"Chomsky on Evolution", Stony Brook Interview #3 with Richard Larson

[Music] [Applause] hello we're here today with internationally known MIT linguist noam chomsky co-author of a recent science article on the evolution of language that article is entitled the Faculty of language what is it who has it and how did it evolve mr. Chomsky in your long writings about the the nature of language acquisition of language by individuals has played an important part in your thinking and you've commented on it in in depth its nature and its significance on the other hand the acquisition of language by our species seems to be a new topic for you one you haven't talked about is in detail before are you excited about this and give us a little bit of background on your engagement in the topic well it from my point of view it became it's not lack of interest it's just that I've never seen anything that could be said about it it's both too hard and too easy it's too easy because they're so easy to make up all sorts of possible scenarios in fact just they come to mind instantly and a lot of them are in the literature it's too hard because there's no way to tell whether any of them have any plausibility little own or credibility the problem has been my view has always been to try to parcel out the topic in such a way that at least parts of it can be studied and that's essentially what this is about actually doesn't say anything about the evolution of language it just says here's a way of looking at the topic with various components some of which can be investigated by the comparative method which is about the only successful method some of which might be very significant if certain ideas about the nature recent ideas about the nature of language are correct so if it turns out that in fact to some in some interesting sense the computational system of the core computational system has optimization properties in particular that it's something like an optimal solution to the problem of linking interface conditions if that's true then there are many avenues to explore that could turn out to be interesting they're kind of barely mentioned at the end so there are other optimization strategies and processes known in nature and it's conceivable that this could be one of them in which case you know matic things as remote as say insect navigation or foraging strategies or the distribution of the structure of the circulatory system which optimizes in a certain sense could there an out to be irrelevant to the evolution of language the interface systems it's possible that he hears mostly mark Hauser and comes the Fitch's work I don't know anything about it that they've done a lot of work on primates and even beyond trying to investigate what extent sensory motor systems and the harder question conceptual systems in other primates might have or beyond in fact might have homologous it might be homologous to humans and some respect but that is a topic that at least can be studied by the comparative approaches and if it's true that the fundamental nature of language involves interface conditions which are mostly there independently a language maybe they were partly selected for language functions if it involves interface conditions and something like optimization relative to interface conditions which is a highly speculative idea if that's true then at least you can break the problem into parts that can be addressed in ways that are to some extent understood you seem to arrange your the proposal that you make in the paper between two different poles of thinking about this topic one is that human language is basically analogous to things found in the animal world maybe more difficult more complex but not different in kind and the other is that it's completely unique a completely unique human adaptation but your paper attempts to steer a third course between the two of them says yeah says that about that well if this is all based on the assumption that it makes sense to think of language in terms of some kind of optimization of linking of interface conditions if that basically mmm you know if these ideas are wrong then it's not going to go anywhere but if there's something to those ideas then both of the properties that you mentioned could turn out to be correct that is the interface conditions could be have homologous structures and other say other primates but the linking seems to be human unique and the question is where that comes from and if it turns out to be an optimization process their ways of thinking about it that don't involve the you know selectional leap that seems almost impossible to explain see more about that in the in the paper you describe the the interface conditions as conditions interfaces between a cognitive system cognitive intentional system and a sensory motor system with natural language forming a kind of bridge drawn between them at various points that's what seems to be lacking in the most in the cousins you know other primates they don't seem that they have no technique of what's lacking and this has been observed for a long time as something like a recursive procedure that will permit the that will generate sound meaning pairs and some sense over an infinite range well if the sound meaning parts are the interface conditions and the recursive procedure is an optimization procedure then you've broken the topic of evolution of language into compartments each of which can be investigated I'm in the most of their work is on the sensory motor systems which they argue really are do have that don't have any unique any particular unique adaptation in humans not at least not a major one on the conceptual intentional side it's much more questionable they're questions of how animal systems signal and how human thought has expressed raised many questions not at all clear that the human mode of referring to things is at all related to animal signaling that seems have quite different