The First Word Quotes

“Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world," said Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear the echo of our basic sound making instrument-the vocal tract. This explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: we like the sounds that are familiar to us-specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“In the meantime, the works of Gordon, Lupyan, and others suggests that words are not just convenient labels for things; rather, they are extremely powerful mental devices.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“Because the light of evolution is not instantaneous or blinding, it is difficult to visualize the immensely slow and gradual change that is brought about by mutation and natural selection. When you consider a protozoan cell or an amphibian, on the one hand, and dolphins or, say, commuters, on the other, there is no intuitive way to make sense of the line that runs from one form of life to the next.

The popular cartoon of evolution, where the ape slowly unbends, straightens up, starts walking, and mutates into some form of modern-day human, is probably the easiest way to think about it. But [...] this caricature is misleading. Evolution does not follow the course of a single line. The tree of life bristles with stems, boughs, and branches. Most lines from one form to another are densely surrounded by branches leading to different species or dead ends.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“When you talk, your face has more moves than Lebron James.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“In our evolutionary history some individuals must have been born with a greater inclination and ability to collaborate than our common ancestor with chimpanzees. These individuals were more successful and bred more offspring with those characteristics [...]. What we have evolved into now is a species for whom an experience means little if it's not shared.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“[I]t is almost impossible to talk about space without gesturing. Gesture is spontaneous, and is integral to individual expression as it is to communication. Even though you probably won't gesture as much if you are talking on the phone, you will still wave your arms about. Blind people gesture when they speak in the same way that seeing people do.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“But there is no agency in evolution; it is inadvertent. We survived, modified, and multiplied, just like any animal alive today, and out of the wildly dodgem course we took, language arose.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“Chris Knight: The key innate feature of human cognition-the one most relevant to the emergence of language-is in my view the capacity for joint attention and egocentric perspective reversal. We humans possess an inborn capacity to correlate our perspectives on the world, viewing ourselves from one another's standpoint. As well as being cognitive in the narrow sense, this faculty has, simultaneously, moral relevance. If I choose to have a violent tantrum, I must temporarily shut down my moral self-awareness. I need this kind of awareness only if I am trying to tune my behavior to social requirements.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“It's small wonder that humans dream in myth and in art about other worlds, because we all have the experience of inhabiting one world and, as we are taught language, of walking through a door into another. Even physicists are obsessed with the idea of a multiverse. But we already live in one.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“Scientists typically offer up the wondrous metaphysical architecture we build with language as a consolation for our mortality. We may not be here for long, but because we have language, we can understand the way that the cosmos spins and twists back on itself, we can see the scintillating and sticky interplay of all the particles of existence, and we can work out the way that small evolutionary changes build steam and spread throughout a population, cascading through a species, funneling it through particular environments, over pressure humps, and around the threat of extinction, along the way turning it into another species entirely.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“The same linguistic structures that allow us to soar through time and space and model entire universes in our heads also enable us to foresee our own mortality. Language also permits us to imagine a self that isn't earthbound and a world beyond death. So far it hasn't offered a way to avoid it.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“Vonnegut exposes the assumption that if we do change biologically, we typically think we will end up smarter in the terms in which we consider ourselves smart today. But to survive means only that we'll be smart in the context of the environment we find ourselves in. If we continue to exist, we will by definition be smarter than the versions of us that did not survive, but that intelligence won't necessarily be comparable to what we have today.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“Whether or not it's moral to let language extinction occur, it is the case that languages are irreplaceable records of the development of human societies and alternate windows into the human mind. When a language dies, we lose the knowledge that was encoded in it. Though we assume that when knowledge is lost, it has been superseded by a superior version, a dead language, with all its unique ways of carving up the world, is as irreplaceable as the dodo or the Tyrannosaurus rex.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“The world loses one of its six thousand languages every two weeks, and children have stopped learning half of the languages currently spoken in the world. It's been argued that languages are under greater threat than any endangered bird or mammal.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“Today there are about six thousand languages in the world, and half of the world's population speaks only ten of them. English is the single most dominant of these ten.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“Language and material culture have greatly increased the mobility of the world's population, and some researchers believe that this will lead to an unhealthy and irreversible diminishing of variation in our genome. As more and more humans breed across the boundaries of genetic variation, we become a blander, more homogenous bunch than our diverse parent groups. This could be a problem because variation is important to the evolutionary health of a species, for the more we are the same, the easier it is for one single thing to make us extinct. Indeed, some genetic variants of the human species are disappearing altogether as small indigenous groups die out.