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 particular 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 perhaps 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 relevant 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, then mediums such as art and music are truly a product of our desire to communicate meaning in a direct sense. The meaning to be communicated first forms itself in the creator's head in some wordless nebula, and then consequently find release directly onto the painter's canvas, 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 will undergo another translation into words as observers start to describe and recount their interaction. Only after the original meaning has traveled from the artist's mind, into a creation, and into the observer's mind, will it have it's 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 Darwin's Dangerous Idea, as he states: "the 'lang... ... that "the idea 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 that is considered to be among the most 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 Cited 1)Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. New York, NY, 1997. 2)Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Touchstone: New York, NY, 1995.