properties and that's just the beginning you know then you go into more complicated things like you know quantifier structures and so on and so forth that we don't even raise but the the real innovation in Homo sapiens appears to be the overwhelming one that is the recursive process of linking two kinds of information one kind that feeds sensory motor systems the other that interacts with conceptual intentional systems the human sight that the human language makes the bridge makes contact with the sensory motor system and you said that has analogs in the animal world is that really even a homologs which is different yeah analogs are all over the but the question is whether there are really homologous structures you might trace back to pre you know before the split between hominids and other primates you know five million years ago or something like that is that the idea then that the the gestural system maybe of apes is the point at which like well they're right now actually they're talking about things like the the articulatory and perceptual systems the gestural systems is a different question I mean they're human gestural systems could turn out to be like other primate gestural systems but isn't that a crucial component I mean what we know for example about natural language is that this is a point that you've emphasized in other interviews is that it's not essentially vocal that is its vocal but it's also gestural given the existence of sign line that raises new dimensions which we don't go into there but is there anything because I haven't really been explored enough I mean to what extent are the the the gestural systems involved in sign and the gestural systems that we otherwise use as seem to be dissociated actually this has been demonstrated pretty persuasively I think in acquisition of sign that there's some dramatic cases like Laura patitos work on the pronoun v' the use of pronouns first and second person pronouns and sign and spoken language I mean there's this basically it works like this there's a stage in spoken language development normal what we're used to in which children invert you and I so they'll say pick you up meaning pick me up they regard you as they hear you as referring to themselves so they think that's who it is and that your eye is referring to that person over there so they think that's who it is so they interchange and then after a while this goes away it's a kind of a pretty standard presumably maturational process that goes on well Laura Patito found the same thing happens in sign at about the same age and there it's quite striking because I and you were iconic use this as that and the infants at the same age act counter iconically so it's not just abstract you know you and I interchange but that and that interchanges furthermore it turns out that at the same period they use this in this for pointing correctly so they have the pointing system iconically and they have the linguistic system which is counter iconic at the same stage at which spoken language children are inverting the pronouns so it looks that kind of evidence seems to suggest that gestural systems and linguistic systems even though they may have the exact same motor element involved in them are just different systems they also seem probably to be neroli dissociated in the sense you could do brain studies that show they're activating different areas it looks like it yeah in fact this began this is work done by ursula bellugi and it claimed and others at Salk Institute I was just been going on for I guess about twenty years now they discovered to everybody surprised that for signers this they began with aphasia and studies in fact most of it still is aphasia that for signers the language faculty is still left hemisphere dominant and it had been suspected it's probably right hemisphere dominant because it's visual but it turns out to be look very much like spoken language despite the difference of modality and they've also discovered something beyond that I'm discover as strong these are hard things to do but they have evidence that for both the spoken language and sign local analytic computation like sentence structure is left hemisphere specialized but global computation like discourse structure is right hemisphere localized for both sign and unspoken know that Lisa their evidence looks like imaging studies are just barely beginning that should it said more light on it does that provide as it were neurological evidence that the sentence is of a special sort of unit for linguistic computation it's not paragraphs are not just big sentences provides you no evidence to the this all pretty weak evidence because very little is understood about it but it looks like that and going back to the original question this does raise serious issues about the ways in which the sensory motor system imposes critical conditions on the operations of the computational system because it seems it's getting to be more and more plausible to believe that human language is not modality-specific even though it's overwhelmingly in the speech hearing mobility but that would put serious constraints on our ability to figure out when natural language evolved for example there's at least a two decade old research program by Philip Lieberman Jeffery late men collaborators that has attempted to look at the comparative anatomy both of extant primates their vocal tract anatomy and also reconstruct the soft tissue anatomy of extinct hominids on the idea that basically if they couldn't make the sounds they didn't have the language you know that's pretty controversial I mean it looks as though this is again I don't enter into this I don't anything about it but the Hauser and Fitch both are very skeptical about that as our others it seems that some of the properties that they found are all over the I'm a kingdom and that it may be that hundreds of thousands of years ago the hominids from which we were