Is putting main clause and subordinate clause in the same sentence optimal?

Draft. As a psychological scientist, I have been teaching communication for at least 25 years. And because of that, I have become interested in how people use communication. When a scientist is writing a report, the standard is to put descriptive stuff in the introduction, method, and result. The explanation typically occurs in the discussion, and is not written in stone – it's more speculative. Here's the catch, most people I talk to tend to put the description in the main clause of the sentence, and the explanation in the subordinate clause of the sentence. As it seems, we have an inborn impulse to jump to conclusion by trying to explain the things just have described.

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As a psychological scientist, I have been teaching communication for at least 25 years. And because of that, I have become interested in how people use communication.

When a scientist is writing a report, the standard is to put descriptive stuff in the introduction, method, and result. The explanation typically occurs in the discussion, and is not written in stone – it's more speculative.

The implication. Scholars typically do not mention explanations when they talk about stuff they have observed. For example, if an astrophysicist has discovered a celestial object, like an asteroid, meteor, planet or star, they do not typically focus on trying to explain why the celestial object exists.

Here's the catch, most people I talk to tend to put the description in the main clause of the sentence, and the explanation in the subordinate clause of the sentence. And of course, I used to do the same, and I probably still do it from time to time.

But the point is, just because you observed something doesn't mean that you have an understanding of the observation.

Why is this important?

Our predecessors, Orrorin man (Pickford och Senut, 2001; Pickford, 2006) and Australipitecus afarensis, a.k.a. Lucy, did not have a verbal language. They relied on body language, facial expression, and noise, for example female mammals during copulation.

It's likely to claim that the verbal language emerged with our genus – Homo (2.8 Mya; Kimbel och Villmoare, 2016; Villmoare, 2018;Villmoare et al. 2015). (Everett, 2017) suggests that syntax is just symbols in a linear fashion.

Pagel (2017), on the other hand, argues that grammatical language emerge ~200 000 years before the present, when our specific species had been around for ~120 000 years (Hublin et al. 2017).

The emergence of language is explained by brain growth and group size:

Group Size and Neocortex Size: There is a strong correlation between the size of a primate's neocortex (the most recently evolved part of the brain responsible for higher-level cognitive functions) and the typical size of its social group. The larger the neocortex, the larger the group size an individual can maintain stable social relationships within. The “Grooming Gap”: In non-human primates, social cohesion is largely maintained through social grooming. Dunbar's research showed that the time spent grooming increases with group size. However, there's a practical limit to how much time can be spent grooming in a day without compromising other essential activities like foraging. For humans, to maintain the social group sizes predicted by our neocortex size through grooming alone would require an impossibly large proportion of the day (e.g., 30-45%). This creates a “grooming gap.”

Language as a Solution: Aiello and Dunbar propose that language evolved as a more efficient and less time-consuming mechanism for social bonding and information exchange, effectively bridging this “grooming gap.” Language allows individuals to “groom” multiple individuals simultaneously (e.g., through conversation) and to exchange complex social information (like gossip, which helps track relationships and alliances) that would be difficult or impossible through physical grooming alone. This would have enabled early humans to maintain larger and more complex social groups.

Connection to Expensive Tissue Hypothesis: While the 1993 paper focuses on the social pressures driving language evolution, it implicitly (and in later work, explicitly) ties into the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis. A larger neocortex, necessary for processing complex social information and supporting language, is a metabolically expensive organ. The ETH provides a mechanism (dietary change leading to a smaller gut) by which the energetic costs of such a large brain could be offset, making the evolution of the neocortex, and subsequently language, energetically feasible. Essentially, the ETH explains how the brain got big enough, while the Social Brain Hypothesis (and the 1993 paper) explains why it got big (to manage larger social groups) and how language became necessary as a consequence of this (Aiello and Dunbar (1993); Dunbar (2009).

Hence, humans are the only animal who uses a verbal language, which is created in a generative process based on phonetics, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and consists of visual and auditory images as well as abstract statements. We use language to send information from one mind to another mind (Pinker, 2010).

And as it seems, we have an inborn impulse to jump to conclusion by trying to explain the things we just have described ...

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