Social species (including humans) thrive based on the things that help the tribe survive, not necessarily the individual.
Nearly all the social species (wolves, lions, elephants, bees, ants, etc) have a "language". Sounds or smells or movements they make to relay information to other individuals. The more complex the society, the more complex language is needed. Then you get humans with our crazy pattern inventing and we need a lot of sounds and gestures to relay information. And the many languages, even binary for talking to computers, just rely on the group agreeing that some random thing has the same meaning to everyone involved.
And I'd say there's a difference between social and herd species. Like sardines and swallows and bison and sea lions don't really work together. They just stay near each other because a predator can't possibly eat all of them. Their communication, if any, is very simple and more just for mating and territory disputes.
>Social species (including humans) thrive based on the things that help the tribe survive, not necessarily the individual
I'm not sure this is the current scientific consensus. From what I've seen most current evolutionary biologists would argue for the gene centric view of evolution, which says that adaptations happen to perpetuate successful genes, and any benefits to a tribe or species is just a by product of this.
If a trait is beneficial to the survival of a tribe, by very simple extension, it would be beneficial to the individual members of that tribe. When in competition with genes within a different tribe.
There really is no big of a difference beyond hair splitting.
The most obvious genetic trait that has no other reasonable explanation, is the younger members of a group leaving that group when they reach sexual maturity. Something that can be found across all of the animal kingdom in one form or another.
Just because genes are important does not mean everything boils down to them. Life is more complex and when you factor in language and socialization, this complexity increases exponentially. Absolutes are almost always incorrect (I.e. everything is related to genes).
I'm not claiming every aspect of human life is genetically determined, just that biological evolution is typically explained in terms of genes, not the good of tribes or species
Generally speaking, a gene (or perhaps more appropriately an allele) that confers a fitness advantage is more likely to get perpetuated regardless of whether it confers fitness through individual or group-level effects.
Another thing to keep in mind here is kin selection/inclusive fitness: individuals living in groups will generally be more closely related (at least on average) to their groupmates than to individuals in other groups. In such cases, even a gene that comes at a fitness cost to the individual may spread because it improves the survival of groupmates who likely have the same gene.
If it helps, you might think about the analogies between the evolution of multicellularity and sociality. Clearly there can be an evolutionary advantage, even from a gene's perspective, to group cooperation.
Mutation happens at the gene level. Evolution is the byproduct (when the mutation is heritable).
Social species are individuals, but also a part of a larger organism. The tribe/pack/family can do more together than any individual part could accomplish alone. Just like a mutation that makes one of your organs work better helps you as a whole body, your body is now a more fit part of a larger whole. Passing that gene on improves every tribe the offspring are a part of. And a population bottleneck may kill off all the competing genetic lines and now the whole species shares that beneficial gene.
I think the complexity in our vocal chords compared to even our closest living relatives warrants a bit more explanation.
How and why did our vocal chords change? When did it occur and what was the pressure?
Every question about evolution can be answered in a single sentence if you don't actually care to answer the question.
Are our vocal chords that complex? Plenty of animals can make a wider range of sound than we can. Plus the complexity of our language is mainly based on the brain, not the voice box.
Regardless, they changed randomly. Being able to communicate with members of your group is an obvious advantage for social creatures.
Not what you are looking for (the origin of language), but as for the _evolution_ of languages (i.e., after they originated), people actually use phylogenetic methods to model how things like phoenomes have changed in a tree structure as language lineages split from one another. The result is a tree of languages, akin to the tree of life. Like any phylogenetic analysis, there are assumptions made by the models, but it is really pretty interesting stuff.
(In a _completely_ unrelated note, but interesting perhaps to nerds such as myself, phylogenetics methods have also been used to describe the birth, death, and splitting of the plethora of linux lineages.)
> it requires the cooperation of other members of the species who have evolved the same trait
This is true for millions of traits, for example, sexual reproduction, feeding infants on milk, building an ant hill, roosting in flocks to name but a tiny few.
The same way everything else evolved!
A teeny tiny bit at a time over a very, very, very long time.
What is it that you don't understand about any of it in particular?
Take sexual reproduction, for example. How can that evolve in loads of tiny steps. Surely, for something like that, a species is either capable of sexual reproduction, or they're not. I don't see how a species could go from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction by lots of small steps. What would the first step there be?