ultimately this ended had the what looked like the physical capacities to produce language but your point is correct if the spoken if the speech hearing modality is not critical to it this would be significant but not overwhelming you know like another organism could you sign yeah exactly I could have because you were there yeah yeah yeah but that does raise the question about the look a search for homologous structures in the sensory motor system it should be extended and we all know that to asking whether what is the character of the gestural systems that are used for language as distinct from the gestural systems which are physically identical but that are part of a different system gesturing how's that possible I mean how could it be possible to have two overlapping I'll take the point in case and it's the most dramatic example but there it's highly dramatic because we think I mean our intuition about sign language obviously completely mistaken is that it is somehow iconic yeah well you know it somehow it is like you know when you when you're a signer we'll set points in visual space and refer back to them it's the anaphora system but it does go through the period periods which indicate that the that it is that even the physically identical gestures are somehow different if there are linguistic and non-linguistic and the neurological evidence indicates the same in fact if you look more deeply at sign language it supports the same conclusions I mean patitos results are particularly dramatic because it's a you know because of the counter iconic usage and the parallel to normal to the normal acquisition for speaking hearing children so it's but this is all fairly recent work you know it's kind of developing fast and should sit alone it could turn out that the major constraints interface constraints for the computational system are on the conceptual intentions side which makes the problem very hard because that to study that independently of language is very difficult I mean it's hard to study thought except through the medium of language which will beg the questions how in principle could we even approach that question well you can do it I mean there's studies of what are called the Apes theory of mind or the infant the pre-linguistic infants theory of mind I mean at what point do were due for example as a factual question do say other primates attribute something like and beliefs to you know their other members of their species can they tribute false beliefs for example and they're all ways of studying this that's just some interesting recent published work reviewing it looked by and in David Premack just came out Chas reviews a lot of the material and this thing's called the original intelligence so the major contained disability might be on that side rather than the sensory motor system unless something can be learned about the I mean by now a lot is known about the perceptual of the auditory and articulatory apparatus what much less is known about the systems of gesture that are used in sign what what if there are structural properties you know how are they distinguished from other gestures and so on but it but undoubtedly there's going to be something to be said about that and that may impose the kinds of constraints that are similar to the ones we're more familiar with from articulatory and auditory systems and in those systems there's reasonably good evidence I think again for me this is second area only know it indirectly but looks to me like there's plausible evidence that the systems are not in any crucial sense human-specific you make a startling suggestion at the end of this article that even the recursive procedures the what you call the narrow Faculty of language the sort of core of it specifically understood might actually have been adapted or accepted co-opted from another system having to do with navigation what's that idea you know this goes back to old ideas I mean it's everyone knows that if you want to if you taken a mature organism say you know a person or a worm or anything you pick and you ask about the factors that lead it to be what it is there are many different factors I mean one is whatever effect experience it another is what there's an expression of the genes a third factor is how the laws of nature work I mean the the laws of nature work in ways which permit certain kinds of development not others and exactly what the effect is of those constraints is not too well understood it's a hard problem actually the problem during work done for a good part of his life classic work is by Darcy Thompson there's more recent work by others but there are many properties of organisms that seem to just be consequences of the way the laws of nature work which is you know in a sense it's a truism but to find the effect of those is hard well we're talking about computational systems and computation would the laws of nature operate in these well one might expect that the way they work is by imposing conditions of efficient computation some sort of optimization conditions and things like that are found throughout nature so insect navigation seems to have optimization properties as I mentioned foraging seems to optimize there's recent work suggesting that by Christopher journey at the University of Maryland that the arrangement of the neural systems least in simple animals he suggests young may not be genetically programmed but just be what he calls minimization of wire lengths I mean using the same procedures that engineers use when they try to get the best possible transistor you know you just make that what he calls the best of all possible brains you know just sort of turns out that way the circulatory system seems to work similarly it looks like there's some optimization in the way it sort of scatters around the body and it's possible that these things are just deep natural laws and somehow or other they you know here here's the step that took place