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LANGUAGE AND REASONING
IN HUMANS AND OTHER ANIMALS
Tatiana Chernigovskaya
St. Petersburg State University
(Part II)
What
we know about us?
What we know is that a specific genegroup has been found - HAR - that
caused acceleration of the frontal regions
of the cortex in our ancestors and it
developed 70! times as quick as the other
parts of the brain. So, what did it give us?
Quick computation! Giving us recursion
rules
 But recursion is acting not only in
linguistic processes subsurving mental
lexicon and grammar (morphosyntax),
and not only in humans!

Yet HAR1F is only one of about 10 genes
to emerge in the past 4 years as
potentially key to the evolution of the
uniquely skilled human brain. And these
discoveries are but the beginning
chapters of an epic evolutionary story that
we are just starting to read.
 For example, a gene called FOXP2 is
mutated in families with a severe
language disorder (a ‘Grammar gene’)

 Whether it's FOXP2, HAR1F, or the
DUF1220 domain, there's a tendency for
people to think this gene is the
explanation for why people are unique
 Too early! "In virtually all cases, the link
of genes or genomic patterns with
human brain evolution is only tentative
and based on suggestive evidence,"
says Bruce Lahn, a human geneticist at
the University of Chicago, Illinois. "The
situation may not change anytime soon
due to the complexity of the questions
and because we can't redo the
experiment that evolution did in many
millions of years."
 It’s
language and other higher
cortical functions that are critical for
human specific symbolic behavior
 Humans are social animals
 Humans are semiotic animals
 Not only humans, however
… but they are the best
and creative enough to produce
not only industrial and verbal culture
from music
to visual art