ABSTRACT
Human language is powerful because (ironically) its basic elements are meaningless. For nonhuman animals, a single discrete call (eagle!, snake!, help!) can make the difference between safe escape and sudden death. But such discrete calls are susceptible to mimicry and danger. The Margay cat can imitate the distress call of a Tamarind monkey pup, luring concerned adults to their deaths. Vocal mimicry of single discrete calls has thus forced some animals out of single-call inventories and into combinatory vocalizations. A would-be predator must now figure out combinatory sequences. There is safety in obscurity—even from other groups of the same species. Human language creates meaning with combinations of combinations that are immune to mimicry—so many levels of combination that the signals of the speech stream themselves are quite sparse in information (speech is high in ‘informational entropy’). Humans compensate for the informational ‘lossiness’ of the speech stream by reaching into each other’s heads to co-create meaning: We are mind readers, and our minds form networks transcending time and place. But winning this race to obscurity requires hyper-cooperation and trust—and, consequently, vulnerability. Humans’ linguistic abilities have made them nature’s top predator, including nature’s top predator of human beings.