is to the step of linking the external conditions and you know what could have happened is that as soon as that step was taking let's link them it immediately became optimal and now comes the linguistic questions to what extent can we show that the actual linguistic systems do have optimal properties that's what the work in the minimalist programs involved with and that's how the issue you know that's how at least for me and for I think my colleagues the question of at bringing the evolution of language to a stage where parts of it cannot be investigated that's where it sort of comes together so recursion basically provided the link but then there's an issue of optimizing the character of the link right so for example if the character of the link is the way I personally assumed that the be say 10 years ago extent say the article that Howard Liao's nickname wrote summarizing what we thought was the state of the art if it's like that it's very far from optimal I mean over all sorts of properties in the system different levels that aren't interface levels strange conditions you know all sorts of things and if that's the way the system actually works looks very far from optimal but if you can demonstrate that those empirical assumptions were wrong that there really are no levels other than the interface levels and that the operations do reduce and some interesting sense to the one operation that comes free in a recursive system namely complaining together take through things you form to make a bigger one you know that comes free and it can be internal or external that yields what we call movement in a automatic way and if you can show that that works by optimal conditions like some of these pro gold theories well okay then you're on it it is a huge empirical question but there's an impetus task and it's a question how far you can carry it out to see if you can show that all of the technology that's used in descriptive and explanatory work in linguistics can be shown to be an artifact a reflection of optimal computational procedures it's a huge task but there's been nothing least to me some significant progress in it to the extent that that can be carried out you have a picture of the evolution of language which is to oversimplify it as we do there it would look like like the following and this is surely oversimplified the interface systems are they're pretty much independently of language and you find them something like them at least in other organisms and you can study their their evolution by usual methods comparative methods some where comes the the step of saying okay let's link these then automatically comes optimization of the linkage which is the recursive system that meets optimal conditions and then you have this basic core of human language and may not have changed I mean that's you know like the ideal how close you can get to that there's a good question but if it's correct then to get back to your original question couldn't well be that the things is that look as remote as insect navigation illustrate the principles that showed up in optimizing the link I see it wasn't the link itself that wasn't right but the authorization comes from somewhere but you know that's the way evolution works I mean if you look at systems that respond to light like the eye or maybe in photo traffic plants and so on they got to come from somewhere and it seems that where they came from was some stochastic process that introduced into a cell a class of molecules by accident you know that which happened to convert light into chemical energy reduction molecules when they get into a cell then you've got the basis for all systems that respond to light but how that happened as you know it's not a wasn't by selections just something that happened and it could be that the linkage is something that happened once it's established you turn to the laws of nature to determine how it should work there are a lot of puzzles you know on the question of not only how it happened but when it happened yes every example in the evolution of our own species Homo sapiens there's a great mystery server the surrounding a certain kind of explosive big bang development that occurred about 30,000 years ago we know that you know modern humans came in about a hundred thousand years ago coexisted with other species like Neanderthals for maybe sixty thousand years and then suddenly there was this very dramatic change apparently in human culture and some have speculated that it was the origin of language the only 30 thousand years ago that did it does that seem remotely plausible I mean there's a lot of evidence that you know roughly in that range maybe 30 50 thousand years something like that there was an explosive change in the degree of inventiveness of tools of different kinds of symbolism even of this magnificent artwork that you see in Lesko and so on but there's no evidence as far as I know for any physiological changes right during the first 50 thousand years and it looks as if contemporary humans are genetically almost identical no matter when they separated from the original you know small breeding group maybe around a hundred thousand years ago so it's a fair question what happened in those first the first fifty thousand years for many mysteries but more than that though it would suggest that after that link was drawn we were in some sense genetically distinct from other members of our own species which would make it unless you know unless the fact I mean there's another possible and there's a whole total speculation here's a possible scenario around the hundred thousand years ago that was all sitting there in the brain but then and you know establishing the link could have been like making the first tools you know I mean just just happens I mean the same side to sort of question arises about when early hominids began flaking stones to make tools you know how they figure it out I mean once it was done