Seth’s blog

According to this persuasive non-embeddable video — from a BBC series called The Truth About Food — the answer is don’t worry about it.

They compare two twins. One drinks 2 liters water/day, the other doesn’t drink any water. Not self-experimentation, but close.

I did an experiment in which I drank 5 liters of water/day. I lost a few pounds, not nearly worth the trouble. There was one surprise: Flavors intensified. Every strawberry was the best-tasting strawberry I’d ever had.

After reading Christine Kenneally’s The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (2007) I could see that most theorists agree with me that language must have started small: With single words. None of the theorists seem to use my other guiding principle: Lightning doesn’t strike twice in one place for different reasons. If two rare events — such as (a) a sound in the night that sounds like a burglar and (b) in the morning your wallet is gone — might be due to the same thing, they probably are. Use of this principle means that how language evolved should fit into a larger explanation.

Humans differ from our closest primate relatives — not to mention all other species — in many ways, of course. One big difference is language; but there are many others. Application of the lightning-strikes-twice principle means that language probably began for the same reason as the other differences.

The overwhelming difference between humans and other species is that humans specialize in terms of jobs. Two randomly-selected people almost surely make their living doing quite different things all day. No other species does this. Two randomly-selected members of any other species almost surely make their living doing the same thing all day. The story I am trying to tell in my human evolution posts is how humans came to specialize like this. (I believe the aquatic ape theory is right, but it’s about an earlier stage of human evolution, before job specialization.)

For me, the question of how language evolved becomes the question: How did single-word language promote job specialization? This has an obvious answer: It promoted trade, which job specialization obviously requires. The first words were nouns — in particular, the names of objects (chair, knife, bag, etc.). These words promoted trade because:

1. They served as advertising. It became much easier to tell others that you or someone else had something to trade. It’s weird that there is no word for the other side of the picture: Wanting something. Single words also made it much easier to broadcast that there was something you wanted.

2. They emphasized function. The words chair, knife, and bag describe the function of the objects they name. Objects have many other qualities, of course: color, location, ownership, age, materials, etc. Common words tend to hide those qualities and emphasize function. Trades based on function became easier to arrange than trades based on desires for other qualities. The first words helped people trade for stuff they could use, in other words.

Single words work perfectly as advertising. They are still used this way. In a Guatemalan market, I heard a man shout the Spanish word for “toothpaste” over and over. Lots of businesses use single words on their signs to indicate what they sell. Early names, moreover, reflected what a person would have to give in trade: Smith, for example.

People who criticize evolutionary explanations sometimes say it is impossible to have evidence. Not so. In the case of language, you can examine how single words are used today. Sure, new ways of using language have grown up; but they are unlikely to have made old uses impossible. There are dozens of things you can’t do with single words. But you certainly can advertise and request (”fork?”).

Jane Jacobs tells a story about a handed-down meatloaf recipe: After the loaf is made, the end is cut off. “Why?” she asked. “We’ve always done it that way,” she was told. The original recipe was for a smaller oven, it turned out; the end was cut off to make the loaf fit in the oven.

I thought of this story when I read a recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine that compared three treatments for back pain: acupuncture, “sham acupuncture,” and “conventional therapy.” Sham acupuncture was like acupuncture except that the needles were put in “wrong” places, inserted less deeply, and not rotated after insertion. Conventional therapy was drugs, physical therapy, and exercise. The study found that acupuncture and sham acupuncture were equally effective. Both were much better than conventional therapy. The results imply that acupuncture works, but the surrounding theory (meridians, etc.) is wrong. Which I find reassuring.

Psychotherapy is essentially the same. Lots of studies show that psychotherapy helps — but many studies also imply that the surrounding theory is wrong. Untrained therapists are as effective as trained therapists. Keeping a journal has similar effects. The active ingredient may be telling your problems, just as the active ingredient of acupuncture is apparently needle insertion.

Ritual — doing something just because — can be found in meatloaf recipes, acupuncture, psychotherapy, and clinical trials. In the discussion section of the acupuncture paper, the authors wrote:

Potential limitations of this study [include] inability to blind acupuncturists to the form of acupuncture.

Just as the meatloaf cooks did not understand their recipe, the acupuncture researchers did not understand their research design. The original reason for blinding was to equate expectations. That the two forms of acupuncture came out equal in spite of unequal expectations among the therapists is better evidence that expectations were not important. The authors failed to grasp that lack of blinding worked in their favor.

Thanks to Hal Pashler.

From Tayster, below a poll that asks “do you sing in the car?”:

It’s been a week since I started the Shangri La Diet and I have lost eight pounds. More importantly, I have lost the cravings that I used to have. I don’t feel like eating as much food as I did before. And when I do eat food, I feel like I need to make it something besides a bag of chips and a chocolate cherry Coke. Since I eat less meals, I prefer to make the meals count.

I still can’t explain it, but it works.

One comment: “CHOCOLATE CHERRY COKE?!!! How did I not know about this assuredly sublime creation?!”

The present system of working for examinations by students is one which is doing a great deal of harm in every way.

From a 1883 letter by J. S. Haldane to his mother.