09.29.05
Pennock, Tower of Babel
Pennock’s Tower of Babel has an interesting section on the ‘evolution’ of language. The first edition of World History and The Eonic Effect had a section note, withdrawn in second edition, since I am wary of speculations about the Paleolithic, challenging such views of the evolution of language. The argument is essentially recast in the second edition in a different form, using the question of art, in particular the enigma of Greek Tragedy.
Basically the idea is (I don’t have Pennock’s book handy, out of town) is the analog of language evolution to Darwinian evolution. The problem here is that, the charge of speculation about the Paleolithic quite apart, there could be, and most probably is, a necessary distinction between a micro and a macro aspect to language evolution. If we look at the differentiation in, say, the Indo-European languages, we are liable to confuse this with language evolution as such. The problem is that we simply cannot determine what the real history of human language evolution was really like. It just might be that in the period of the Great Explosion a kind of peak period occurred that flexed a new level of language expression, leaving in its wake the primordial sources of today’s language families. Scientists would reject such thinking out of hand, but they have little evidence to buttress their own case.
It is just here that the study of the eonic effect shows one spectacular clue: if we study the ‘revised Axial Age’ rubric of the eonic sequence model, we stumble on something most remarkable. This amounts to using simple periodization to clock the effects of the sequence of eonic transitions (Check the history and evolution site). Then we are confronted by the case of the Greek Archaic. This isn’t just random cultural evolution here, and the number of innovations in all fields is tremendous, in particular in the realm of poetry and art the sudden upsurge, like clockwork, is unbelievable. Greek lyric poet, epic, move/evolve rapidly toward the climax visible in the incandescent brief run of Greek Tragic drama. Then within a few decades the post-Axial wane occurs, equally remakable this sudden fall-off.
Thus we see, that with respect to the ‘evolution’ visible in the eonic series, sudden cultural transformations at the highest level of linguistic performance, show non-random patterning and placement in an emergentist sequence.
I would withdraw my investment in Darwinian versions of the evolution of language, overnight!
We see that ‘evolution of some kind’, with respect to man, can remorph whole cultural hotspots in time slices on the order of centuries, this visibly in a greater interval on the order of five to ten millennia.
Our suspicions of just how far off the mark Darwin is grow ominously.
To follow this discussion, one might start at
Descent of Man Revisited
So the myth of the Tower of Babel expresses (possibly) a significant aspect of the evolution of language: something at a source of high order, and the falloff from that.
We simply can’t imagine how the Great Explosion period of man could have produced such a decisive advance. But the data of the eonic effect gives us a hint at how that might have occurred. Quite apart from anything else it is a challenge to the dominance of rank speculation made dogma by the current Darwin regime of selectionist fanatics.