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>Curiously, I don’t believe anyone has considered the opposite: rather than considering whether the Pirahã disprove the universality of grammar in humans, maybe their language suggests Pirahã aren’t entirely human?

This was the subtext of the debate between Everett and Chomsky. Chomsky said recursion makes us human. Everett finds people without recursion and then says, "you're not going to say these people are anything less, right?" Even while providing dozens of examples of the Piraha not grokking the human condition. In his next book, Dark Matter of the Mind, he rederives atman---no-self---and says that having a self is culturally constructed. The following year he wrote How Language Began, which argues that language has existed for 2 million years, back with the emergence of our genus. This all follows the assumption that there is not a neurological difference. He spent decades with the Piraha, but never collected any DNA because he didn't want to look racist (his explanation). (Nevermind that if a village in Appalacia displayed half the oddities of the Piraha a genetic test would be the first thing done.) In the end, this didn't work. Based on his description of their lifestyle linguists in Brazil got together to deny his government permit to see them. Ostensibly this was done for the protection of the piraha, but they obviously love him and he has helped them protect their land. But clearly the linguists were protecting their blank slate theories from information that was difficult to explain.

To your point about the Piraha being from before Noah, I suspect that may literally be true. Though I would go back further, to Eden. I think that the Fruit of Knowledge is a metaphor for understanding yourself as a moral agent who will one day die. Culture with that understanding baked in spread worldwide around the end of the Ice Age along with serpent worship and stories of women making the discovery of self-as-agent. There were people in the Americas before that cultural package arrived ~15kya, and maybe the Piraha are the sole holdout. They have no ritual, no religion, and no god. Though Everett makes one exception: they will sometimes dance with venomous snakes.

You may enjoy my grand theory about the role of a primeval snake cult which spread with self-awareness. Maybe the Piraha are drop-outs: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cult-of-consciousness

Quote from Don't Sleep in which the snake dance is described:

“Pirahãs have told me about a dance in which live venomous snakes are used, though I have never seen one of these (such dances were corroborated, however, by the eyewitness account of the Apurinã inhabitants of Ponto Sete, before the Pirahãs dispersed them). In this dance, the regular dancing is preceded by the appearance of a man wearing only a headband of buriti palm and a waistband, with streamers, made entirely of narrow, yellow paxiuba palm leaves. The Pirahã man so dressed claims to be Xaítoii, a (usually) evil spirit whose name means “long tooth.” The man comes out of the jungle into the clearing where the others are gathered to dance and tells his audience that he is strong, unafraid of snakes, and then tells them about where he lives in the jungle, and what he has been doing that day. This is all sung. As he sings, he tosses snakes at the feet of the audience, who all scramble away quickly.

These spirits appear in dances in which the man playing the role of the spirit claims to have encountered that spirit and claims to be possessed by that spirit.”

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> The Orks are the pinnacle of creation. For them, the great struggle is won. They have evolved a society which knows no stress or angst. Who are we to judge them? We Eldar who have failed, or the Humans, on the road to ruin in their turn? And why? Because we sought answers to questions that an Ork wouldn’t even bother to ask! We see a culture that is strong and despise it as crude.

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There but for the grace of God...

I wonder how the Piraha don't get bored into inventing a culture/a religion/something. Is survival that time consuming in their environment?

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Have you read Tristes Tropiques? It's a great book written by a French anthropologist who spent time living in the midst of remote Brazilian tribes, amongst other interesting musings and anecdotes. I highly recommend it.

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Gwern has a great book review on this one: https://gwern.net/review/book#dont-sleep-there-are-snakes-everett-2008. The ending of Gwern's review brings up probably the best theory I have read to explain the Pirahã, although I would put it more bluntly: maybe they are just extremely inbred and very dumb. They can't plan for the future the way a some children cannot plan for the future. They cannot learn how to count to ten, because that is too complicated for them.

