Language Development, Scientific Thinking, and Human Independence
October 19, 2026
The better we understand our history, the better we understand how things work. And the better we understand how things work, the better equipped we become to shape our future.
But how much do we really know about ourselves?
How many of us understand that our evolutionary ancestors existed for millions of years before the emergence of language based on meaningful words?
How many of us understand that the development of language represented one of the most consequential turning points in human evolution?
And how many of us have ever seriously investigated the extraordinary role language has played in transforming human existence?
These are not insignificant questions. They are fundamental questions about who we are, how we became who we are, and what we are capable of becoming.
1. Before Language, and After Language
Animals communicate. Our evolutionary ancestors communicated long before the emergence of the sophisticated linguistic systems that characterize human societies today.
But communication and language are not necessarily the same thing.
The emergence of meaningful words fundamentally transformed the possibilities of human existence.
Through language, human beings progressively developed the capacity to describe events beyond their immediate surroundings, preserve experiences, transmit knowledge across generations, construct explanations, formulate hypotheses, and organize collective action around imagined futures.
Language did not create every form of intelligence or learning. But it dramatically expanded humanity’s capacity to understand, predict, plan, and transform its environment.
Consider the numbers. Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 300,000 years old. Genetic studies suggest that the capacity for language was present at least 135,000 years ago, and human beings have been speaking to one another for at least 100,000 years. Writing, by contrast, appeared only about 5,200 years ago. If the history of our species were compressed into a single day, writing would appear at about 11:35 p.m., and the printing press less than three minutes before midnight.
Then came a second turning point. More than 5,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, human beings invented writing. Unlike speech, which every child acquires from the community around them without formal instruction, writing is a technology. It must be deliberately taught, and when a society stops teaching it, it can disappear, as it did in Greece for roughly four centuries after 1200 BCE. The first writing was used to count grain, record taxes, and track debts. It was an external memory. Later, it preserved myths, epics, and sacred texts, in which fiction and history were often blended.
A third turning point came with the printing press and the scientific revolution, about four centuries ago. Writing became more disciplined: shared definitions, standardized spelling, and precise terminology allowed scientists to record observations, replicate experiments, and build on one another’s work across distances and generations. Writing freed knowledge from the limits of a single human memory.
But that precision has remained largely the privilege of those who read and write at a high level. As recently as 1820, only about 12% of the world’s population could read, and by 1900, barely 21%. As we will see, a fourth turning point may now be within reach.
Think about that!
If language played such a fundamental role in transforming humanity’s evolutionary trajectory, why is advanced language development not among the highest priorities of every educational system on Earth?
Why do we spend so much time teaching people what to say, what to remember, and what to believe, while often devoting insufficient attention to teaching them how to examine the meanings of words, investigate propositions, and discriminate between competing explanations?
2. Language Development Is More Than Speaking
Having the ability to speak does not necessarily mean having a highly developed language repertoire.
A person may possess thousands of words and still lack the conceptual understanding necessary to evaluate what those words represent.
Consider words such as:
Freedom. Liberty. Free will. Truth. Justice. Democracy. Rights. Beliefs. Morality. Well-being.
How many people use these words every day without being able to define them precisely?
How many defend ideas they have never critically examined?
How many make consequential decisions based on concepts whose meanings, implications, and practical consequences they have never investigated?
And how many believe they are exercising independent judgment when their responses are largely influenced by verbal environments constructed and reinforced by others?
This is where language development becomes a fundamental question of human independence.
The objective is not merely to acquire more words. It is to develop increasingly sophisticated repertoires for understanding meanings, identifying relationships, evaluating evidence, and discriminating among the conditions and consequences those words represent.
Without these abilities, individuals become more vulnerable to misinformation, unsupported assertions, and manipulation.
3. When Language Becomes an Instrument of Manipulation
Consider a phenomenon that continues to characterize human societies in the twenty-first century.
Highly educated religious authorities may use sophisticated language, philosophical arguments, and even scientific terminology to present literal creation narratives as established historical or scientific facts.
Some continue to teach that the universe, Earth, living organisms, and human beings were created within six literal days.
Yet extensive evidence from cosmology, geology, genetics, archaeology, and evolutionary biology contradicts such a chronology.
It is worth understanding how such beliefs arose. For most of human history, our ancestors faced the sun, the rain, the stars, illness, and death without any knowledge of their causes. Human beings readily detect intention and agency in the world around them, so explaining these forces through powerful beings made complete sense. It was a reasonable response to the evidence available at the time, not a failure of intelligence.