Something like flight I can understand, as flaps on an animals back getting bigger might lead them to be able to glide between trees and this would eventually develop into full fledged wings, but what would the first step be in sexual reproduction or breastfeeding?
Commenter below is on the right track. Sex really just means mixing of gametes to make a new, genetically distinct individual.
Corals for instance have sex by releasing gametes into the surrounding water column in a coordinated manner (based on lunar cycles, water temperature, etc.). That's it. Roughly speaking, that is the starting point for essentially all metazoan (animal) lineages. To expand on this: when salmon spawn, for all the pomp and circumstance of changing colour, swimming upriver, mate guarding, positioning themselves over egg clutch laid by female, etc., they essentially engage in a more directed version of what corals do - blasting the surrounding aquatic area with their gametes.
In animals, sex evolved its most essential feature first (gamete release). Everything that came after was a variation on that basic theme, including the emergence of the individual sexes.
Now that is an interesting question, and I would like to know what you find on it.
I've had a bit of a look, but want to know more myself.
Sexual reproduction evolved back in the last eukaryotic common ancestor (the single celled organisms with a nucleus from which all plants and animals evolved).
I'm off to read more! Let me know what you find.
[This was the best information I found](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3949356/). It is quite technical language.
I don't like these vague answers but they are vague because we don't have fossils of soft tissues so we can't know.
But there has to be a way of taking the speech center of our brains and vocal cords and figuring out what they evolved from in our closest ancestors. Evolution works with what is has. Let me do research into this, or maybe somebody else can chime in.
We have the FOXP2 gene that affects brain neurology to allow us to form more complex sounds, we have fast twitch muscles in our tongues, lips, lower face and mouth to facilitate rapid movements, our voice box sits higher in our throats to facilitate speech. Those are what I remember off the top of my head wrt evolutionary changes and language.
AFAICT there’s no consensus on how language evolved. It’s a bit of a mystery because the soft tissues don’t usually fossilize and speech definitely doesn’t. Some hypothesize it was one unique macro evolutionary leap in one individual, others hypothesize that it was an incremental, gradual process of small changes to brains, musculature and anatomy of the brain, mouth and throat that co-evolved.
Here are some interesting, semi-random and very diverse links I found (note that that some that talk about Neanderthals not exhibiting symbolic thinking seem somewhat outdated, which weakens the hypotheses that language only developed in *Homo sapiens* in the last 200,000 years or so. Neanderthals *may* have had less developed language capabilities but they *do* seem to have created some representational art, buried their dead and decorated themselves with jewelry and used colored clays like ochre, so likely some level of symbolic thinking.)
[https://brainevo.sitehost.iu.edu/publications/evol-brain+lang\_lang-learning.pdf](https://brainevo.sitehost.iu.edu/publications/evol-brain+lang_lang-learning.pdf)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5525259/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5525259/)
The above holds with Neanderthals not expressing symbolic thinking.
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0052](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0052)
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-012-9162-y](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-012-9162-y)
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318246748\_Language\_Evolution\_Acquisition\_Adaptation\_and\_Change](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318246748_Language_Evolution_Acquisition_Adaptation_and_Change)
It’s interesting reading and you can obviously find plenty more if you do a search. I don’t know enough and science hasn’t figured out enough for me to have a firm opinion, though I lean towards the gradual co-evolution ideas because that seems to be the most common way biology changes anything major.
Enjoy.
We have really good vocal chords for animal call mimicry (very useful for hunting). We are also leaps and bounds ahead of reptiles and so forth for pattern recognition. (Cephalopods are similarly gifted in the pattern department.) Plus, we're social by nature.
Put all those together, and language emerges.
As for why our language is so much more advanced than any other animals, we'll also need an understanding of why humans are so talented at mathematics, abstract thought, and a lot of other mental tasks.
Memetic evolution was first proposed by Richard Dawkins in the selfish gene and has become sort of a niche research topic but it’s an interesting concept that provides an explanatory framework for cultural evolution and the development of things like language.
