0:15 as in most Sciences especially the human
0:17 Sciences almost every major question is
0:20 open so for example uh I take the
0:24 question the two obvious questions one
0:28 is how come there any languages at all I
0:31 mean a second question is why are there
0:36 many these are pretty Elementary
0:38 questions but they're sensible questions
0:41 uh roughly say a 100,000 years ago which
0:44 is almost nothing in evolutionary time
0:45 the questions couldn't be raised because
0:47 there weren't any languages you know
0:51 maybe 200,000 but roughly that area so
0:53 it's a sensible question one is the
0:56 question how did languages suddenly
0:59 emerge in the uh evolutionary record and
1:02 it's pretty sudden by in in evolutionary
1:04 framework you know amount of time
1:05 involved and then how come they
1:07 proliferate it how come there isn't just
1:10 one well there's steps towards answering
1:13 that there's progress I think my own
1:14 view I should say is pretty
1:17 idiosyncratic it's not widely held but I
1:20 think we understand enough about the
1:24 fundamental computational basis of
1:28 language to see that uh to to develop a
1:31 kind of a plausible scenario for how
1:33 there might have been a reasonably
1:36 sudden emergence of the fundamental
1:39 nature of language and also of why the
1:41 apparent diversity is pretty
1:43 superficial uh so that if say a martian
1:47 was looking at humans the way we look at
1:51 uh say frogs uh the Martian might
1:53 conclude that this fundamentally one
1:55 language with minor deviations and I
1:58 think we're moving towards an
2:00 understanding of how that that might be
2:04 the case and it is pretty clear that it
2:06 has to be the case the time of
2:08 development is much too shallow for
2:11 fundamental changes to have taken place
2:14 and we know of no fundamental changes so
2:18 a child from a hund gather tribe and
2:22 Stone Age tribe and say the Amazon uh
2:25 brought to Cambridge and raised here
2:27 will you go on and become a quantum
2:30 physics physicist at MIT there's no
2:33 known differences in re relevant
2:35 cognitive capacities so there's
2:37 something fundamentally the same about
2:40 all of us and it's whatever emerged
2:44 pretty recently and we have to work out
2:47 the to show that the enormous apparent
2:50 variety is a kind of superficial
2:53 variation and also to explain how it
2:55 might have suddenly appeared in The evolutionary
