alt Hacker NewsBut scale of knowledge acquisition is mediated by, at minimum, lifespan, and what knowledge there is to verbalize and pass on, no? It’s not like we got the language then built our hands based on the knowledge shared by another person with hands.
Instead, these co-evolved. Our language is shaped by that, and we shouldn’t give it too much causal power when it’s only a slice of the system.
We are also very unclear on what birds can communicate. They’re social migratory species with 4 color vision and magnetoreception. Their sensory context is deeper and richer in some ways, and whatever communication they layer atop it will be shaped by that. What seems like squeaks and chirps can hold information that another bird, but not humans, can decode. We’re getting better at layering all this context and then interpreting bird song and sounds.
But we’re at the beginning of this exercise, not a place where we can make a firm conclusion.
Sure, lifespan is a factor, but it's hard to argue that lifespan has been the main factor for humans. Or that lifetime of many other organisms isn't sufficient. And I already pointed out that we co-evolved with language, that's what it means for it to be a dialectical process. However, for language even get bootstrapped, it needs the prerequisite brain structures to support recursive grammars and abstractions we use.
What we can look at is what other species are able to accomplish and how much they are able to shape their environment. I'm not arguing the fact that we don't have a good grasp on how other animal communicate and different kinds of intelligence we have in the animal kingdom. What I'm saying is that our unique combination of being able to abstract concepts and package them up using language, and especially writing, is what allowed up to rapidly accumulate knowledge and pass it across generations. We are demonstrably the only species that does this. Although, there were other hominids originally with similar capabilities that went extinct.