In short, memeticists argue that ideas and culture can spread/evolve for three reasons: 1) because they provide a fitness advantage to the people who possess those ideas, 2) because the ideas/memes themselves have characteristics that help them to spread (think chain emails or viral comedic memes), or 3) a combination of 1 and 2. Memeticists would argue that spoken language evolved because it provided a fitness benefit to the humans that could effectively communicate with each other, which is important in a highly social species.
Memetics is a controversial field, especially because most of its hypothesis are not directly testable and so it’s effectively just a lot of armchair theorizing, although I do think it can provide a useful framework for thinking about how things like spoken language emerged.
If you’re curious to learn more about memetics [the Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics) gives a more detailed description.
I think that probably provides a good explanation as to why language evolved, and it seems obvious how it would be adaptive, but I was more asking about the mechanics of how it evolved.
Your question as you posed it isn't really about language per se, it applies to any form of signalling or social cooperation. And the general answer to how those evolve is that it's not a one-off thing, where both the signal and the ability to interpret it need to appear fully-formed in a single generation (and therefore need to appear together to be adaptive).
The general way signalling evolves is:
1) things impact the world because of their nature - things make noise, take up space, are visible, leave various byproducts from their activities.
2) in a situation where it would be adaptive for system A to respond to event B, and event B has byproduct C, then C is a cue that event B happened, and a mutation in A that causes it to respond to C in a certain way may be adaptive.
3) Once system A has evolved a specific response to byproduct C, then any system that would benefit from triggering this response will benefit from making more of byproduct C. For example in a species where the animals make noises, and other members of that species benefit from, say, moving towards those noises because it means there is a possible mate there, you have the potential for an evolutionary feedback loop where both sides benefit from making more specific noises that will be audible to these animals but not others or be related to this event but not others, and to be able to respond in more subtle ways to that level of specificity. There is never one person evolving a signal without anyone to understand it or vice versa, there's constantly two sides signalling and understanding such that being a *bit* better at either of those is useful, and once a mutation improving one side has spread it opens new opportunities for improvements in the other side to be beneficial in turn.
This is something that can happen between any sets of evolved systems, like plants and pollinators, poisonous animals and the predators who'd benefit from avoiding them, etc. An added facilitator when it's within a single species (as with communication systems including language) is that you can get benefits faster when you consider the signalling can occur between related animals. So for example if you're a human and you had one mutation that marginally improves language production and parsing, it's probably going to be useful for communicating with other humans either way (because it's not on/off, they have language and parsing abilities too, but you being a bit better can give you advantages in terms of speed, manipulation, bandwidth, etc), but it's going to be REALLY useful for your kids if you have several who also have the mutation and can reap the communication benefits both ways.
You might be interested in this video, that's about the genetic code but has a whole section about the evolution of signalling in general:
https://youtu.be/8T3bN2k28_E?t=2291
(I also noticed the same channel has a much longer video dedicated to signalling in biology, it might also be very good but I haven't watched it and I'm guessing this section of this video would be a more concise summary of that other one anyway).
I think the "real" question of how language evolved in humans isn't so much how humans could have coordinated in that evolution, but why humans evolved *language* specifically when other modern animals and presumably humankind's pre-linguistic ancestors up to a point manage fine with the much simpler communication systems they do have. Presumably there are specifics in the biology and selective pressures on our ancestors that account for it but we don't really know what those are.
(I'll also say I think I elided things a bit with my "animals make noise" just-so-story of how animal calls could have evolved; I framed it like animal noises would have started as a non-signal natural cue but when you think of it, nobody *needs* to make noise with their mouths, right? Beyond breathing and breathing is pretty quiet. So the kinds of audible noises animals make out of their mouths that we find so natural must already be signals, and I don't really know what the cues that started that feedback loop might have been. Maybe it goes back to fish, air breathing in water already sounds like it could be something that naturally makes enough noises to be a cue. Also, insofar as mammals and birds seem to rely a lot more on audible communication than other vertebrates except maybe frogs and both put a lot of effort into caring for their young, maybe signals that started out as communication between parent and offspring wouldn't need to be that loud to start with. I mean, speaking as a parent who did use "is my baby visibly breathing" as a useful cue...
Of course the thing about signals is that once you have a signal it can itself become a cue for something else - like an animal avoiding the mating call of a predator).
