【The Power of languages】字幕手写小组作品

Part1：
0~4
Each of you possesses the most powerful dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It’s apiece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people’s minds. I’m talking about your language, of course, because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else’s mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery. instead, when you speak, you’re actually using a form of telemetry. Not so different from the remote-control device for your television. It’s just that whereas that device relies on pulses of infrared light, your language relies on pulse discrete pulse of sound. And just as you use the remote-control device to alter the internal setting of your television to suit your mood, you use your language to alter the setting inside someone else’s brain to suit your interests. Language are genes talking getting things that they want .and just imagine the sense of wonder in a baby when it first discovers that merely by uttering a sound it can get object to move across a room as if by magic, and maybe even into its mouth. Now language’s subversive power has been recognized throughout the ages in censorship, in books you can’t read, phrases you can’t use and words you can’t say. In fact the power of Bable story in the bible is a fable and warning about the power of language. According to that story, early humans developed the conceit, that by using their language to work together, they could build tower that would take them all the way to heaven. Now God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower, and then to ensure that it would never be rebuild, he scattered the people by giving them different languages, confused them by giving them different languages. And this leads to the wonderful irony that our languages exist to prevent us from communicating. Even today, we know that there are words we cannot use, phrases we cannot say because if we do so, we might be accosted jailed, or even killed, and all of this from a puff of air emanating from out mouths. Now all this fuss about a single one of our traits tells us there’s something worth explaining. And that is how and why did this remarkable trait evolve, and why did it evolve only in our species? Now it’s a little bit of a surprise that to get an answer to that question, we have to go to tool use in the chimpanzees. Now these chimpanzees are using tools, and we take that as a sign of their intelligence. But if they really were intelligent, why would they use a stick to extract termites from the ground rather than a shovel? And if they really were intelligent, why would they crack ions nut with a rock? Why wouldn’t they just go to a shop and buy a bag of nuts that somebody else had already cracked open for them? Why not? I mean, that’ s what we do. now the reason the chimpanzees don’t do that is that they lack what psychologists and anthropologists call social learning. They seem to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching.as a result, they can’t improve on others’ ideas or learn from others mistakes. Benefit from others wisdom. And so, they just do the same thing over and over and over again. in fact, we could go away for a million years and come back and these chimpanzees would be doing the same thing with the same sticks for the termites and the same rocks to crack open the nuts. now this may sound arrogant ,or even full of hubris ,how do we know this？ Because this is exactly what our ances