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 gene- group 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."

Its 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