, speaking people have been around for longer than 6,000 years, much longer, and it's poppycock to think that everybody from the origin and spread of H. sapiens to the time of Babylon spoke the same language, especially when you look at extremely old populations like native Australians, who arrived, conservatively, 40,000 years ago, and who were geographically isolated when water covered the land bridge over which they could have traveled about 8,000 years ago. Also, the original, Edenic language would most definitely not be early Biblical Hebrew, which any cursory glance at a good history book's chapters on Mesopotamia and the preceding time would make damn clear (Sumerian, for example, doesn't fit into any language family, really, like Basque).

Just knowing how long Native Australians have lilved there is enough to dismiss Edenics out of hand, so while I want to read the Edenics book, I don't know if I'd have the patience. I should get it so I can address the phonology-type arguments he has, but, like I said, I don't know if I have the patience, and phonetics isn't a subject I get much joy from.