I dunno if ju guys ever read any of my leenks, b-u-t…
I think all this attention to brain matter may be overshooting the mark a bit. The gist of our relative agreement about semantics goes deeper than the brain. I’d like to know if any of you see the same connections as I do on this.
It was Noam Chomsky who first suggested the hypothesis of an innate syntactical structure Generative Grammar that must be present within human beings. I think we are beginning to actually discover this, and the research below satisfies his requirement for recursion.
“Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages.[37] The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed Universal Grammar.”
Now Geoffrey Sampson is suggesting the same for Natural Semantics.
I believe all of this is absolutely spot on. But not for any evidence found in the brain. It seems much too obvious (to me) that we do in fact have an innate language structure built into our humanity from birth. Why? Because we are built from the language of DNA. We are beings of language… not flesh and bone… we’re not rocks. Our existence begins as a Letter, and then we become a Word quickly evolving into a Sentence, a Paragraph, and a whole bunch of Chapters.
There it is… We don’t have an innate language structure built into the brain. We are language.
And Wes Warren from Washington University’s Genome Sequencing Center has made some profound discoveries to suggest that our DNA is responsible for our language ability, and not the brain at all.
As described in April 2010 Journal Nature…
Warren has demonstrated a different mechanism than mere “interactions of neurons within the brain”. He seems to have discovered what causes those interactions to occur.
“We show that song behaviour engages gene regulatory networks in the zebra finch brain, altering the expression of long non-coding RNAs, microRNAs, transcription factors and their targets. We also show evidence for rapid molecular evolution in the songbird lineage of genes that are regulated during song experience. These results indicate an active involvement of the genome in neural processes underlying vocal communication and identify potential genetic substrates for the evolution and regulation of this behavior.”
The implications of this are staggering, as “The zebra finch is an important model organism in several fields1, 2 with unique relevance to human neuroscience3, 4. Like other songbirds, the zebra finch communicates through learned vocalizations, an ability otherwise documented only in humans and a few other animals…”
We once again find another use for the so called Junk DNA. It seems that when the Zebra Finch expresses a DESIRE to sing, that desire causes a change in sequence of the “long non-coding RNAs, microRNAs, transcription factors and their targets.” And thereby, a change in that sequence, is the very mechanism which causes the “interactions of neurons within the brain”.
“Two of the cDNA clones that measured the most robust increases27 align to an unusually long (3 kilobases (kb)) 3′ untranslated region (UTR) in the human gene that encodes the NR4A3 transcription factor protein (Fig. 4a). The entire UTR is similar in humans and zebra finches, with several long segments of >80% identity”
“These findings indicate that this NR4A3 transcript element may function in both humans and songbirds to integrate many conserved microRNA regulatory pathways.”
“It has been proposed that ncRNAs have a contributing role in enabling or driving the evolution of greater complexity in humans and other complex eukaryotes32. Seeing that learned vocal communication itself is a phenomenon that has emerged only in some of the most complex organisms, perhaps ncRNAs are a nexus of this phenomenon.”