The Talking Ape – Robbins Burling ****

Language – surely one of the key factors to making us human – and Robbins Burling does a superb job of explaining just what language is and how it might have originated.

This one of those popular science books that just reads itself – although Burling does use a little jargon, he employs it sparingly, and with careful explanation. The text along the way is easy to follow and the arguments are absolutely fascinating.

Though Burling has clear ideas of just how language developed (including the remarkable thought that it may have originated as a form of proto-music), he is careful to put across the opposing views that crop up throughout the field. This is a book that can be read easily by anyone with an interest, but it doesn’t fall into the trap of oversimplifying. Equally fascinating for the non-linguist is discovering some of the complexities of our communications channels – how, for example, gestures form part of our language, or how the genetically programmed “calls” like laughter and sobbing are analogue, while language is digital.

There are a couple of quibbles. It’s a real shame Burling seems to have overlooked the highly impressive content of Clive Bramhall’s The Eternal Child, which powerfully argues that much that makes us human is a side effect of the need to cooperate when our ancestors moved onto the savannah, pushing us into a more cooperative infantile development. For example, Burling wonders why language always seems to have developed in spoken, rather than gestured form – could it be because the most infantile communication is vocal; crying comes before hand signals? Any book on human origins that ignores Bramhall’s thesis these days is one sandwich short of a picnic.

The only other mild irritation is Burling’s tendency to repeat himself. This is a very readable book, but some of the points he makes come up over and over in different chapters. It’s true they say “tell them what you’re going to say, tell them, then tell them what you told them,” but it’s overdone here.

These quibbles apart, though, this is a delightful book for anyone interested in language or the development of the human mind. Unlike so many attempts at popular science by academics, this is more like a witty, accessible chat from an enthusiast than yet another lecture, boring droned out by someone who teaches because he has to. Recommended.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog