The Evolution of Language...and Manipulation

What are the evolutionary purposes of language? Most people would, without further thought, assume that the principal purpose of language is communication of information. That is, indeed, one of its purposes; but, I believe, it is a secondary purpose. The primary purpose of language is social interaction: to influence others to do what you want them to do, to create a good (or bad) impression of yourself in the minds of others, to identify yourself as a member of their particular group.

This is the principal reason that there are languages, plural. Each “tribe” even today has its own language. These languages are much more complex than they have to be, and the main reason is that if you cannot master the complexities of the language and its pronunciation, you are probably an outsider.

But even within a society, language is primarily a tool of social interaction, and often of manipulation. We can see this in the current eruption of white supremacist and neo-Nazi sentiments in the United States. The use of these terms would prejudice a reader against them, and I would avoid them, except that the right-wing extremists are proud of them. Some of them carry Nazi flags, and the others allow them to.

1.      When a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of anti-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017 [http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/18/us/charlottesville-james-alex-fields-charges/index.html], President Trump vacillated between condemning neo-Nazi activities and considering them to be merely part of the spectrum of political opinion. At no point did he or any other member of his administration call this an act of terrorism. But it fits all definitions of terrorism. The terrorist was not targeting a particular individual with his car; he was attempting to create terror among the people who were protesting against the white supremacists. And he used deadly force. If he had been Muslim, he would have been instantly branded as a terrorist. The selective use of the word “terrorist” against Muslims but never using against white Christian extremists is a clear use of manipulative language.

2.      The white supremacists call their cause and their rallies “free speech rallies” rather than neo-Nazi or white supremacist rallies. By getting millions of people to use this term for their activities, they project the message that, “You can’t possibly be against free speech! So you have to allow us to shout out our hatred against our fellow citizens.”

Technically, they have the legal right to say whatever they want to, so long as they do not incite people to violent action. But they are evil. We cannot allow them to depict their actions as mere defenses of free speech. All of us who are not aspiring Nazis must keep calling these people, and all who sympathize with them or speak out in their defense, what they are: the modern defenders of Adolf Hitler.

Some conservatives have tried to excuse the terrorist by saying that he had suffered abuse as a child. I have no opinion about this. But a black man could not have used this excuse.

Hitler himself was a master of language manipulation. (He wasn’t a master of much else. His leadership was disastrously delusional and destructive for his own German people, for example.) Most of us think of the phrase “Deutschland über alles” (Germany over all) as being Hitler’s phrase for world domination. But it was originally used to unite the German kingdoms (such as Saxony and Bavaria) into a single country: Germany was more important than its constituent kingdoms. Hitler stole the phrase and all the sympathy that went with it. Also, if Hitler had publicly proclaimed that he planned to slaughter millions of Jews, if he had called it an attempt at extermination, he would have had much less support from the German people. But he called it a “solution,” and who wouldn’t be in favor of this? A person is as likely to support a “solution” as “free speech.”

Political conservatives hate, viscerally hate, our modern language practices in which we attempt to counteract the racism of the past. They call it “political correctness,” which implies that anyone who does not use racist terms is doing so only for political influence. Our use of “black” instead of “nigger” can only mean, to conservatives, that we want political power; they think it cannot possibly be because we want to show respect and love to people who people who have been oppressed and slaughtered in the recent past. Conservatives want to refer to what happened in Tulsa in 1921 as a race riot, implying that black people were doing the killing and burning. In reality, it was a white mob hunting down and shooting blacks. Prominent Tulsan and KKK member W. Tate Brady was pleased to see a black man being dragged behind a car with a noose around his neck. It is not “political correctness” that makes us refer to the 1921 incident as a massacre or as an act of terrorism rather than a riot. It is a desire for truth, and to try to make up for the white massacre of blacks in the recent past.

To test the hypothesis of “language exists largely for manipulation,” all we need to do is see the spectacular failure of invented languages. Esperanto was invented to create world peace under the misguided notion that a common language will prevent miscommunication. But liars can lie in Esperanto. Charles Bliss created a system of symbolic communication that, he believed, would prevent language from being manipulated. He printed up six thousand copies of his book and sent them to government and other leaders all over the world, and got no response whatever, until some nurses noticed that this system might help children with cerebral palsy, who cannot communicate what they are thinking, to connect with the world. Bliss’s system thereby escaped extinction. But soon it was being used, not in place of other languages, but as a way of learning them, leading right back to the manipulation that Bliss, an escapee from World War Two, hated so much.

So when humans have created new languages for the express purpose of avoiding social manipulation, the new languages become the venues of social manipulation. This is an experimental confirmation of the hypothesis that languages evolved for social interactions, one important component of which is manipulation.

And there is nothing we can do about it, other than to keep using language in such a way as to try to counteract evil people from using their words to oppress others in their attempt to revive Nazi sentiments and make them palatable.

I also posted this essay on my science blog.

After posting a video on this topic, I received a comment saying that the white supremacist in the car was merely trying to get out of the crowd, and that his car was being attacked by leftist protestors. Well, of course this is what happened, AFTER he drove his car at high speed into the crowd. Of course his car was attacked AFTER he committed his act of terrorism. This is obvious to anyone who has seen the videos, such as this one. The fact that there was someone even within my small circle of YouTube viewers who believes that it is okay for a white supremacist to ram his car into protestors, that killing someone is a form of free speech, is frightening. My video, so far, has had only 18 views, and this comment came from one of this small number of viewers. Extrapolating to the total adult population of America, this means that there are approximately a half million right-wingers in America who believe that such action is justified. There might be more, as my videos tend to be viewed by progressives.

Christians Worship Trump

In America today, Christianity consists entirely of the worship of Donald Trump. Christians believe that everything Trump says is correct and must be believed, is good and must be obeyed. The Bible, and Jesus, are totally irrelevant to modern American Christianity.

Of course, you will immediately say that there are millions of Christians regarding whom this statement is incorrect. And you would be right, of course. I happen to know a few and so do you. But there are many other millions of Christians who loudly proclaim the near-divinity of Donald Trump.

What I have chosen to do, for the sake of simplicity, is to assume that all Christians are worshipers of Trump. I will then make individual exceptions for those Christians who make a public denunciation of Trump in some way or other. If you are a Christian who does not worship Trump, your denunciation must be public, as on Facebook, or a blog. Something that is searchable on the internet. You cannot secretly worship Jesus while publicly worshiping Trump.

I realize that it is something of a risk to identify yourself as a Christian who denounces Trump. His followers have guns and love them. But the danger is not nearly as great now as it will be later, once Trump’s worshipers have more power. And your public denunciation is likely to have more of an effect now than later.

The German churches largely went along with Hitler. If they had stood up to him in 1933, history might have been different. But by 1939 it was no longer possible for the churches to change anything. By then, not just Germans but Vichy French and other sympathizers were committing acts of unspeakable cruelty—acts that they might sincerely have not wanted to commit—while claiming that they were just following orders.

Some possible places to post your opposition to Trump:

• The whitehouse.gov website (keep a copy)
• On Facebook
• Your blog

So if you identify yourself to me as a Christian, I will assume that you worship Trump and wish Him to be the great spiritual leader of America. But I will ask you if you have publicly denounced Trump, and where you posted your statement. If you can answer that question, then I will concede that you are a Christian. Otherwise I can only assume that you are a worshiper of Trump, with whom for my own personal safety I must communicate as little as possible.

So, You Want the Gospel?

So, you want the Gospel? I wouldn’t suggest going to church to find it. Just listento this song by Glen Campbell, who died yesterday.

Thoughtful Quotes from All the Light We Cannot See

One of the best books I have recently read is All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which was a best-seller last year. It is so well-written and thoughtful that it was compelling despite an adventurously fragmented arrangement of short chapters. A blind French girl and a young Nazi radio operator were both very aware that the universe is full of photons that we must perceive with something other than our eyes.

“Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger?”

“...she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never see a photon sent from the sun.”

“But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking as the city is gradually pounded to dust.”

Dinosaur Trackways on the Blank Slate of the Mind

I have posted this essay on my science blog as well, but I include a final paragraph on this blog that was not on the science blog.

The last couple of days, I have had the privilege of working, again, with Glen Kuban down in the bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas (Dinosaur Valley State Park). Usually we work alone, or with a couple of other people, but this time there was a little crowd. A BBC film crew brought their cameras and even a photographic drone to get video footage of the dinosaur trackways, which I have written about numerous times previously in this blog, for example here). They also came to interview Glen, who has worked on these tracks (and knows each footprint by name) for 37 years, and he will not get some worldwide recognition for the work he has done. Congratulations, Glen! You deserve it.

Watch for the BBC video when it comes out. It will be called Rediscovering T Rex. The trackways in the park are not T. rex, but there are very few verified footprints of T. rex. But in the Paluxy river bed you can see long trackways of Acrocanthosaurus, which was similar to T. rex in many ways. The BBC does not yet have an American distributor for this video, so far only Canada and France, but I’ll bet that within a year or so you can find the video on Amazon or your local library.

I have posted a YouTube video of Glen and the film crew, if you want to experience what it was like to be there.

We were at the trackway site that was made infamous in the 1970s-era creationist movie Footprints in Stone, where creationists claimed that human footprints overlapped dinosaur footprints, thus proving, they claimed, that the entire evolutionary timetable of Earth history was wrong. The evidence of human footprints in 110-million-year-old mud (now limestone) was skimpy and some of it faked. Most creationists, even those who have not publicly disavowed the “manprints of the Paluxy,” pretty much ignore them. The son of the producer of the creationist movie, when he discovered that his father had misled his viewers about these footprints, destroyed all remaining copies of the movie. There was no discussion of this uniquely American controversy with the BBC crew, even though they knew about it, because it is such a dead issue even among creationists; certainly European viewers would wonder why anyone took so much as two breaths to talk about the supposed man-prints.

But there are still passionate creationists, mostly in the Glen Rose vicinity, who believe that the supposed man-tracks are real and that they prove that not only are all evolutionary scientists wrong, but even most creationists. They are a crazy little cult. They still have a museum right near the state park, although it appears to be on the skids and is now only open two days a week. I have posted essays in this blog about the Mantrack cult in the past (for example here). The state park personnel who were with Glen, me, and the BBC crew told me that this little cult has so effectively spread the hoax that lots of visitors still ask them how to find the man-tracks. It gets pretty intense sometimes, and rather than to create a confrontation, the park personnel sometimes have to simply walk away or busy themselves with some other park visitor.

We sort of expected that some members of this cult would come and try to disrupt the BBC filming. This did not happen, however, perhaps because there were a half dozen park employees on the scene. This track site is hard to find but the cult members, some of whom own adjacent land, can get there. They act as if they also own the river bed, and have in the past tried to keep Glen from studying the tracks. Actually, the river bed belongs to the state of Texas.

But one of the cult members came by, claiming that he was taking photographs for the City of Glen Rose. I very much doubt that the city government actually sent him, however. They might have posted some of his photos in the past, but he was acting in no official capacity. Of course, this man, whose name I forgot, and just as well, started going through his little speech about how belief in the man-tracks took less faith than belief in what he called “strict evolution.” Glen had told me beforehand almost verbatim what this little speech would be. It is as if the cult members are programmed to give their little speeches, and they will not respond to anything you say. They act as if they are brainwashed.

But that was not actually the precipitating event. The man started by saying that a cold front was coming through this weekend, and that it would only be about 92 degrees instead of the normal 97 degrees. This, he claimed, disproved the entire science of global warming. As I am one of the climate scientists that Donald Trump hates and Emmanuel Macron loves, I had to point out that this was an invalid conclusion. Global warming does not mean that temperatures never decrease; it means that they increase more, and more often, than they decrease. Well, this was all the cue he needed to self-identify as a right-wing extremist (or words to that effect; I did not yet so label him) and launch into his speech.

This man went on to comment on the fact that paleontologists have stopped using the genus name Paluxysaurus and started using Sauroposeidon instead. This shows, said the man, that scientists are wrong about this and, why not, everything else also. But changing names of organisms reflects the ongoing process of coming to better understand the evolutionary history of the organisms. And, of course, science advances because scientists make mistakes and then learn from them, something that religious cults almost by definition cannot do. Cults believe themselves to be directly inspired by God, and to admit one mistake totally undermines their reason for being.

I wish to make two points from this. First, the religious fundamentalists are now attacking all of science and education on two fronts. Formerly, they focused all their attention on evolution. Now, they also consider climate scientists to be servants of Satan. This is why scientific and educational organizations, all the way from national and international organizations such as the AAAS and NCSE to local ones such as the Oklahoma Academy of Science and Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education, of both of which organizations I am a past president, disseminate as much information about climate science as about evolutionary science.

The second point explains the title of this essay. The lumpy limestone of Dinosaur Valley State Park has proven to be one of the most creative blank slates upon which a religious cult can write its own version of the history of the universe. The dinosaur footprints are real enough. The supposed man-tracks are incomplete dinosaur footprints. On some of these prints, the dinosaur toes have eroded away. On others, the creationists have deliberately ignored the dinosaur toe prints. Early creationists film footage and notes show clearly that they knew the dinosaur toe marks were present. In a few infamous instances, creationists have even carved human toes on the dinosaur prints, or carved entire fake human footprints in the limestone. Rather than getting insights from the evidence in the limestone, they have used the limestone as a blank notebook on which to write their own version of reality, a version not even shared by most creationists.

It is unclear whether these cult members are dangerous. Of the hundreds of videos I have posted on my Darwin Youtube channel, the only ones on which rabidly angry comments have been posted were those in which I showed Glen Kuban at work in the Paluxy riverbed. A couple of times I have wondered whether to report these creationists to the FBI, but their comments were just short of personal threat. Of course, there were atheist comments also, which insulted the creationists. The creationist comments did not threaten the atheist commentators, Glen, or myself with any violence; they merely hoped that God would rain down fire and brimstone from the sky to destroy us and our children, that’s all. The blank pages of limestone on which this cult writes its version of reality includes at least the hope that everyone who disagrees with them will be destroyed.

I must now add that I have had many of the same experiences as many of the readers of this blog. We have been driven away from doctrinal religions because of fundamentalists and the rabidly violent things that they believe. Is this fair? Should I reject Christianity because of fundamentalists who believe that God wants them to have their guns ready to use against the rest of us? Of course there are members of every religion who esteem the pathway of peace. There are lots of churches, and mosques, that proclaim peace and love. Should they be held guilty for what their bloodthirsty co-religionists do and say? No, but here is the problem. There is nothing within the structure of religion itself, particularly not the doctrinal ones such as Christianity or Islam, that prevents hatred and violence. I consider peaceful Christians and Muslims to be enablers of the violent ones because they believe that their scriptures are, in fact, the sword of the Lord. I have the greatest esteem for Jesus of Nazareth, even while I totally reject Christianity. Christianity is a system of violence and oppression that has falsely taken the name of Jesus as justification for its destructive evils.

Religion and Human Misery, Worldwide and Throughout History

Throughout prehistory and history, religion has been a major source of human misery. Since the beginning of our species, religion has allowed some members of a society, and some societies, to dominate others, because they claim the authority of their god to do so. Most, if not all, religion is a delusion, but cultural selection (the social equivalent of natural selection) has favored it not because it was true but because it provided fitness benefits to its practitioners.

This delusion has been prevalent in the human species since the beginning. Civilization developed independently and differently in the Old World and the New World, but in both cases religion allowed powerful people in the cities to dominate masses of teeming poor and miserable victims. The list of atrocities carried out by the world’s first kings—who ruled more than just their village or small confederation of villages—is impossible for any sane human to comprehend all at once. Babylonian kings flayed their victims alive. Even the reputedly moral Israelites put whole cities to the sword. Chinese emperors carried out mass executions. African kings made some of their armies march into the sea and drown. And in America? More presently.

Peter Watson wrote The Great Divide back in 2011. This book is a quixotic quest to make sense out of all human history. This prolific writer must be a genius but his task was impossible. However, his book did help me understand one thing a little better. What caused history to take a different trajectory in the Old World from the New?

The major answers to these questions were, to my understanding, not very different in Watson’s book than in the more famous books (Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse) by Jared Diamond. The Old World had wild plants that could easily be bred into crops; wild animals that could easily be bred into livestock; and a geography that allowed easy movement of technologies and people east and west along latitudinal lines. North and south movement was more difficult because of climatic differences, something that was particularly important for crops. Agricultural civilization developed in both hemispheres, but much later in America, which is much narrower, especially in tropical Mesoamerica. New technologies diffused very slowly from one part of the New World to another.

But Watson also wrote about something I’d not considered: religion. He gave examples, just a few from countless ones, of the cruelties imposed in the name of religion. But something happened in the Old World that was different from the New.

All religions, Watson explains, began as shamanistic religions, in which a religious cult leader would go into a trance and believe himself or herself to be transformed into a spirit animal, or at least convince others of it.

In the Old World, this gradually transformed into religions in which there were fewer and fewer, and more powerful, gods, with priests who were not shamans. This was associated with the rise of agricultural civilizations, in which kings, standing in for gods, imposed order.

But in the New World, there were fewer agricultural civilizations, and they rose later: the Mound Builders, the civilizations of Mexico and of Peru. And, something I’d not considered, the New World has far more species of hallucinogenic plants. Priests continued to be ceremonial shamans using hallucinogens to connect with the spirit world in America long after it had mostly stopped in the Old World. (Indeed, in the Old World, starting in several places independently about 500 BCE, many people began challenging religious tradition with demands for justice and morality, examples being the Old Testament prophets, Buddhism, and Taoism.) I’d also not considered that Old World people could not get stoned as much—they preferred mild drugs like alcohol—because if they did it would be dangerous for them to handle large livestock animals, animals that the New World inhabitants did not have.

And it wasn’t just hallucinogens; in the Native American civilizations, people induced a trance state by self-brutalization. The Spanish conquistadors saw a king and queen come out and, in public, lacerate themselves: he drew a rope through his own penis, she through her tongue. Once there was a contest to see how many sticks a man could run through his tongue; the winner pierced his tongue with 405 sticks. In Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest, there were 1500 ball courts. In these games, the losing team was sacrificed, and sometimes the winning team also. Archaeological evidence indicates that at the major city in North America before the European invasion, Cahokia (in modern Illinois), when one of the chiefs died, his relatives were killed also, as well as fifty women aged 15 to 18 years of age.

Some of what we know about the extremes of religion in ancient America come from their own records (those that the earliest Spaniards did not burn); but it is also based on historical observation, and not just by the conquistadors. In 1720, a French explorer, Le Page du Pratz, was visiting a Natchez village, when the chief died. At his funeral, the chief’s two wives and six concubines were stupefied then strangled. At least, in North America, the cruelties were less extreme than those I describe below.

Much has been written about the cruelty of the conquistadors who massacred and enslaved the Native Americans, starting with Columbus’s expedition. I have written a lot of it myself. I have repeatedly called for the elimination of Columbus Day. This is all true. But the Aztecs and Incas were not peaceful civilizations hacked to pieces by demonic Europeans. If anything, the Native American civilizations had continued the self-feeding spiral of religious cruelty far beyond anything that had evolved in the Old World. In the Old World, human sacrifice stopped. Had it continued, and had it undergone an autocatalytic explosion, it would have produced something like what the Aztecs and Incas had.

Aztec warriors would raid more and more distant towns and bring the captives to Tenochtitlán. Some warriors would flay the skin from the victims and then wear it until it rotted away, which was a religious display of renewal and resurrection after death. Warriors were given the flayed skin of girls to wear. Every student of history has learned about the Aztec sacrifices in which the priests cut out the still-beating hearts of victims, eviscerated them, rolled their bodies down the pyramid steps, then cut off and made stew out of the limbs. This was often after pulling out the teeth and fingernails of the captives. Hundreds of children were sacrificed, particularly by the Incas, after cutting their ears off.

Both the Aztecs and the Incas had to keep expanding their territories not because they needed food for an expanding population, or because of the desire to rule larger empires. Indeed, with no horses or wheeled vehicles, a central priestly government simply could not control a large empire, nor could they import heavy tributes or perishable food. (Old World agriculture produced mostly grains, while New World agriculture produced mostly perishable products, except dried corn, which was actually a late product.) Almost all that they wanted was sacrificial victims with which to feed their ravenous, unpredictable, and horrible gods. Sacrifices intensified, starting about 1440 CE (by the Mayan calendar) and continuing until the conquest in 1521. By the time of conquest, the Aztecs were processing twenty thousand victims a year. It was a spiral of cosmic paranoia. They were worried that their sun good, Huitzilopochtli, might run out of food; this was at a time when the sun was, in fact, getting dimmer because of eruptions of volcanoes such as Popo (Popocateptl) not far away from the Aztec capital city. There was no American equivalent of a supreme God who could be satisfied with prescribed animal sacrifices. While the Old World had storms and droughts and volcanoes, the New World was rife with them. The Native Americans were much more afraid of their gods than the Eurasians had ever been of theirs.

Some Pre-Columbians could see that human sacrifice was becoming crazily excessive. The Toltec leader Topiltzin tried to stop human sacrifice, but failed.

Their only desperate hope to escape from this cycle of bloodshed appeared to be that the god Quetzalcoatl would come from oversees and rescue them. Cortez came, and the Aztecs thought that he must be Quetzalcoatl.

Meanwhile, the conquerors from the Old World were just as evil, with the exception of not having human sacrifice. The Spaniards roasted their captives alive, or cut off their noses, lips, or chins. Many European scholars of many lands (Juan Sepúlveda, Cornelius de Pauw, Oliver Goldsmith, etc. etc.) wrote that Native Americans were little more than animals and had no right to not be killed. A few, like Bartholomé de las Casas, stood up for the humanity of the natives.

When the Old World met the new, religiously-inspired massacre met religiously-inspired human sacrifice. Not only in society after society, but by entirely separate evolutionary development in the two hemispheres, religion facilitated, even demanded, the greatest cruelties the human mind could devise.

What do we do about it? Do we give up religion? Can we? Would it change anything? I do not have time to write, nor you to read, any attempt at answering that question right now.

The Republican Party: Fertile Ground for Racism

The Republican Party is extremely fertile ground for racists. I am not saying all, or even most, Republicans are racists. But their extreme passion, based on gut feelings and opposed to all facts and reason, is exactly the mental framework in which racism thrives. Most Republicans are not racists, but nearly all racists are Republicans. When a racist Republican creates publicity, the Republican Party is quick to distance itself, but I am not sure whether this is sincere or is merely an attempt to avoid notice. And, as the presidency of Donald Trump has shown, the Republican Party welcomes the support of racists even while disavowing them.

One recent example was a Republican candidate for the House of Representatives from Tennessee. Candidate Rick Tyler’s slogan was Make America White Again, and his campaign website was www.makeamericawhiteagain.info. His big billboards were featured in a 2016 news channel article. I presume that he lost the election, probably even the primary, because his website is no longer up.

It is particularly puzzling that this candidate emerged from Polk County, Tennessee, which is in the very heart of the homeland of the Cherokee Tribe. The candidate owns or owned a restaurant in Ocoee, very close to the birthplace of my sixth-great-grandmother Nancy Ward, one of the most important leaders in Cherokee history. If anyone should know that America has never been all-white, it should be people from Polk County, Tennessee! But this line of reasoning is lost on people like Tyler and to a lesser extent on Republicans in general, because they specifically reject evidence and reasoning.

And racists use the Christian religion specifically to promote their agenda. Notice the billboard in the article link; it shows people praying.