The *New Yorker* article (cited by Gwern and found here https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interpreter-2) also implies that the Pirahã are really dumb. An evolutionary biologist, William Tecumseh Fitch (yes, he is a direct descendant of the American Civil War general), traveled down there to test the Pirahã, and he had a lot of problems getting them to pass basic grammar test which apparently even all monkeys tested could pass. According to the article, Fitch eventually found one sixteen-year-old who could pass the test. I cannot figure out from Fitch's Google Scholar page where he wrote up these results--maybe they're buried somewhere.

Getting genetic samples of the Pirahã would clarify how inbred they are, and it would at least partly let us guess their genetic IQ, insofar as we can use one of those fancy polygenic scores for educational attainment/cognitive ability to estimate it. I also would like to see someone replicate Everett's work (Margaret Mead's fieldwork did not replicate). Even the *New Yorker* journalist had to rely on Everett's translations.

I have to complain about your bizarre insinuations that Everett's original Protestant Christianity is to blame for some of his ideas... Per Wikipedia, "[Everett] says that he was having serious doubts by 1982 and had abandoned all faith by 1985." And wouldn't you know it, he completed his masters thesis in 1980 and PhD in 1983 in linguistics under a Brazilian-French advisor. His thesis provided "a detailed detailed Chomskyan analysis of Pirahã." Anyways, it sounds like he begins to reject his Protestant Christianity as a Brazilian graduate student, and you blame Protestant Christianity... How would you feel if I said Everett abandoned his faith due to the influence of Jewish academia (here Chomsky)? It is not so simple, and saying something like that is foolish. Likewise with regards to your comments on Protestant Christianity.

Incredibly, Everett is an avowed defender of the blank state. I wonder how he would react to Gwern's (or your) book review.

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Yes the protestant thing was mainly tongue in cheek / speculative.... apologies if caused offense!

Agree re their society just... being shit?

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I’m too sensitive when it comes to blaming Protestants for atheism/far-leftism/wokism in general—I hear it too often. Arnold Kling and Sailer most recently said something like this—drives me nuts. It’s like blaming Kant for Communist Russia—yeah, Kant’s thought was the impetus for Hegel who influenced Feuerbach who influenced Marx, but there’s no proximate cause (in the legal sense).

I enjoyed the book review.

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Oct 8Edited

Interesting. When I read in the book, he could not teach them how to count to ten (trying for months, because they asked him to better prepare them for dealing with traders - their language having only kinda 2 "numerals: "one" and "some"), my take was: check how much of their DNA is Denisovan. Some comments here suggest "inbred". Possible, though the P. do manage to survive in conditions where many skills need to be mastered to survive. And the book offers many examples, where the P. have skills that leave his in the dust. Try catching fish without a rod or net! - On the author, his latest book and Chomsky: see this outstanding (reader's) review on ACX: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-language-began

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Incredible piece ! Gives one so much to think about and ponder .

I loved pointing out the similarities to the moral relativism at “our ABC”.

Extra respect for writing this while traveling with 4 children 💪🏼

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At the time of writing, I hadn't finished this article.

The more this story went on, the less I felt able to cling to the idea that this missionary was simply practicing "Academic Moral Relativism" or suspension of judgement (just describing as is). The more sure I became that this guy is a dumb son of a gun.

He could've left. He could've wiped the dirt from his shoes. Or, he could've shot someone. That would've been better than 99% of what he did so far.

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Yes but I've also selected for the most salient extracts

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Really interesting stuff, thanks for writing.

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What an interesting story, especially for me, considering the work I am doing in regards to getting medical aid in dying legislation passed in our state

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Hi Misha. Enjoyed the read. Thxs. I do have an observation and a question. In the beginning paragraphs you stress “The world of the Pirahãs is fascinating: they are a people eternally in the present.” Yet in a later paragraph you relate from the author the planning ahead or expectation of a marriage (the young girl rubbing the older man who explains he is going to wed the girl when she is old enough). So which is it, living in the present (only) or the ability to plan ahead with all that implies are expectations? Cheers! js

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Yes not strictly true.... but past and future considerations dramatically narrowed!

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By the way, tried correcting spelling and couldn’t save it. Planning instead of planing. Cheers

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