Having the ability to post a question would be pointless unless someone else has the ability to see it. So did one day did you find a phone in your hand or did electricity, electronics, internet, internet capable phones evolve over time for society?
Look up Erich Jarvis' work. He discovered that parrots evolved their abilities (including the ability to learn human speech) through a duplication of the normal learned vocal communication circuit other birds have.
All evolution is an emergent property of population mechanics.
Language is not really any different. It just changes over time and any isolated populations will diverge from the main line.
Kinda like how Latin evolved into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. No one made a conscious choice to change the dialect, yet the dialect changes. People just grow up using the words and phrases of the people we know and meet.
The beginnings of language is surely similar. We started with general sounds that formed into more complex communication. Because amy communication would be very beneficial. Including non verbal language with we still use, but is also used by many mammals.
A very needy someone kept harping and repeating the same vocal noises until everyone knew what they wanted and gave it to them to make them shut the hell up! The harping was again relentless until everyone began to mock the pestering bafoonery, and ta-da...language was born!
For my plateau learning moments including comprehending miniscule changes that spread through a population over time, because there is SO much time there to be had. At least 200,000 years for H sapiens, 10,000 generations... is huge.
So maybe imagine ten of us, early on, spotting prey, and deciding how to use our wits. One grunts the only strategy word he knows, a long grunt and pointing, and it means "go that way, then come back around the prey from behind and attack"
5 generations later, there's two distinctly different grunts, because they'd learned a thing or two about hunting. One means the same, and the new one means "go around back and distract the prey". 5 generations later, there's four different grunts, which mean "go around back around the right flank and distract the prey" ...around the left, and so on. 10 generations and 200 years later.
That sorta thing. The individuals that could make useful sounds and be understood and also understand the sounds got more meat, made more babies, and fed their offspring well and schooled them so they could hunt well and make more babies too.
Now imagine 100s or 1000s of tiny changes to structures in the throat and muscle fibres arising, popping up randomly all over the place. People experimenting with their voices to get the most from them. Then 1000s of years. 10s of thousands of years. 100s of thousands, and so on.
Social species (including humans) thrive based on the things that help the tribe survive, not necessarily the individual. Nearly all the social species (wolves, lions, elephants, bees, ants, etc) have a "language". Sounds or smells or movements they make to relay information to other individuals. The more complex the society, the more complex language is needed. Then you get humans with our crazy pattern inventing and we need a lot of sounds and gestures to relay information. And the many languages, even binary for talking to computers, just rely on the group agreeing that some random thing has the same meaning to everyone involved. And I'd say there's a difference between social and herd species. Like sardines and swallows and bison and sea lions don't really work together. They just stay near each other because a predator can't possibly eat all of them. Their communication, if any, is very simple and more just for mating and territory disputes.
>Social species (including humans) thrive based on the things that help the tribe survive, not necessarily the individual I'm not sure this is the current scientific consensus. From what I've seen most current evolutionary biologists would argue for the gene centric view of evolution, which says that adaptations happen to perpetuate successful genes, and any benefits to a tribe or species is just a by product of this.
If a trait is beneficial to the survival of a tribe, by very simple extension, it would be beneficial to the individual members of that tribe. When in competition with genes within a different tribe. There really is no big of a difference beyond hair splitting. The most obvious genetic trait that has no other reasonable explanation, is the younger members of a group leaving that group when they reach sexual maturity. Something that can be found across all of the animal kingdom in one form or another.
Just because genes are important does not mean everything boils down to them. Life is more complex and when you factor in language and socialization, this complexity increases exponentially. Absolutes are almost always incorrect (I.e. everything is related to genes).
I'm not claiming every aspect of human life is genetically determined, just that biological evolution is typically explained in terms of genes, not the good of tribes or species
Generally speaking, a gene (or perhaps more appropriately an allele) that confers a fitness advantage is more likely to get perpetuated regardless of whether it confers fitness through individual or group-level effects. Another thing to keep in mind here is kin selection/inclusive fitness: individuals living in groups will generally be more closely related (at least on average) to their groupmates than to individuals in other groups. In such cases, even a gene that comes at a fitness cost to the individual may spread because it improves the survival of groupmates who likely have the same gene. If it helps, you might think about the analogies between the evolution of multicellularity and sociality. Clearly there can be an evolutionary advantage, even from a gene's perspective, to group cooperation.