had an enormous effects on the species it opened up new sources of protein and so on and so forth and you know all sorts of affect but it happened somehow you know we don't know how and the the ability to do it had already been there before it happened obviously otherwise it couldn't happen now it's possible that the ability to make the link was there say a hundred thousand years ago and it just varies maybe independently and various separated groups somehow it happened like tool-making and once it happened you've got language and then they're all going to look alike because they're all coming from the same genetic base so it lay fallow for 60,000 years yeah just how long did the tool-making play film maybe millions of years for all we know hmm and in fact anything you look at you did the same question it's going to arise and it's kind of striking to us because we think about language you can really ask the same questions about every stage of tool production or any other cognitive capacity well professor Chomsky thank you very much we're now gonna take some questions from our studio audience please step to the mic and ask your question you seem to be substituting the word optimization of the linking process or something like that for the process that others would say is guided by a natural selection more or less and those others would say that natural selection is or someday will be adequate to explain the development of the human Faculty of language so I'm just wondering if you can explain why you think the natural selection isn't adequate or isn't an appropriate term to use here and how it falls short as an explanatory device well I don't see any reasonable selectional procedure the mechanism that could have led to the development of an optimal linkage and there are many aspects of organic growth where we know that selection is just not the factors that are involved so if you look at say symmetry of this there's a lot of symmetrical structures in organism design there are there are many as I mentioned optimization processes that takes what take place that takes a the way proteins fold something as simple as that it's not a matter of natural selection that's just the way the world works and the way the world works affects the way organic entities work so it's just an empirical and there's nothing but you know the everyone agrees that natural selection an important factor in evolution but to try to sort out its the effects of that factor is extremely hard even in the most elementary systems we know anything about because there are all sorts of other factors like chemical and physical laws and maybe mathematical principles of organization so there's no kind of you know a prior I stand that you have to take and then argue against the question is just to discover what it is and here are some suggestions as to what it could be if someone has some selectional ideas fine look at those but but they don't have any particular priority I'm a biologist and I should the question I have a sort of a follow-up to this one when a biologist looks at something as complex as the FLN the recursion device ostensibly is the first question to questions you ask is what is it for and what is it from that is what it evolved from and you suggested that maybe it didn't evolve or at least that's not the right way to look at it it evolved but the way it's with hoppitty molecules getting into the vault so its properties in other words on that view are more contingent on its function it's it's contemporary function rather than its evolutionary origin even that's misleading because there's a factual question about what the function is under the usual assumption about language has been that its function is to facilitate communication right this I've never believed that and this point of view takes a very different approach it says the function if you want to use the worth of language is to link interface conditions and when you look here it's just an empirical question and when you look closely at the structure of language I could mention some cases I think what you find is that the computational system is optimal is apparently optimal with regard to linking the interface but it's very non optimal with regard to communication I see so but I actually have a specific question about its origin so it there was a case to be made that animal Minds evaluate contingent circumstances and control their most purposeful motion in response to those that those systems are in fact hierarchically nested in combinatorial there's actually an argument to be made that that's true that looks remarkably like the FLN that looks remarkably like the recursion device and if that's true in turn that it means that the property of the recursion device perhaps including some that looks suboptimal for its function or in fact like the bones in a bird's wing they are historical accidents rather than functional properties of the system could you perhaps explore that just for a moment whether you like or dislike that is the difference between hierarchical structure and recursion there's all kinds of the texts of the birds and you know the bones and I got five fingers randomized three you know and so on that's hierarchical structure but it's not recursion there's no recursive process that gives you an arbitrary number of fingers each stage of which has particular significance remember this recursion is not like you know walking I mean you take one step and then in two steps and then the three-strikes every stage in the process has particular significance determine significance at two interfaces and that's something completely different than hierarchical structure yeah I was actually referring to things like Biederman's view of perception for example that it's that it's inherently combinatorial in hierarchically nested do you like yeah that's fine I mean in fact maybe the we could have gone into this fact I mentioned it that the