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“In a 2006 study, the geneticist Jonathan Pritchard and his colleagues at the University of Chicago announced that there were at least seven hundred regions of the human genome that had clearly undergone positive selection in the last five thousand to fifteen thousand years. Some of the genes affect taste, smell, digestion, and brain function. It is thought that some of these changes resulted from the pressures involved in moving from a hunting-gathering lifestyle to a more agriculture based one.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“At the same time that Lahn's results were published, another team of scientists based at the University of California, San Diego, announced the discovery of a positively selected gene called SIGLEC11 that is expressed in brain cells called microglia. Although they can't yet explain the effects of the gene, it is interesting because it is one of the very few found only in humans and not in our ape cousins. This could make it a candidate for explaining some of the differences between us and them.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“In 2005 scientists published the results of a number of experiments that indicated that humans are still evolving. In one case, a team of geneticists led by Bruce Lahn at the University of Chicago offered proof that the human brain has been continuously evolving since Homo Sapiens first appeared. The scientists looked at two genes known as microcephalin and ASPM, both of which are known to contribute to brain growth. (They are also expressed in other tissue in the body.) The geneticists sequenced DNA from a collection of human cells that represents the variation in our species, and they found that one variation of each gene, called an allele, occurred with particularly high frequencey. The fact that the alleles seemed to occur more than normal genetic drift would allow suggests that they have been actively selected over time. The scientists believe that the frequent allele of microcephalin appeared around thirty-seven thousand years ago and the frequent allele of ASPM appeared only fifty-eight hundred years ago. It's not known what effect these variations of these genes have, or why they were selected. They could have shaped cognition, as Lahn argues. Other scientists suggest the genes could have had some other effect on the brain that doesn't directly impact thought.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“In 2005 scientists published the results of a number of experiments that indicated that humans are still evolving. In one case, a team of geneticists led by Bruce Lahn at the University of Chicago offered proof that the human brain has been continuously evolving since Homo Sapiens first appeared. The scientists looked at two genes known as microcephalin and ASPM, both of which are known to contribute to brain growth. (They are also expressed in other tissue in the body.) The geneticists sequenced DNA from a collection of human cells that represents the variation in our species, and they found that one variation of each gene, called an allele, occurred with particularly high frequencey. The fact that the alleles seemed to occur more normal genetic drift would allow suggests that they have been actively selected over time. The scientists believe that the frequent allele of microcephalin appeared around thirty-seven thousand years ago and the frequent allele of ASPM appeared only fifty-eight hundred years ago. It's not known what effect these variations of these genes have, or why they were selected. They could have shaped cognition, as Lahn argues. Other scientists suggest the genes could have had some other effect on the brain that doesn't directly impact thought.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“While all living things affect the evolution of other living things simply by virtue of trying to stay alive, humans interact with the biological evolution of other species in a much more complex and powerful fashion because of one ability: language. Nothing occurs on the human scale without language. No language means no agriculture, no animal farming, no science.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“It's clear by now that the problem of language evolution is completely intractable when you approach it from the perspective of a single discipline. For all the salient questions to be answered, the multidisciplinary nature of the field will have to become even more so. So far, it has taken years for individuals in different departments to start talking, to develop research questions that make sense for more than one narrow line of inquiry, and to start to understand one another's points of view. The field of language evolution needs students who can synthesize information from neuroscience, psychology, computer modeling, genetics, and linguistics. The more this happens, the richer and wider the field will become, instead of devolving around one or two theoretical issues.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“Indeed, humans won't speak or produce language unless they are taught to do so, which means that our remarkable capacity doesn't amount to much at all if someone isn't there to provide a model for how to use it.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“All the work in genetics, neuroscience, ethology, biology, and linguistics has emphasized both the undeniable separateness and the powerful continuity of language. We are not the only animals that live within a world of meaning. And yet no other animal mimics in quite the way we do, no animal gestures like we do, no other animal is able to produce such an ordered flurry of distinct and meaningful bites of sound, and certainly no other animal puts all of this together and communicates it in the same way we do.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“Language is unique in that there are no other animals with which we converse, no matter what language we are speaking. And yet the miracle of this research has been the realization that what is unique from one perspective may be constructed of mostly old parts from another.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“Language has to be partly innate, simply because human babies are born with the ability to learn the language of their parents. While this can justifiably be called a language instinct, there is no one gene compelling us to produce language. Instead, a set of genetic settings gives rise to a set of behaviors and perceptual and cognitive biases, some of which may be more general and others of which are more language specific.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

“In working out the way genes build linguistic brains, one of this new science's greatest challenges is determining how experience affects the spread of job specialization across the brain. The dynamic interplay between genes and experience as it propels a creature through conception, development, sexual maturity, parenthood, and eventually death is greatly complicated by brain plasticity-which must itself, presumably, be underwritten by genes. Solving the mystery of language and its evolution will involve working out what is innately specified and what alternative routes to processing the same kind of data are enabled by plasticity.”
― Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language