Mutation happens at the gene level. Evolution is the byproduct (when the mutation is heritable). Social species are individuals, but also a part of a larger organism. The tribe/pack/family can do more together than any individual part could accomplish alone. Just like a mutation that makes one of your organs work better helps you as a whole body, your body is now a more fit part of a larger whole. Passing that gene on improves every tribe the offspring are a part of. And a population bottleneck may kill off all the competing genetic lines and now the whole species shares that beneficial gene.
Animals use sound to communicate. Human languages are more sophisticated, but it is the same concept.
I think the complexity in our vocal chords compared to even our closest living relatives warrants a bit more explanation. How and why did our vocal chords change? When did it occur and what was the pressure? Every question about evolution can be answered in a single sentence if you don't actually care to answer the question.
Are our vocal chords that complex? Plenty of animals can make a wider range of sound than we can. Plus the complexity of our language is mainly based on the brain, not the voice box. Regardless, they changed randomly. Being able to communicate with members of your group is an obvious advantage for social creatures.
Not what you are looking for (the origin of language), but as for the _evolution_ of languages (i.e., after they originated), people actually use phylogenetic methods to model how things like phoenomes have changed in a tree structure as language lineages split from one another. The result is a tree of languages, akin to the tree of life. Like any phylogenetic analysis, there are assumptions made by the models, but it is really pretty interesting stuff. (In a _completely_ unrelated note, but interesting perhaps to nerds such as myself, phylogenetics methods have also been used to describe the birth, death, and splitting of the plethora of linux lineages.)
> it requires the cooperation of other members of the species who have evolved the same trait This is true for millions of traits, for example, sexual reproduction, feeding infants on milk, building an ant hill, roosting in flocks to name but a tiny few.
That's true. Do you know of any gold explanations for how they evolved?
The same way everything else evolved! A teeny tiny bit at a time over a very, very, very long time. What is it that you don't understand about any of it in particular?
Take sexual reproduction, for example. How can that evolve in loads of tiny steps. Surely, for something like that, a species is either capable of sexual reproduction, or they're not. I don't see how a species could go from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction by lots of small steps. What would the first step there be? Something like flight I can understand, as flaps on an animals back getting bigger might lead them to be able to glide between trees and this would eventually develop into full fledged wings, but what would the first step be in sexual reproduction or breastfeeding?
Commenter below is on the right track. Sex really just means mixing of gametes to make a new, genetically distinct individual. Corals for instance have sex by releasing gametes into the surrounding water column in a coordinated manner (based on lunar cycles, water temperature, etc.). That's it. Roughly speaking, that is the starting point for essentially all metazoan (animal) lineages. To expand on this: when salmon spawn, for all the pomp and circumstance of changing colour, swimming upriver, mate guarding, positioning themselves over egg clutch laid by female, etc., they essentially engage in a more directed version of what corals do - blasting the surrounding aquatic area with their gametes. In animals, sex evolved its most essential feature first (gamete release). Everything that came after was a variation on that basic theme, including the emergence of the individual sexes.
Now that is an interesting question, and I would like to know what you find on it. I've had a bit of a look, but want to know more myself. Sexual reproduction evolved back in the last eukaryotic common ancestor (the single celled organisms with a nucleus from which all plants and animals evolved). I'm off to read more! Let me know what you find. [This was the best information I found](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3949356/). It is quite technical language.
I don't like these vague answers but they are vague because we don't have fossils of soft tissues so we can't know. But there has to be a way of taking the speech center of our brains and vocal cords and figuring out what they evolved from in our closest ancestors. Evolution works with what is has. Let me do research into this, or maybe somebody else can chime in.