could be that the recursive systems and not only maybe they're connected with insect whatever's involved in insect navigation but they could also be involved with what a lot of perceptual psychologists call the rules of vision you know the rules that make you see some object some presentation as a three-dimensional object in motion there's a very pretty well understood but now computational procedure that determines that from very few presentations like three estes copic presentations that get you to see a rigid object in motion okay there's some kind of principles involved in that and it wouldn't be outlined to assume that those were tall rules of seeing you know are similar in some way to whatever's going on here yeah I think this didn't come from nowhere you know the question is where it came from and in my view and exciting and not implausible conclusion is that it just comes from the way nature works with computational systems and therefore you going to find it all over the place yes if there's there's one more question I'm really against as a biologist struck by why linguists are I'm not sure the word is hostile but apparently indifferent to this question of what language is for a biologists look at that and say that look at language look at its sophistication and it's its Paley's and watch on a heath it's a complex thing that can only ultimately be produced as a result of its adaptive consequences the only apparent adaptive consequences are the ones we think that leap immediately to mind that is exchange of information cooperative change that's what leaps to mind it's just a mistake I'm just look at the I mean what if you want to well it leaps to the mind of almost every biologist in the world I've ever say and the notion of function is a very you know loose and vague notion we all know that so what's the function of the skeleton I mean just to keep you from falling into a puddle on the ground there is it the store calcium or if it's properly considered is not an arrow what to ask what the function of a birdwing is is a well focused question maybe but the you know if you actually look at the history of it's not so well for the evolution of it it's quite complicated a lot of exaptation and so on and so forth but the notion of what a function is is a very vague notion however what is usually assumed plausibly is you can get some guide to what the function is by looking at the characteristic use ok well let's take the characteristic use of language characteristic use of languages for the thought not for communication almost all language use close to 100% is internal my understanding was that that's controversial that is in particular that most thought is in fact not lling oh that's another question yes there could be plenty of thought that's not linguistic but I'm asking a different question what's the use of language statistically speaking it's almost all internal if you want to check just introspect for a couple hours but that's bait but that's based on that's based on introspection I could make my own observation but introspection is a kind of observation I mean if we had an outside way of looking at introspection we'd find the same but an equivalently plausible interpretation of that is that that appears to be true subjectively because the purpose of language is to prepare our thoughts for the ultimate purpose of social communication control thoughts and say this if you want but that's now we're off way and I know those are equal desert competing models should be set up in desk yet all we know is all we know is the following that the overwhelming use of language close to a hundred percent is internal and when you think about what that internal stuff is it has very little to do with communication like you can spend half your life obsessing because somebody criticized you ten years ago you don't expect to communicate it but that's kind of thing that was on your mind all the time oh you can you know you can think about ostensively you were preparing for a man for an invert into meeting with that person maybe maybe it's an argument somebody died you know I mean it's just not you know it's just factually incorrect it's it's true arguable it's true that look everything's arguable but the overwhelming evidence is that internal thought is playing some function for us yeah you know planning agonizing whatever we do it right and some tiny piece of it ends up as being communication incidentally plenty of other things are involved in communication too now it could you can always make up a story that's one of the things about evolutionary fairytale manufacturing or about all of science they're nuts they're about stories yes they're not testable sorry soul Alliance just so stories are particularly prominent in this domain but if you want to use plausible arguments but like characteristic use tells you something about function then I think you'd have to say that the function of language in this loose sense is a forethought some of it ends up being communication very small parts in fact even the part that is externalized it's communication I made a very odd sense I mean like if you meet somebody it's very hard for people to be next to each other and not to talk to each other yeah it's kind of you know it's like dogs looking at you know in others I you just have to talk to each other so if you meet some you're standing with somebody a bus stop it's just uncomfortable if you're not talking to them so you talk to them about the weather or the baseball game or so that's not communication that's just it's sometimes called fatik communication it's just a way of establishing human relations social human but that's not communication in the sense of transmitting information or anything if by communication you just mean interacting with other people yeah okay then it would turn out if you do it descriptively I think it would turn out like this overwhelmingly language is internal