Read Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man for Free Online

donut-hole making . . . clearly this list has no end. But the list of what pens are for is short: pens are for writing on paper.
    And not only are there piles of quirky ways to use a mechanism, but there will typically be no simple characterization of how the mechanism will react in any specific case. Whereas the proper function of a pen can be activated by a mechanism characterized by a description something like this—“a hand holding the pen and lightly moving on the surface of the paper, leaving ink”—the mechanistic descriptions for different quirks will tend to differ wildly, and to refer to physical aspects of the pen that are not part of any description of writing. For example, good penny flicking depends on a pen’s rigidity being in the right range. And the pen I’m holding right now could serve as a container for sand, which depends on how the pen fits together so that it has room left over on the inside. These and many other peculiar characteristics of the mechanism aren’t relevant for understanding the proper function of the pen. And when it comes to the brain, we are woefully ignorant of its mechanisms, and so it is immensely difficult to determine which characteristics are central to its natural operation and which are not. The quirks are difficult to comprehend, but the purps are comparatively simple. I have a hope of wrapping my head around the fundamental core regularities found in nature and characterizing the brain’s likely response (the purps), but practically no hope of doing so for the quirks.
    To sum up, there’s no reason to believe that harnessing is completely dominated by the quirks. On the contrary, because most quirks are not truly useful for anything, whereas focused usefulness is the very essence of purps, purps are far more likely to be harnessed. There will, inevitably, be some facets of language and music that are not mimicking nature, but are, rather, shaping themselves to fit the quirks. But in this book I’ll ignore these quirks, for the reasons I just went over. To the extent that language and music have come to harness quirks despite their deficiencies, I’ll leave that to future scientists to unravel, because it is far above my pay grade.
    Now, with quirks out of the way, the fundamental argument structure of nature-harnessing can be illustrated by Figure 1b. If the brain in the story “from nature to brain to culture” is covered over, that leaves only nature and culture, highlighting the hypothesis that culture mimics nature.
    Figure 2, on the following page, shows the three cases of nature-harnessing I have examined in my research: writing, speech, and music. It shows the mechanisms in the brain each harnesses, and also the natural stimuli the brain mechanisms were selected to process. Writing was covered in The Vision Revolution . The other two rows in Figure 2 are for speech and music, the cultural artifacts taken up in this book, with nature-harnessing as the overarching theme.

     
    Figure 2 . The structure of the book’s argument. For example, for the first row, writing shaped itself (via cultural selection) for our visual object recognition mechanisms in the brain, and these mechanisms were, in turn, shaped (via natural selection) for recognizing three-dimensional scenes with opaque objects strewn about. Supposing that writing shaped itself mostly for the brain’s “purps” and not the quirks, then writing is expected to principally shape itself to look like three-dimensional scenes with opaque objects. The next two rows are the main topics of this book.
     
    And now we’re ready for the meat of this book. In Chapter 2, I describe how speech sounds like solid-object physical events, and in Chapters 3, 4, and the Encore (at the end of the book), I describe how music sounds like people moving. In the fourth chapter of my previous book, The Vision Revolution , I described how writing looks like 3-D scenes with opaque objects. With these three cases made,