Today, the situation is different. Every phenomenon that has been carefully investigated has turned out to have a natural explanation, and no supernatural claim has withstood rigorous testing. The questions that remain unanswered, such as the origin of the universe or the nature of consciousness, are reasons to investigate, not gaps to fill with the supernatural.
The issue is not whether someone has the right to believe a religious narrative.
Freedom of religion protects the right to hold and express religious beliefs. It does not establish the empirical truth of those beliefs.
A religious narrative may have theological, symbolic, philosophical, or cultural significance. But presenting an account as a scientifically established historical event requires evidence appropriate to that claim.
How is humanity helped when individuals are taught to accept unsupported empirical assertions as demonstrated facts?
How is humanity helped when children are not systematically taught to distinguish fiction from nonfiction, theological propositions from scientific explanations, or personal convictions from empirically supported conclusions?
How can people shape their future if they have not developed the repertoires necessary to investigate the explanations they inherit?
These questions are not attacks on the right to believe.
They are questions about which claims can count as established facts, and about the conditions necessary for intellectual independence.
4. The Scientific Community Reveals Something Even More Important
Consider an observation frequently discussed by astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.
A 1998 survey of members of the United States National Academy of Sciences found that approximately 7% of responding scientists expressed belief in a personal God.
Many would emphasize the 93% who did not. Dr. Tyson asks a more revealing question: among the most accomplished scientists in the nation, why is the figure not zero?
The 7% demonstrates that advanced scientific expertise and religious belief can coexist within the same individual.
But it also raises a more fundamental behavioral question:
Does the acquisition of highly developed scientific repertoires in one domain necessarily produce scientific discrimination across every other domain of human life?
Apparently not.
A scientist may demonstrate extraordinary analytical abilities when investigating physical phenomena while continuing to maintain religious beliefs acquired through an entirely different learning history.
The question is sharper than it may first appear. A personal God, as commonly described, acts in the world: answering prayers, performing miracles, intervening in human affairs. Those are claims about events, and claims about events are precisely what scientific methods are designed to evaluate. By the standard this essay defends, such a belief is irrational: it is not based on objective evidence. It is maintained by a learning history, not by data. This is not a judgment of anyone’s character or intelligence. It is evidence that the same standard of evaluation has not been applied across every domain.
Above all, the phenomenon illustrates something essential:
The development of sophisticated language and scientific repertoires does not guarantee that those repertoires will generalize across all situations.
And that is precisely why systematic training in conceptual discrimination, evidence evaluation, and scientific reasoning is so important.
5. Political Behavior: When Words Pull Votes Away From Stated Preferences
Now consider political behavior.
Let me state my own standard openly: I support whatever the evidence shows will benefit the great majority, beginning with those who have the least. That is a value commitment, not neutrality. What I ask of every reader, and of myself, is to apply that standard through evidence, not labels.
Millions of Americans express support for policies associated with progressive political agendas, including expanded healthcare coverage, affordable education, and stronger economic protections.
Yet their electoral decisions do not always correspond to those expressed policy preferences.
Consider Bernie Sanders and his proposals for healthcare, education, wages, and economic inequality.
Or consider Florida in 2020. Voters approved a $15 minimum wage, a policy Sanders had long championed, with about 61% of the vote. Yet the same electorate also chose the presidential candidate whose party opposed raising the federal minimum wage to $15. Stated preference and vote, side by side.
Whether a particular policy benefits an individual must be established through careful analysis, not political affiliation. Nevertheless, the discrepancy between people’s stated policy preferences and their electoral behavior raises important questions.
Why might someone support a particular policy but reject it when associated with a political label?
Consider the word SOCIALISM.
A person may support public education, Social Security, Medicare, and other publicly financed programs while reacting negatively to a proposal described as socialist.
Why?
What behavioral histories have established the functions of that word?
What happens when the emotional response to a political label becomes more influential than an examination of the policy’s actual consequences?
The same process operates across the political spectrum. Words such as “GMO” or “nuclear” can trigger strong rejection, including among many progressives, regardless of what scientific assessments have found. In a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 88% of scientists in the American Association for the Advancement of Science said genetically modified foods are generally safe to eat, compared with only 37% of the general public. A label can override evidence for anyone.
The same questions arise in political campaigns involving religious language.
Consider the 2026 U.S. Senate race in Texas. Democratic candidate James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, has made his faith central to his campaign. Opposing campaigns and PACs have run ads built around short clips of his past remarks on religion and gender, in one case using an AI-generated likeness of him. Talarico has acknowledged that some of his past comments “missed the mark,” while his campaign argues that others were stripped of context. Talarico, in turn, has run an ad accusing his opponent of violating some of the Ten Commandments.
