Simon's Blog

I was listening to a fascinating talk on TED the other day about the development of language and how it became a defining feature of being human.  With language you are able to explain things in an abstract form as well as passing one lessons from the past.  The speaker then went onto explain that language was, like everything about us, a genetic mistake when DNA was coding itself.  Apparently DNA makes such mistakes every billion or so replications.  Most of the time these replication errors don’t cause any noticeable changes but sometimes they have profound effects on the next generation.  Such an effect was the ability of talk.

Of course the ability to form coherent sounds really is the easy part – the ability to understand what they mean is the other half of the equation.  Just prove this think of anytime you might have heard someone talking in a language you might not understand and how that makes communication so much more difficult.  So perhaps there were two genetic errors that came along and helped to start the development of the brain at the same time as language.  This in turn means that somewhere back in the past there was individual who had the language error transmitted to them during conception and that one person must have been the mother or father of us all.  I am sure that this is a too simplistic understanding of the situation but in just under 150,000 years we have gone from not being able to talk to Buzzfeed …some progress?

So what has this to do with the drawings?  Nothing but as I have stated before it is my blog so I’ll fill it with as many strange juxtapositions as I like.