Simultaneous appearance of written language and common man

Sea lions are pretty good at it symbol recognition, apparently. I saw a documentary in which they tested a sea lion's ability to make rational associations between various different types of symbols. Then they went out on the streets of wherever it was in California and did the same with people. The sea lion did better than lots of the people, making for amusing viewing.A bit off-topic, but related, I saw a bit of film recently about intelligence and tool use in animals. In one experiment, they put a piece of meat in the bottom of a tube and placed a rod on top of the tube to see if a crow would use the rod to spear the out of reach meat. It tried to do so, but couldn't successfully pull up the meat. So it flew with the rod to a hole in a wall, stuck the rod in, and bent it round to form a hook. It then returned to the tube, slid the rod down beside the meat, twisted, and successfully hooked it up. Wow!So, does this mean that crows are more intelligent than creationists, I wonder? Measured in intelligence per neurone, almost certainly.P.S. Please don't mention IamJoseph too often, for our sanity's sake.

I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to say, and why you see a connection between written language and the emergence of what you refer to as "modern man". Firstly, it's important to distinguish between written and spoken language. Spoken language is an innate biological characteristic of our species, so much so that if you put a group of babies on an isolated island with only deaf mutes to look after them, the kids would develop a spoken language amongst themselves as they grew up. Written language, on the other hand, is cultural, and it's a technical tool like the wheel, bow and arrow, or blow pipe, that some cultures of "modern man" invent and use, but others don't. It's just technology, like the invention and use of boats (the earliest known of which are older than the date you give for written language at 7,000 to 9,000 years, and probably go back much further).So groups of biologically modern people may or may not invent a boomerang or written language and use them.As you say, all (non-disabled) humans would have the capacity to learn a written language, and this would apply to those who were alive tens of thousands of years ago, and who invented clever tools and jewelery, carved fertility goddesses, and painted the walls of caves. These ancients didn't use written language for the same reason my grandparents didn't use desk top computers. The technology hadn't evolved in their cultures. But they were "modern man" in the scientific, biological sense of the expression.It's your arbitrary association of the phrase "modern man" with one particular technological invention that's causing confusion, I think.

I'll try to explain some things. The ASPM variant that is thought to have arisen only 5800 years ago is not the cause of agriculture, city building and writing. I say this partly because it comes too late, and would only have had time to spread over a significant proportion of the population much later than the time those things were well established.However, there may be a connection. The selection pressure on the variant (what makes it a positive trait) may possibly be due to agricultural societies, in the same way that agriculture seems to have caused selection pressure on the mutation for continued adult lactase production (which helps adults use milk products in cultures with a long term history of domesticating animals for food).First, check out the timings of the history of agriculture.Agriculture - Wikipedia Agricultural timeline

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Since its development roughly 10,000 years ago, agriculture has expanded vastly in geographical coverage and yields...

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Ironically, the ASPM variant may possibly be selected for if it slightly decreases brain size. The only connection to agriculture that I can think of is that mono-crop-cultures and restricted diet can lead to smaller body sizes, and a slightly smaller brain size makes birth easier for smaller women, but all this is very speculative.It isn't actually known yet what effect the new variant has, and it doesn't seem to effect brain size much at all, although research shows a slight decrease to be more likely than an increase. Here's a paper on itThe gist of that paper is that the variant is being selected for, but they don't know why!!! It could be for effects on the phenotype that have no relationship either to brain size or intelligence though, they suggest.However, my main point is that the arrival and spread of the gene is too late for it to be regarded as an important factor in the development of the technologies you refer to. Remember, when it starts, only one person has it, and it takes many generations for it to spread over a significant proportion of the population and to move from region to region. So it's not a writing gene, because people in very different areas were writing before it could have arrived in all of those areas (and even then, only a minority would have the characteristic).Agriculture and proto-cities or towns far predate its occurrence anyway.But it is interesting, and the whole area of mutations in relationship to our brains over the last few million years since the split from the other apes is a very important area of research.We are unique creatures, but that could actually be said of all species to some extent!

He said:

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MICHAEL GAZZANIGA: An ASPM variant arose about 5800 years ago, coincident with the spread of agriculture, cities and the first record of written language. It too is found in such high frequencies in the population, that it indicates strong positive selection.

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He draws no conclusions at all. He merely mentions that the time that the variation first occurred was "coincident" with the first record of written language and the spread of agriculture and cities.I point out that agriculture and cities were spreading at this time, so he's not wrong, but they already had been for some time, so the mutation cannot be their cause, but the strong selection of it could be an effect of the type of societies produced by those things. As for written language, it too had been evolving for some time (the proto-languages) before a single person had this mutation, and it would be a long time after the mutation that people in both the near east and China could possibly have it. Gazzaniga (great name!) doesn't claim that the mutation is the cause of those things either.Do you understand that most of us don't have it now? It's not a characteristic that is fixed across the human population, but one that appears to be progressing in that direction. People are interested in it because it appears to confer some kind of health (fitness) advantage, physical or mental, but we don't know what! There's all kind of healthy disagreement and debate in science, but I'm not actually disagreeing with Gazzaniga here. You've just read too much into his passing comment. "Coincident" does not mean that there's a connection between the mutation and the cultural phenomena he mentions. It's actually me who's suggesting that strong selection on the variation may be driven by modern societies, agriculture in particularly, but it may well be nothing to do with that at all, and the variant might be something advantageous to humans in any type of culture."Strong selection" just means that the people with the variant, on average and with all else being equal have been producing slightly more children per head than the average of the rest of the population, so the variation (mutation) has been spreading steadily across the human population over the last 5,800 years. Like most of evolution, this is very undramatic and unspectacular, although if the gene does turn out to make the brain slightly more efficient than average, then there'll be a great deal of interest in it.If that's the case, we'll probably find that the variation is more common amongst evolutionists than creationists. Edited by bluegenes, : spellin!