Both sides are drawing on voters’ religious convictions.
When political messages invoke people’s previously established religious beliefs to influence their evaluation of a candidate, an important behavioral process may occur.
Instead of examining a candidate’s proposals, qualifications, and anticipated policy consequences, individuals may respond primarily to religious associations evoked by the political message.
Of course, religious convictions can legitimately inform political preferences. The concern arises when statements are distorted, context is removed, or emotional associations replace accurate information.
The scientific question is not whether people should support a particular politician. It is whether they possess the conceptual and analytical repertoires necessary to evaluate political propositions independently of misleading verbal stimuli.
This applies to every political party, ideology, and candidate.
The issue is not whom people vote for.
The issue is whether they understand what they are voting for, what they are voting against, and the likely consequences of their decisions.
6. Artificial Intelligence: Another Turning Point in Human History
Today, humanity has developed Large Language Models (LLMs), extraordinary technological systems capable of processing and generating language at an unprecedented scale.
These systems can facilitate research, explain complex concepts, translate languages, support education, and assist with increasingly sophisticated problem-solving activities.
Yet, at the same time, hundreds of millions of human beings still lack adequate opportunities to develop advanced literacy, conceptual understanding, and scientific reasoning. UNESCO estimates that roughly 750 million adults cannot read at all.
What sense does that make?
How can we celebrate the extraordinary development of artificial intelligence while failing to prioritize the systematic development of human intellectual capabilities?
And who will benefit most from these technological advances?
Those who can formulate precise questions, evaluate explanations, identify contradictions, and discriminate between reliable and unreliable information may be better positioned to use these technologies effectively.
Others may become increasingly dependent on explanations they cannot independently evaluate.
But this outcome is not inevitable.
Artificial intelligence can also become a powerful instrument for expanding educational opportunities and developing human language repertoires.
I have been drawn to writing, to working with words and concepts, since I was a child. I have kept a personal blog since 2014, yet only about 30% of what I draft has ever been published. I also have hundreds of other texts, along with studies and research. Thanks to AI, I can now review and polish them faster, and make them more accurate, more factual, and more precise. But I do not simply accept whatever AI tells me. I am a scientist, an expert in Applied Behavior Analysis, a researcher and a writer, and I hold a PhD in Education. I use AI as a tool, and I keep full control over my work. AI never decides or dictates what I write; every suggestion passes through my own judgment. Like any other source, AI can reflect biases built into it, and it makes mistakes. AI will benefit the great majority to the extent that we learn to use it to develop the very skills this essay is about.
This may be that fourth turning point in the history of language. For thousands of years, precise knowledge has lived mainly in writing, and therefore mainly among those who read well. Today, voice technologies and artificial intelligence make it possible to bring that precision back to the spoken word, the form of language every human being already masters. English is increasingly becoming the world’s common language, but the great majority of humanity still lives, thinks, and learns in its own languages. The goal is not one universal language. It is a universal spoken culture of precision, in every language, accessible to every human being, whether or not they read well.
Consider this: of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, nearly half still have no writing system at all. Every one of them is spoken.
The fundamental question is whether we will use these technologies to expand humanity’s intellectual independence or allow existing inequalities in knowledge and critical reasoning to become even more consequential.
7. The Ability to DISCRIMINATE
This brings us to the most important concept in this entire discussion:
DISCRIMINATION!
In behavior analysis, discrimination involves responding differently under different stimulus conditions as a result of learning.
In the context of language development and scientific reasoning, increasingly sophisticated discrimination allows individuals to identify meaningful differences among concepts, propositions, evidence, and consequences.
It helps us distinguish:
- What we know from what we merely believe.
- What has been demonstrated from what has only been asserted.
- A scientific explanation from an unsupported speculation.
- A fictional narrative from an empirically documented event.
- A correlation from a causal relationship.
- A persuasive argument from a valid argument.
- A political slogan from an evidence-based policy analysis.
- A person’s conviction from the accuracy of that person’s claim.
But discrimination must be learned, practiced, reinforced, and generalized across different environments.
It does not automatically emerge simply because someone becomes older, earns academic degrees, acquires professional credentials, or develops an extensive vocabulary.
8. Can We Really Shape Our Future Without Advanced Language Development?
Our evolutionary ancestors influenced their environments long before the emergence of complex language.
But there is an extraordinary difference between influencing one’s environment through immediate behavior and deliberately constructing a future through systematic investigation, conceptual reasoning, scientific prediction, and coordinated action.
