Adam's tongue
5mentions
2recommended by
3HN commenters
2009–2025first – last mentioned
67% recommend33% neutral
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67% recommend33% neutral
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
The book Adam's Tongue by Derek Bickerton chronicles one view of how language evolved in humans and in doing so, evolved humans along with it. It's pretty fascinating. The book explains how our brains wouldn't really have…
on “How Deaf People Think” ↗> no one knows what exactly property of language makes it unique. The book Adam's Tongue delves into this. The author distinguishes "Animal Communication Systems" from languages by their linguistics. There are several things that you can isolate in human languages that you never see in animals,…
on “How Animals Think” ↗The book Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans makes a cogent argument for my position. It examines carefully the difference between Animal Communication Systems and our own, in all the variety primitive…
on “How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)” ↗There has been a LOT of research on this. A popsci book I've read on the topic is Adam's Tongue. It details the features that separate what's called Animal Communication Systems from human language. https://www.amazon.com/Adams-Tongue-Humans-Made-Language-ebo... Obviously pets are quite capable…
on “Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans” ↗…education and work in general is unlikely to increase our IQ. Derek Bickerton, sometime co-author of the article's referenced William Calvin, believes that we may already be going the other way. In his book "Adam's Tongue" he points out how, over time, humans are becoming eerily similar to ants or termites, He also notes that it takes about 40 generations for a wolf to become a domesticated dog-like animal and that the…
on “Get Smarter” ↗