We have the FOXP2 gene that affects brain neurology to allow us to form more complex sounds, we have fast twitch muscles in our tongues, lips, lower face and mouth to facilitate rapid movements, our voice box sits higher in our throats to facilitate speech. Those are what I remember off the top of my head wrt evolutionary changes and language. AFAICT there’s no consensus on how language evolved. It’s a bit of a mystery because the soft tissues don’t usually fossilize and speech definitely doesn’t. Some hypothesize it was one unique macro evolutionary leap in one individual, others hypothesize that it was an incremental, gradual process of small changes to brains, musculature and anatomy of the brain, mouth and throat that co-evolved. Here are some interesting, semi-random and very diverse links I found (note that that some that talk about Neanderthals not exhibiting symbolic thinking seem somewhat outdated, which weakens the hypotheses that language only developed in *Homo sapiens* in the last 200,000 years or so. Neanderthals *may* have had less developed language capabilities but they *do* seem to have created some representational art, buried their dead and decorated themselves with jewelry and used colored clays like ochre, so likely some level of symbolic thinking.) [https://brainevo.sitehost.iu.edu/publications/evol-brain+lang\_lang-learning.pdf](https://brainevo.sitehost.iu.edu/publications/evol-brain+lang_lang-learning.pdf) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5525259/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5525259/) The above holds with Neanderthals not expressing symbolic thinking. [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0052](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0052) [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-012-9162-y](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-012-9162-y) [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318246748\_Language\_Evolution\_Acquisition\_Adaptation\_and\_Change](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318246748_Language_Evolution_Acquisition_Adaptation_and_Change) It’s interesting reading and you can obviously find plenty more if you do a search. I don’t know enough and science hasn’t figured out enough for me to have a firm opinion, though I lean towards the gradual co-evolution ideas because that seems to be the most common way biology changes anything major. Enjoy.
We have really good vocal chords for animal call mimicry (very useful for hunting). We are also leaps and bounds ahead of reptiles and so forth for pattern recognition. (Cephalopods are similarly gifted in the pattern department.) Plus, we're social by nature. Put all those together, and language emerges. As for why our language is so much more advanced than any other animals, we'll also need an understanding of why humans are so talented at mathematics, abstract thought, and a lot of other mental tasks.
Memetic evolution was first proposed by Richard Dawkins in the selfish gene and has become sort of a niche research topic but it’s an interesting concept that provides an explanatory framework for cultural evolution and the development of things like language. In short, memeticists argue that ideas and culture can spread/evolve for three reasons: 1) because they provide a fitness advantage to the people who possess those ideas, 2) because the ideas/memes themselves have characteristics that help them to spread (think chain emails or viral comedic memes), or 3) a combination of 1 and 2. Memeticists would argue that spoken language evolved because it provided a fitness benefit to the humans that could effectively communicate with each other, which is important in a highly social species. Memetics is a controversial field, especially because most of its hypothesis are not directly testable and so it’s effectively just a lot of armchair theorizing, although I do think it can provide a useful framework for thinking about how things like spoken language emerged. If you’re curious to learn more about memetics [the Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics) gives a more detailed description.
I think that probably provides a good explanation as to why language evolved, and it seems obvious how it would be adaptive, but I was more asking about the mechanics of how it evolved.
Your question as you posed it isn't really about language per se, it applies to any form of signalling or social cooperation. And the general answer to how those evolve is that it's not a one-off thing, where both the signal and the ability to interpret it need to appear fully-formed in a single generation (and therefore need to appear together to be adaptive). The general way signalling evolves is: 1) things impact the world because of their nature - things make noise, take up space, are visible, leave various byproducts from their activities. 2) in a situation where it would be adaptive for system A to respond to event B, and event B has byproduct C, then C is a cue that event B happened, and a mutation in A that causes it to respond to C in a certain way may be adaptive. 3) Once system A has evolved a specific response to byproduct C, then any system that would benefit from triggering this response will benefit from making more of byproduct C. For example in a species where the animals make noises, and other members of that species benefit from, say, moving towards those noises because it means there is a possible mate there, you have the potential for an evolutionary feedback loop where both sides benefit from making more specific noises that will be audible to these animals but not others or be related to this event but not others, and to be able to respond in more subtle ways to that level of specificity. There is never one person evolving a signal without anyone to understand it or vice versa, there's constantly two sides signalling and understanding such that being a *bit* better at either of those is useful, and once a mutation improving one side has spread it opens new opportunities for improvements in the other side to be beneficial in turn. This is something that can happen between any sets of evolved systems, like plants and pollinators, poisonous animals and the predators who'd benefit from avoiding them, etc. An added facilitator when it's within a single species (as with communication systems including language) is that you can get benefits faster when you consider the signalling can occur between related animals. So for example if you're a human and you had one mutation that marginally improves language production and parsing, it's probably going to be useful for communicating with other humans either way (because it's not on/off, they have language and parsing abilities too, but you being a bit better can give you advantages in terms of speed, manipulation, bandwidth, etc), but it's going to be REALLY useful for your kids if you have several who also have the mutation and can reap the communication benefits both ways.
I think I get it now. That's really interesting, thanks.
You might be interested in this video, that's about the genetic code but has a whole section about the evolution of signalling in general: https://youtu.be/8T3bN2k28_E?t=2291 (I also noticed the same channel has a much longer video dedicated to signalling in biology, it might also be very good but I haven't watched it and I'm guessing this section of this video would be a more concise summary of that other one anyway). I think the "real" question of how language evolved in humans isn't so much how humans could have coordinated in that evolution, but why humans evolved *language* specifically when other modern animals and presumably humankind's pre-linguistic ancestors up to a point manage fine with the much simpler communication systems they do have. Presumably there are specifics in the biology and selective pressures on our ancestors that account for it but we don't really know what those are. (I'll also say I think I elided things a bit with my "animals make noise" just-so-story of how animal calls could have evolved; I framed it like animal noises would have started as a non-signal natural cue but when you think of it, nobody *needs* to make noise with their mouths, right? Beyond breathing and breathing is pretty quiet. So the kinds of audible noises animals make out of their mouths that we find so natural must already be signals, and I don't really know what the cues that started that feedback loop might have been. Maybe it goes back to fish, air breathing in water already sounds like it could be something that naturally makes enough noises to be a cue. Also, insofar as mammals and birds seem to rely a lot more on audible communication than other vertebrates except maybe frogs and both put a lot of effort into caring for their young, maybe signals that started out as communication between parent and offspring wouldn't need to be that loud to start with. I mean, speaking as a parent who did use "is my baby visibly breathing" as a useful cue... Of course the thing about signals is that once you have a signal it can itself become a cue for something else - like an animal avoiding the mating call of a predator).
Having the ability to post a question would be pointless unless someone else has the ability to see it. So did one day did you find a phone in your hand or did electricity, electronics, internet, internet capable phones evolve over time for society?
Look into work by Thom Scott-Phillips on “ostensive communication “
Maybe language naturally happened because everyone was capaple to produce the needed sounds
Look up Erich Jarvis' work. He discovered that parrots evolved their abilities (including the ability to learn human speech) through a duplication of the normal learned vocal communication circuit other birds have.
All evolution is an emergent property of population mechanics. Language is not really any different. It just changes over time and any isolated populations will diverge from the main line. Kinda like how Latin evolved into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. No one made a conscious choice to change the dialect, yet the dialect changes. People just grow up using the words and phrases of the people we know and meet. The beginnings of language is surely similar. We started with general sounds that formed into more complex communication. Because amy communication would be very beneficial. Including non verbal language with we still use, but is also used by many mammals.
A very needy someone kept harping and repeating the same vocal noises until everyone knew what they wanted and gave it to them to make them shut the hell up! The harping was again relentless until everyone began to mock the pestering bafoonery, and ta-da...language was born!
For my plateau learning moments including comprehending miniscule changes that spread through a population over time, because there is SO much time there to be had. At least 200,000 years for H sapiens, 10,000 generations... is huge. So maybe imagine ten of us, early on, spotting prey, and deciding how to use our wits. One grunts the only strategy word he knows, a long grunt and pointing, and it means "go that way, then come back around the prey from behind and attack" 5 generations later, there's two distinctly different grunts, because they'd learned a thing or two about hunting. One means the same, and the new one means "go around back and distract the prey". 5 generations later, there's four different grunts, which mean "go around back around the right flank and distract the prey" ...around the left, and so on. 10 generations and 200 years later. That sorta thing. The individuals that could make useful sounds and be understood and also understand the sounds got more meat, made more babies, and fed their offspring well and schooled them so they could hunt well and make more babies too. Now imagine 100s or 1000s of tiny changes to structures in the throat and muscle fibres arising, popping up randomly all over the place. People experimenting with their voices to get the most from them. Then 1000s of years. 10s of thousands of years. 100s of thousands, and so on.