Saturday, September 15, 2018

Coevolution of Language and Cities

Coevolution is a better concept than evolution when thinking about how the living things in the world arrived at their current state of being.

Living things don't evolve in isolation, they live in a world populated with many other living things, obviously. All the living things in a given area evolve together. Some mammals, for example, evolved with the plants and animals of the ice age climate world, and when the climate changed and the plants from the cooler, less humid winter world died off, many of the mammals did as well.

It seems pretty likely that most of the time that humans have been on earth they lived outside cities, however it's pretty likely that most the time humans have been on earth they lived in some form of pack or flock or tribe. I don't really know if every social animal has a form of language, but I can't think of any exceptions to that off the top of my head.

Language using man was also corporate man (corporate in the most general sense of that word). The relative effectiveness of cooperation versus competition would be one mechanism for building the shared mental model of the outside world that makes language work. If someone lacked the concept of a "map" in their brain, for example, it'd be much harder for that person to coordinate with other people on an agricultural project.

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