Read Online Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived by Chip Walter - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Chip Walter
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average two–year–old is thirty inches tall and twenty-eight pounds of pure, cerebral appetite determined without plan or guile to snatch up absolutely everything knowable from the world. She, or he, is, indisputably, the most ravenous, and most successful, learning machine yet devised in the universe.
It may not seem so on the surface, but toddlers accomplish prodigious amounts of work (all cleverly disguised as play) as they bowl and bawl their way through each day. By throwing a ball (or food), playing in the mud, a pool, or a sandbox, by attempting headlong runs and taking sudden tumbles, or swinging on swings or off “monkey” bars, the young are fervently familiarizing themselves with Newton’s laws of motion, Galileo’s insights into gravity, and Archimedes’ buoyancyprinciple, all without the burden of a single formula or mathematical term.
When a toddler smiles, cries, grimaces, gurgles, giggles, spits, bites, or hits; when she breaks free of mom or dad for a wild dash down the sidewalk; throws whatever he can grab for the sheer joy of it; dances spontaneous jigs or engages in other diabolical antics—she is learning what is socially acceptable and what is not, what is scary, what works in the way of communication and what fails and when. Food, and much that isn’t food, is tasted, licked, and baptized with slobber to investigate its texture, shape, and taste. Yet no artifice or logic is behind the tasting. It’s just another form of exploration. Objects, living or not, are bounced, swatted, hugged, flailed, closely inspected, all in a fervent effort to comprehend their nature. Unbounded and unstoppable greed for knowledge is the best way to put it.
Acquiring language is another big job in childhood. Babbling, squeals, and other noises are, as the best linguists have so far been able to ascertain, ways of figuring out the language that the other bigger, parental creatures speak around the toddlers whether it is Swahili, German, or Hindi. Later, early conversations are short, generally. “Here! Mama! Dadda! Mine! No! Please. Want!” Often, in times of acute frustration, communication is inarticulate, loud, and punctuated with acrobatic body language. In time, however, and amazingly, vocabularies grow, syntax improves, and full sentences are expressed, all with hardly an ounce of formal instruction. The acquisition of language is one of the great miracles in nature. At age one few children can say even a single word. At eighteen months they begin to learn one new word roughly every two hours they are awake. By age four they can hold remarkably insightful conversations, and by adolescence they have gathered tens of thousands of words into their vocabulary at a rate of ten to fifteen a day and often use them with lethal effect! And nearly every word was acquired simply by their listening to, and talking with, the people around them. 1
Children do these apparently lunatic and astonishing things for a reason. Nature has wired their brains for survival by driving them to swallow the world up as fast as they possibly can. Pulling off this feat is easier said than done. However, if we hope to comprehend how cerebral connections this complex take place, it might first be useful to step back and consider why brains exist at all, and how we eventually came by the particular brand we have.
* * *
By general agreement the first brain in nature belonged to a creature scientists today call planaria, known more commonly to you and me as the lowly flatworm. Flatworms are metazoans and wouldn’t seem therefore to be very brainy. But intelligence is a relative thing and planaria, when they first emerged more than seven hundred million years ago, were the geniuses of their time, creatures of unparalleled intelligence blessed with an entirely new kind of sensory cell capable of extracting marvelously valuable bits of information from their environment.
Unlike many of their contemporaries planaria were unusually
It may not seem so on the surface, but toddlers accomplish prodigious amounts of work (all cleverly disguised as play) as they bowl and bawl their way through each day. By throwing a ball (or food), playing in the mud, a pool, or a sandbox, by attempting headlong runs and taking sudden tumbles, or swinging on swings or off “monkey” bars, the young are fervently familiarizing themselves with Newton’s laws of motion, Galileo’s insights into gravity, and Archimedes’ buoyancyprinciple, all without the burden of a single formula or mathematical term.
When a toddler smiles, cries, grimaces, gurgles, giggles, spits, bites, or hits; when she breaks free of mom or dad for a wild dash down the sidewalk; throws whatever he can grab for the sheer joy of it; dances spontaneous jigs or engages in other diabolical antics—she is learning what is socially acceptable and what is not, what is scary, what works in the way of communication and what fails and when. Food, and much that isn’t food, is tasted, licked, and baptized with slobber to investigate its texture, shape, and taste. Yet no artifice or logic is behind the tasting. It’s just another form of exploration. Objects, living or not, are bounced, swatted, hugged, flailed, closely inspected, all in a fervent effort to comprehend their nature. Unbounded and unstoppable greed for knowledge is the best way to put it.
Acquiring language is another big job in childhood. Babbling, squeals, and other noises are, as the best linguists have so far been able to ascertain, ways of figuring out the language that the other bigger, parental creatures speak around the toddlers whether it is Swahili, German, or Hindi. Later, early conversations are short, generally. “Here! Mama! Dadda! Mine! No! Please. Want!” Often, in times of acute frustration, communication is inarticulate, loud, and punctuated with acrobatic body language. In time, however, and amazingly, vocabularies grow, syntax improves, and full sentences are expressed, all with hardly an ounce of formal instruction. The acquisition of language is one of the great miracles in nature. At age one few children can say even a single word. At eighteen months they begin to learn one new word roughly every two hours they are awake. By age four they can hold remarkably insightful conversations, and by adolescence they have gathered tens of thousands of words into their vocabulary at a rate of ten to fifteen a day and often use them with lethal effect! And nearly every word was acquired simply by their listening to, and talking with, the people around them. 1
Children do these apparently lunatic and astonishing things for a reason. Nature has wired their brains for survival by driving them to swallow the world up as fast as they possibly can. Pulling off this feat is easier said than done. However, if we hope to comprehend how cerebral connections this complex take place, it might first be useful to step back and consider why brains exist at all, and how we eventually came by the particular brand we have.
* * *
By general agreement the first brain in nature belonged to a creature scientists today call planaria, known more commonly to you and me as the lowly flatworm. Flatworms are metazoans and wouldn’t seem therefore to be very brainy. But intelligence is a relative thing and planaria, when they first emerged more than seven hundred million years ago, were the geniuses of their time, creatures of unparalleled intelligence blessed with an entirely new kind of sensory cell capable of extracting marvelously valuable bits of information from their environment.
Unlike many of their contemporaries planaria were unusually
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