The evolution of social learning went through two phases: (1) early social learning, which transmitted simple meanings that each individual could rediscover through individual learning (that is, independent discovery or invention), and (2) cultural learning, which transmitted meanings, that an individual, regardless of his abilities, could not rediscover independently in his entire life.

Social learning is characteristic of the early stages of cultural selection, when meanings were conveyed between hominids on the basis of their herding behavior, that is, their animal sociality. The early meanings themselves were still part of the animal behavior and appeared as animal signals and tools. If meanings got lost in the course of transmission, they could be rediscovered or reinvented through self-learning. In the later stages of cultural selection, meanings had left the realm of nature and formed an independent realm in which active abstractions in their shape of a word and a tool gradually decoupled from immediate animal behavior. Now meanings were transmitted through cultural learning; the complexity of meanings no longer allowed them to be simply reinvented if the community had lost them for some reason. At the same time, cultural learning enabled the transition from the collection of individual experiences to the growing accumulation of meanings from generation to generation.

Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb noted that “the transition to human societies with linguistic communication required changes in anatomy and sensorimotor systems and an increase in cognitive ability, but the part of the transition that is most difficult to explain is how humans acquired the capacity to quickly master the complex rules of grammar when young” (Jablonka and Lamb 2006, p. 243). They suggested that this ability may have arisen in the course of the co-evolution of genes and culture. Originally, linguistic information was transmitted through social learning. However, as linguistic communication became more crucial for proto-human groups, cultural selection of individuals took place based on their ability to learn the basics of language, leading to partial genetic assimilation of those basics. Given this assumption, the question arises: how can it be that every child today can learn any of the five or six thousand human languages. The answer could be either that by the time the genetic capacity for language evolved, all proto-humans had the same language and that no change in the genetic capacity was required for further language evolution, or that the genetic capacity evolved relative to a base common to all languages.

The first option, according to which the same language existed for hundreds of thousands and millions of years in different pre-human groups, seems unlikely. The evolution of languages over the last few thousand years is well studied from written sources and shows that languages diverge rapidly as their speakers spread geographically. The second, more likely, option assumes that the genetic ability to learn languages evolved in relation to their common base. Individual languages form the plane of expression of this base. Damian Blasi and his colleagues, after analyzing the “basic vocabulary” of 40 to 100 lexical items from 62 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages, showed that there is a stable connection between sound and meaning: lexical items with similar meanings have similarities in sound. This similarity may be due to the origin of different languages from a common ancestor, to borrowings between languages, or to other reasons that make certain sounds preferable for expressing certain meanings (Blasi et al. 2016).

At one time, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed not only differential calculus but also the idea of a single human language based on the nature of things themselves. Newton wrote: “The dialects of each language being so divers and arbitrary a general Language cannot be so fitly deduced from them as surely as from the natures of the things themselves, which is the same for all Nations and by which all Language was at the first composed” (Elliott 1957, p. 7). Leibniz believed that there is an alphabet of human thought, made up of simple concepts or “letters” and that innate language is based on this alphabet (Wierzbicka 2011, p. 379).

Strange as it may seem, thoughts are not made of concepts, not of images, not of letters, not of words. Thoughts are made of meanings. Douglas Hofstadter says in I Am a Strange Loop (2007):

“No one has trouble with the idea that ‘the same novel’ can exist in two different languages, in two different cultures. But what is a novel? A novel is not a specific sequence of words, because if it were, it could only be written in one language, in one culture. No, a novel is a pattern—a particular collection of characters, events, moods, tones, jokes, allusions, and much more. And so a novel is an abstraction, and thus ‘the very same novel’ can exist in different languages, different cultures, even cultures thriving hundreds of years apart” (Hofstadter 2007, p. 224).

Meaning, or social and material abstract action, is the common content of all languages, it is the base in relation to which languages function as elements of the plane of expression. Meaning is connected with its linguistic expression through an active linguistic norm and is transmitted thanks to this norm. Evald Ilyenkov wrote in his Considerations on the Relationship between Thinking and Language (1977):

“The ‘deep structures’ identified by Chomsky actually take shape in ontogenesis, in the process of a child’s development before he can speak and understand speech. And one does not have to be a Marxist to recognize their obvious, one might say, tangible reality in the form of sensorimotor schemes, i.e. schemes of the direct activity of a developing human being with things and in things in the form of a purely bodily phenomenon—the interaction of a body with other bodies located outside it. These sensorimotor schemes, as Piaget calls them, or ‘deep structures,’ as linguists prefer to call them, are precisely what philosophy has long called logical forms or forms of ‘thinking as such’” (Ilyenkov 2019-, vol. 5, pp. 243-4).

Can a human being understand things without using words? Can language be reduced to gestures and tactile sensations rather than words? Although the Zagorsk experiment on teaching deaf-blind children did not provide a definitive answer to this question, we are inclined to believe that this is probably impossible. Meanings and words are inextricably linked for humans.

Studying the language development of a child is a key to understanding the language development of all humanity. A child learns language through a socially activated plane of expression, saturated with active norms. Active norms in this case are sensorimotor schemes and the event models and action programs built on them: connections between symbols (words, gestures) and actions: “eat,” “drink,” “sleep,” “walk,” etc. A child is predisposed to internalize these connections.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky once said that the concentration of energy in stars preceded the evolution of organisms (Tsiolkovsky 2004, p. 105). Life with its laws of selection has its origin in the inanimate nature with its laws of collection (or gravity). Culture, in turn, has its origin in life. Organic evolution occurs through selection within populations: genetic variability requires a change of generations of individuals. Cultural evolution begins as an extension of natural selection, as a mixed selection of individuals, which occurs not only on the basis of variations in genes, but also on the basis of variations in meanings. However, if genes, as elements of biological information, are rigidly tied to populations of individuals and cannot change independently of the organisms as their carriers, then meanings, as elements of cultural information, as socially transmitted material abstract actions, can change independently of human organisms within the framework established by the active power of man, his instincts, practices and reason.