SPEECH! How Language Made Us Human
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EnglishVoice Age
Senior (55+)Accents
British (General) British (Received Pronunciation - RP, BBC)Transcript
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Of course, 50 million years is still an enormously long time. But in geological terms, in evolutionary terms, it's just a blink of the eye. We still don't really know what happened to trigger. This can be an explosion. But what we do know is that the ability of cells to cooperate and coexist was a pivotal event in the history of life, a step change in what it was possible for evolution to achieve in learning to act as units of millions, billions and then trillions cells were gradually able to differentiate and develop more complex, coordinated structures that led to everything from duck weed to dinosaurs. Single celled organisms are limited in what they can do. They cannot grow beyond a certain very small size, cannot specialist and have limited ability to interact with their environment. But multi cellular charity allows an organism to develop tissues and distinct organs mouths, eyes, ears and limbs, which function cooperatively, creating integrated holes that are more efficient both in terms of their internal structure and their ability to survive. The key change was the ability to interact with individual cells now able to work together as cooperative units. The difference was dramatic. No longer isolated in a microscopic cells, each cell world, organisms were free to grow as big as food supplies and gravity would allow, and the tree of life exploded into diversity. But despite their impressive new powers and abilities, the individuals swimming in the sea of new species were still trapped in their own worlds, living by their own wits, limited to their own experience as they are to this day. To the extent that they live in communities, all animals benefit from the nurture of parents, the comfort of companionship and, to a certain degree, the lessons of survival. But beyond the clues to be gleaned from observing others, no animal without language can be sure of what its peers are thinking. Nor can they ever hope to express anything more than a few basic emotions to each other. They may slowly evolve the ability to out, swim, outrun or out fly their rivals. But without an effective way to communicate, meaningful cooperation is almost impossible. They have no choice but to learn from their own experience, endlessly repeating the same old trial and error process of every individual born before them.