Evolution and Ambiguous Communication Essay -- Biology Essays Research

Throughout the debate concerning evolution, I have noted the relative precision or imprecision of various methods of human communication. From the connotations of fact words to the emotion incited by a distinct music phrase, it is often surprising which human forms of expression are ambiguous and which seem to be universal. When considering this phenomenon, it is by chance useful to construct a method for discussing the relative accuracy of communicating exactly what we mean when we use various ways to say it.From an evolutionary standpoint, it is applicable to our discussion to ask whether meaning(thought) pushed language into existence, or whether it was language that originated meaning. If the first is true, because mediums such as art and music are truly a return of our desire to communicate meaning in a direct sense. The meaning to be communicated first forms itself in the creators head in some wordless nebula, and then consequently find release directly onto the painters c anvas, or the musical phrase. Hence, once the creation is added to the realm of world attention, and observers begin to interact with the creation, the meaning of the piece go out undergo some other translation into words as observers start to describe and recount their interaction. Only after the original meaning has traveled from the artists mind, into a creation, and into the observers mind, allow it have its first confrontation with language. However, if language itself created meaning, then we must understand art to be an interpretation of spoken or unspoken language a second generation product of the human desire to communicate with self or others. This is the viewpoint endorsed by Dennett in Darwins unreliable Idea, as he states the lang... ... that the intellect of the original is created by the copies, and that the original is always deferred never to be grasped. (Culler 12). This theory can be (and was originally) applied to one of the modes of human communication t hat is considered to be among the about precise written language. But does this theory mean that we as humans have no hope of ever communicating exactly what it is we mean to another? Perhaps there is no hope of this, and that is why, in some more ambiguous forms of our communication, we have ceased to hope for it and admitted defeat on that front but in doing so, we found a new realm of significance in the variety of interpretation. Works Cited1)Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. New York, NY, 1997. 2)Dennett, Daniel C. Darwins Dangerous Idea. Touchstone New York, NY, 1995.