In his TED talk evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel discusses how language has changed humanity as a whole and articulates several surprising ideas. For instance, he reflects on The Tower of Babel myth and suggests that what if languages we speak were a tool for misunderstanding. When God punished humanity for such audacious act as reaching him through a skyscraper, he, in a sense, created a weapon of mass destruction: if all the war and genocide events were not for wrong interpretations and cultural mistakes, what else could be the reason?
Still, professor Pagel believes language is a tool due to which cooperation exists at all. To prove that, he gives an example of two scenarios. Imagine a Neanderthal person who is good at building heads for arrows – that’s a skill he was born for, but unfortunately he cannot make arrow sticks. So he goes up to a guy who has lots of those. If we don’t have language, something like this could happen: the first man take a sum of his arrowheads and gives them to the other guy. The latter thinks that it’s some kind of present, takes it and leaves. What happens then is a result of misunderstanding between them: the first tries to use gestures, moves around the gift-taker in vain trying to explain what he wants from him and as a result gets killed by his own arrowhead.
In the second scenario we’ve got a language we can use. So the same person comes up with a pile of arrowheads and says, “I want to trade my heads for a bunch of your sticks, fifty-fifty”. The other guy responds, “Sure, seems like a good deal”. Everyone’s happy.
What that example shows, I think, is that language is a tool which must be used carefully. It is for sure provides cooperation between our species. This effect can even go to the extent when we may benefit from people who has already passed away – it’s something modern science is based on. What would we do if not for all the previous inventions and technologies other scientists and thinkers came up with? The same goes with almost every field engaging masses of people, e.g, car production. But in order to do that successfully we have to do something else before putting it into words. I wonder what that is.
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