The first option, according to which the same language existed for hundreds of thousands and millions of years in different pre-human groups, seems unlikely. The evolution of languages over the last few thousand years is well studied from written sources and shows that languages diverge rapidly as their speakers spread geographically. The second, more likely, option assumes that the genetic ability to learn languages evolved in relation to their common base. Individual languages form the plane of expression of this base. Damian Blasi and his colleagues, after analyzing the “basic vocabulary” of 40 to 100 lexical items from 62 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages, showed that there is a stable connection between sound and meaning: lexical items with similar meanings have similarities in sound. This similarity may be due to the origin of different languages from a common ancestor, to borrowings between languages, or to other reasons that make certain sounds preferable for expressing certain meanings (Blasi et al. 2016).
At one time, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed not only differential calculus but also the idea of a single human language based on the nature of things themselves. Newton wrote: “The dialects of each language being so divers and arbitrary a general Language cannot be so fitly deduced from them as surely as from the natures of the things themselves, which is the same for all Nations and by which all Language was at the first composed” (Elliott 1957, p. 7). Leibniz believed that there is an alphabet of human thought, made up of simple concepts or “letters” and that innate language is based on this alphabet (Wierzbicka 2011, p. 379).
Strange as it may seem, thoughts are not made of concepts, not of images, not of letters, not of words. Thoughts are made of meanings. Douglas Hofstadter says in I Am a Strange Loop (2007):
“No one has trouble with the idea that ‘the same novel’ can exist in two different languages, in two different cultures. But what is a novel? A novel is not a specific sequence of words, because if it were, it could only be written in one language, in one culture. No, a novel is a pattern—a particular collection of characters, events, moods, tones, jokes, allusions, and much more. And so a novel is an abstraction, and thus ‘the very same novel’ can exist in different languages, different cultures, even cultures thriving hundreds of years apart” (Hofstadter 2007, p. 224).
Meaning, or social and material abstract action, is the common content of all languages, it is the base in relation to which languages function as elements of the plane of expression. Meaning is connected with its linguistic expression through an active linguistic norm and is transmitted thanks to this norm. Evald Ilyenkov wrote in his Considerations on the Relationship between Thinking and Language (1977):
“The ‘deep structures’ identified by Chomsky actually take shape in ontogenesis, in the process of a child’s development before he can speak and understand speech. And one does not have to be a Marxist to recognize their obvious, one might say, tangible reality in the form of sensorimotor schemes, i.e. schemes of the direct activity of a developing human being with things and in things in the form of a purely bodily phenomenon—the interaction of a body with other bodies located outside it. These sensorimotor schemes, as Piaget calls them, or ‘deep structures,’ as linguists prefer to call them, are precisely what philosophy has long called logical forms or forms of ‘thinking as such’” (Ilyenkov 2019-, vol. 5, pp. 243-244).
Can a human being understand things without using words? Can language be reduced to gestures and tactile sensations rather than words? Although the Zagorsk experiment on teaching deaf-blind children did not provide a definitive answer to this question, we are inclined to believe that this is probably impossible. Meanings and words are inextricably linked for humans.
Studying the language development of a child is a key to understanding the language development of all humanity. A child learns language through a socially activated plane of expression, saturated with active norms. Active norms in this case are sensorimotor schemes and the event models and action programs built on them: connections between symbols (words, gestures) and actions: “eat,” “drink,” “sleep,” “walk,” etc. A child is predisposed to internalize these connections.
3. Traditional choice and cumulative culture
Meanings, counterfacts and choices
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky once said that the concentration of energy in stars preceded the evolution of organisms (Tsiolkovsky 2004, p. 105). Life with its laws of selection has its origin in the inanimate nature with its laws of collection (or gravity). Culture, in turn, has its origin in life. Organic evolution occurs through selection within populations: genetic variability requires a change of generations of individuals. Cultural evolution begins as an extension of natural selection, as a mixed selection of individuals, which occurs not only on the basis of variations in genes, but also on the basis of variations in meanings. However, if genes, as elements of biological information, are rigidly tied to populations of individuals and cannot change independently of the organisms as their carriers, then meanings, as elements of cultural information, as socially transmitted material abstract actions, can change independently of human organisms within the framework established by the active power of man, his instincts, practices and reason.
As Leonid Krushinsky has shown, in the lower stage of biological evolution, the behavior of animals is mainly influenced by instincts, while as the nervous system becomes more complex, learning (practice) plays an increasingly important role in adaptive behavior. In modern humans, with their differentiated cerebrum, behavior is largely determined by reason (Krushinsky 1986, pp. 135-136). At the same time, “the basis of intelligent action is an extremely broad norm of reaction; behaviors performed with the participation of reason can go far beyond the forms of behavior that arose as adaptations to specific living conditions” (Krushinsky 1986, p. 80). Since intelligence, as a late product of mixed selection, has not been refined by it as much as learning, the frequent solving of new problems can lead to neuroses (ibid., pp. 228-229).
Practice and intelligence are not exclusively human characteristics. Animals also have their own animal “traditions” and their own “intelligence.” However, the difference between an animal and a human is not purely quantitative, as Darwin saw it. The difference is qualitative: animals use means but remain in nature. Their means and methods do not form a domus that would separate itself from the natural habitat.
Robert Sapolsky points out that the broad reaction norm underlying human intelligence is itself a result of evolution (we would say mixed selection) that has freed the human brain from the tight control of the genetic program:
“The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes” (Sapolsky 2017, p. 173).
The development of reason, with its broad norm of reaction, is synonymous to the development of counterfacts (counterfactuals). Counterfacts are, one might say, alternative facts—actions and things that could have been but were not done, that were not added to the stable cultural repertoire and were not passed on through learning. Counterfacts arose along with meanings as their random versions brought about by variations in plans and actions. In itself, this randomness was only the intersection of existing patterns: “what we see as fundamental randomness may be the result of simple interacting rules” (Page 2009, p. 38). As meanings evolved, counterfacts began to acquire their own meaning, transforming into an alternative world of “as ifs.” In his Book of Why (2018), Judah Pearl cites as an example of a counterfact a figurine carved from the tusk of a mammoth 40,000 years ago—the “Lion Man” as a fantastic