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What about oral histories? Why does it need to be written if it can be memorized and shared verbally?
by jimkleiber 2y ago
What about oral histories? Why does it need to be written if it can be memorized and shared verbally?
- mattdeboard 2y agoI think it's very possible there are other species that use "oral history" to convey information to their children, like whales, dolphins, etc., so it's not "safe" -- again just IMO -- to consider it uniquely human.
- bee_rider 2y agoI guess it is hard to say… if you looked at humans in any random moment when we’ve been around, I suppose we’d look a lot like dolphins (not making much increments progress generation-to-generation). But, it does feel like there’s something in our storytelling tendency, maybe just a quantitative difference (we do it a little bit more and some up with slightly better summaries) that creates a qualitative one (positive feedback loop in our ability to reason about the universe). From that point of view, writing is just an iteration of the loop. A big one, though.