I mean it's literally close to a hundred percent some of it is externalized of the part that's externalized a lot of it is just fatik communication I mean we want to be part of a group or we don't want to feel hostile to each other like right you don't look at it personally you don't this like gaze is always off to the side or you stay at a certain distance from somebody that's rightly a lot of it just needs to be like that and some very small part of it is communication in some independent sense of the word communication say well you can make up a story saying that it's that very small part that drives the system but we have no evidence for it furthermore if you look at the mechanics of the system now we're getting into more technical aspects I think you can show that a lot of the mechanics of the system are badly designed for communication and well-designed for linking the interfaces actually one important asset is which is if you if you if any of you are writing parsing programs you know programs where you're trying to do automated parsing there's one overwhelming problem that you always face and that is a word comes along like a wh work you know what or something like that and you know because of the way language works if there's going to be it's going to be linked to some position in the sentence but that position has to be not heard to get so you have the problem of taking word who and figuring out what unexpressed there's no space there's no break there's no nothing but what point in the utterance is it connected with just think how easy it would be if you repeated it so if you didn't say what did you see but what did you see what okay then the problem is trivial however that's computationally more difficult if you look at the way our beliefs about the computational systems if they are recursive is in the way we think that would involve more computation for linking the interfaces so here's a pretty striking case and they're quite a lot more where the system seems to be mechanically designed so that it reduces computation and increases the problem of perception and I think there are a lot of cases like this thank you thank you it's very interesting to hear how language may have evolved as a response to the interface conditions between intentionality and sensory motor systems and so we've been talking about the past hundred thousand thirty thousand whatever in terms of our time course what about the future are we done is the language mechanism now finished is this the masterpiece or are we are we going to continue to adapt there's no relevant evolution going on under some you know in humans are changing all the time different groups change but you know the time scale is so small that the chances of significant genetic change involving something like the language faculty look pretty marginal but even in another hundred thousand years can you envision you know so little is known about this that you can say anything you like but the chances I think most biologists would agree that we're just talking about much too small a time scale so everyone will speculate about the furthermore all speculative research over yet you know there's no I mean for real changes to take place there have to be separation of species they have to stop that of sub species you have to stop interbreeding for a long time before speciation takes place real genetic change and how that happens is mostly mysterious but it does seem to require a pretty sharp break and interbreeding right over a long stretch and that just doesn't happen with humans right so perhaps we could use simulation to try to explore some of these ideas since we really can't do it in the real world too easily you could do simulation if you understood the processes but since you don't understand the processes you can't do simulation Thanks just a short question on the role of the sensorimotor interface because in the earlier discussion it seemed as though what was crucial about the combinatorial system and so on is that it made the link between these two these these two things and the output of the century motor interface is as you have been have been saying so some kind of some kind of physical event either they had motion or sounds or something and if language is sort of making that link between say the inside and in the physical world then in the the response to the earlier question about say the function of language as being a vehicle for expressing thought then that raises the question of what what's the other half of the link in the hundred percent use are almost hundred percent use of language as you described this what what is what's at the other end of the link the other end of the previous end of which is the conceptual more depth conceptions interface extremely interesting question and here we don't have any anything the way of solid evidence but we have a ton of introspective evidence and that's evidence all right introspect for a while when you're talking to yourself you're producing something which you heat is the same as what you hear okay yeah I mean and that's an enormous amount of air life is producing to ourselves something that in our head sounds just like something we're hearing here's a question which I don't know the answer to and I don't think it's been investigated do signers that what is realized the next question well I don't think it's been investigated but I would assume so if that's the case then the you know the internal part of the sensory motor system is really functioning okay so this I think it's very hard to talk to yourself and not do is like a chance of English right yeah so this is this is music in fact you get really earlier by yourself figure out if the sentence is rhyme for example I mean all things are easy in fact automatic thanks very much okay [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

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Published: Tue Jul 10 2018