Collected Commenter Wisdom
The premiere issue of Nautilus, “What Makes You So Special,” is full of thought-provoking ideas, and we’re glad to see that readers were indeed provoked to talk about those ideas in our comment areas and in social media. Here are some of our favorite replies:
The most heavily commented piece so far is “Where Uniqueness Lies,” by Gary Marcus. One commenter, Gavin, added some useful context to the question of human language development:
“When you write ‘A human brain is a primate brain, tweaked,’ I think the issue, for me at least, is not so much that [it] is tweaked, but how it came to be tweaked, and an argument that is persuasive to me is that it has been language itself doing the tweaking. Thinking of language as a kind of epiphenomenon of increased intelligence or a ‘comparatively tiny cognitive enhancement’ in human brains minimizes the role of language itself in our evolutionary history. I am fairly persuaded by Terrence Deacon’s coevolutionary perspective of language and the brain and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on his perspective, or if you are not familiar with his work, how do you think the coevolution of the brain and
