Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Thought/Emotion/Feeling
Message-ID: <854@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 13 Dec 88 09:18:35 GMT
References: <569@epicb.UUCP> <1146@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <1152@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <496@uceng.UC.EDU> <1154@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <4349@Portia.Stanford.EDU> <1159@arctic.nprdc.arpa>
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Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
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In article <1159@arctic.nprdc.arpa> bickel@nprdc.arpa (Steven Bickel) writes:
> Language has been evolving for a very long
> time. The physical brain structures that we seem to need for higher level
> language communication appear to have evolved as long as 200,000 years ago
> and this time period is widely debated.  The key to understanding my 
> concept is that the function and structure of communication,
> and congitive processing changed dramatically in a relatively short period.
> This evolutionary concept does not necessarily coincide with dramatic
> physical changes in the brain structure.

Myself, I would be reluctant to conclude much from an endocranial cast.
If there is any more direct evidence available about what the "physical brain
structures" (are there non-physical brains?) were 200,000 years ago, it would
be *extremely* interesting to hear about it.  (What a pity Broca didn't live
back then.  If he had, he might have left us some preserved brains.)

It is certainly possible that "the .. structure of communication ...
changed dramatically in a relatively short period".  As a whole-hearted
believer in Punctuated Equilibrium, I would expect as much (at any rate,
of changes near a speciation event).  BUT WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?
How can we know that "cognitive processing changed dramatically in a" period
unless we know what it was like both before and after the period?
We still don't know whether human language is based on a novel facility
(as Chomsky claims) or whether it is solely a function of general
cognitive facilities (as Lakoff and others claim).  So we don't even know
what *this* end of the interval is!  As for knowing how people 200,000 
years ago thought and communicated, I really would love to know how that
was discovered.  (Did someone ask Ramtha, maybe? :-)