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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Well, firstly, thanks, because now I feel like we're having a good, interesting, and productive conversation.

What do you think about Alex the parrot, who (allegedly, and feel free to object) combined words to make neologisms?

And what's your take on humans with nasty FOXP2 mutations such that, uh, let me grab a quote,

FOXP2 came to light through the discovery by Jane Flurst, an English geneticist, of an unusual London family whose existence she reported in 1990. The family consists of three generations. Of the 37 members old enough to be tested, 15 have a severe language deficit. Their speech is hard to understand, and they themselves have difficulty comprehending the speech of others. If asked to repeat a phrase like "pattaca pattaca pattaca," they will stumble over each word as if it were entirely new. They have difficulty with a standard test of the ability to form past tenses of verbs ("Every day I wash my clothes, yesterday I ___ my clothes"; four-year-olds will say "washed" as soon as they get the idea). They have problems in writing as well as speaking. The affected members of the family have been given intensive speech training but mostly hold jobs where not much talking is required. "Their speech is difficult to understand, particularly over the telephone, or if the context is not known. In a group of family members it is hard for you to pick up the pieces of the conversation, which is difficult to follow because many of the words are not correctly pronounced," says Faraneh Vargha-Khadem of the Institute of Child Health in London.55

Some of the first linguists to study the affected family members believed [Page 48] their problem was specific to grammar but Vargha-Khadem has shown that it is considerably wider. Affected members have trouble in articulation, and the muscles of their lower face, particularly the upper lip, are relatively immobile.

It could be argued that their defect stemmed from some general malfunction in the brain, which was not specific to language. But the IQ scores of the affected members, though low, fell in a range (59 to 91) that overlapped with that of the unaffected members (84 to 119).56 The core deficit, Vargha-Khadem concluded, is "one that affects the rapid and precise coordination of orofacial [mouth and face] movements, including those required for the sequential articulation of speech sounds."57

The affected members of the KE family, as it is known, have each inherited a single defective gene from their grandmother. They provide the results of an experiment that no one would even contemplate doing in humans, but which nature has performed nonetheless — what happens if you disable a critical speech gene? And the one disabled in the KE family seems to operate at such a sophisticated level that it looks as if it were one of the last genes to be put in place as the faculty of language was perfected.

In 1998 a team of geneticists at Oxford University in England set out to identify the defective gene by analyzing the genome of KE family members. Their method was to look for segments of DNA that the affected members shared and the unaffected lacked. The Oxford team soon narrowed the cause of the problem to a region on chromosome 7, the seventh of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in which the human genome is packaged. Within this region lay more than 70 genes, and it seemed that it would take several years to study each gene and see which one was responsible. But Hurst then turned up a new patient with the same rare set of symptoms. The patient, a boy, had a break in his chromosome 7 that disrupted one of the genes in the section the Oxford team was studying. It was an easy task to identify which of the new patient's genes had been broken. It was a gene known as forkhead box P2, or FOXP2 for short.58

The Oxford geneticists, Cecilia Lai, Simon Fisher and Anthony Monaco, then analyzed all 267,000 DNA units in the FOXP2 genes of the KE family members. In all the affected members, and in none of the normal members, just one of these letters was changed from a G to an A (the four different kinds of chemical units in DNA are known for short as A, T, G and C). The [Page 49] switch to an A at this site in the gene meant that in the protein molecule specified by the gene, a unit that should have been an arginine was changed to a histidine (proteins are made up of 20 different kinds of units, known as amino acids, of which arginine, and histidine are two).59

How could a single mutation in a gene cause such a wide range of effects? The FOX family of genes makes agents known as transcription factors, which operate at a high level of the cell's control system. The agents bind to DNA and in doing so control the activity, or transcription, of many other genes. FOXP2 is active during fetal development in specific parts of the brain, and the protein transcription factor it makes probably helps wire up these brain regions correctly for language. Brain scans of affected KE family members seemed normal at first glance but a more sophisticated type of scan has shown they have considerably fewer neurons than usual in Broca's area, one of the two brain regions known to be involved in language, and more neurons than usual in the other region, known as Wernicke's area.60

I don't think capacity for language is magic and I don't think it's a good yardstick for humanity. And I don't think awareness, sense-of-self, or volition are uniquely human either. As it happens I work with animals and have a lot of time to consider this. Their internal experiences are indeed very different from ours, but not, I think, in the ways you're proposing.

What do you think about Alex the parrot, who (allegedly, and feel free to object) combined words to make neologisms?

I don't think about Alex the parrot at all. To my knowledge, no parrot has ever used their language to organize a rebellion against their human owners, something human slaves have done repeatedly. By language, I am not referring to words, but rather to the ability of humans to communicate their internal state to others, to build communicable models of the world that coordinate large-scale cooperative action. Neither parrots nor other animals do that.

I'm not sure what your excerpt about genetic defects is supposed to communicate.

I don't think capacity for language is magic and I don't think it's a good yardstick for humanity.

Whether it is "magic" is an interesting question. I'll agree that it alone is not a good yardstick for humanity; large language models are not human and I don't care much about them. I care about language because it interpenetrates and mutually amplifies the rest of the items on that list. Language, in the sense I am using it, is one of the reasons tyranny is not sustainable: people can formulate moral arguments, and those moral arguments retain weight. They can make blood-guilt immortal beyond the imagining of any individual human, and are part of why justice is, in every practical sense, inescapable.

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