The emergence of meaningful words dramatically expanded that second capacity.
And the continued development of language, conceptual understanding, and scientific reasoning remains fundamental to expanding it further.
A person who cannot adequately evaluate competing explanations is more vulnerable to accepting conclusions supplied by others.
A person who cannot identify the practical implications of political or economic propositions may struggle to determine how those propositions relate to their interests.
A person who has not learned to distinguish evidence from assertion may become dependent on authorities whose claims have never been independently examined.
And a society that fails to systematically develop these repertoires across its population risks allowing its collective future to be disproportionately shaped by those who control information, institutions, and persuasive language.
This is not an inevitable limitation of human beings. It is an educational challenge that humanity has the capacity to address.
9. The Scientific Thinkers Circle: An Invitation to Shape Our Future
If you want to become increasingly capable of shaping your future, begin by studying one of the most consequential developments in human evolution:
LANGUAGE!
Learn about its origins.
Investigate how it develops.
Expand your vocabulary.
Study how words acquire meanings.
Learn how concepts are formed and how verbal relationships influence behavior.
Develop your ability to examine propositions, identify contradictions, evaluate evidence, and distinguish scientific explanations from unsupported assertions.
Above all:
LEARN TO DISCRIMINATE!
Not merely between words, but between the conditions, relationships, and consequences those words represent.
Because the ultimate objective of advanced language development is not simply to speak eloquently, argue persuasively, or accumulate information.
It is to understand reality more accurately, reason more effectively, make increasingly informed decisions, and participate more independently in shaping the conditions of our existence.
This is the educational vision behind the Scientific Thinkers Circle.
We are committed to making the foundations of language development, conceptual discrimination, critical thinking, and scientific reasoning understandable and accessible to every human being.
We believe that these capabilities should not remain privileges associated with academic institutions, professional credentials, or socioeconomic status.
They should become fundamental educational opportunities available to everyone.
I must also be honest about this essay itself. It is written at a high language level, and that creates a contradiction I cannot ignore. The people who most need these skills are often the least likely to read a text like this one to the end. If I write only at this level, I speak mainly to those who already have the repertoires I am advocating for.
I have seen this contradiction firsthand. I recently shared a short video in which Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and his colleagues discussed artificial intelligence in an elegant and familiar way. I asked five people to watch it and tell me what they understood. Four of them told me it seemed very interesting, but that they understood little of it, because the vocabulary and concepts were not part of their repertoire. Around the same time, I asked about a dozen leaders of the Hayti de Demain movement, committed and capable people, to translate a short French text I had written into Kreyòl. Most of them could not translate one of its central sentences. Not because they lacked intelligence, but because they had learned in a language they do not live in every day. Neither experience was a formal study. Both showed me the same thing: when the words are not part of our repertoire, the message does not reach us, however simple it may seem to the person who wrote it.
The answer comes from my own discipline. In behavior analysis, we do not demand the final behavior at the start. We begin where the learner is and reinforce each step toward the goal. That process is called shaping, and it is what we mean by shaping our future.
This essay is written for those who can carry the message further: teachers, parents, clinicians, and community leaders. The Scientific Thinkers Circle will reach everyone else in the ways people actually learn: plain-language versions of these ideas, spoken explanations, short videos and audio messages, materials in Kreyòl, Spanish, and other languages, and trained facilitators who bring these skills into schools, homes, and neighborhoods. Used well, artificial intelligence can help adapt the same message to every reader’s level and language.
This matters especially for Hayti. Our culture is largely oral. Nearly all Haytians speak Kreyòl, while only an estimated 5 to 10 percent are fluent in French, yet most of our children are still taught in French. Precise knowledge delivered in spoken Kreyòl may reach the great majority faster than any campaign that first requires them to master reading in a language they do not speak every day.
Kreyòl itself shows both the problem and the opportunity. It is a young language, born about three centuries ago in colonial Saint-Domingue. Most of its vocabulary comes from French, with contributions from African languages, from the Taíno heritage of the island’s first inhabitants, and from Spanish and English. Its standard spelling was officially adopted only in 1979. Because Kreyòl has rarely been used in science, law, or higher education, many of the words in an essay like this one have no established Kreyòl equivalent. That is not a weakness of the language itself. Every language builds its technical vocabulary by borrowing and adapting words; English took much of its own from French and Latin. Kreyòl can do the same, sounding new words the Kreyòl way and writing them consistently. Developing a writing system, a dictionary, and a scientific vocabulary once took generations and great expense. Today’s technologies can make that work faster and far less costly.
A message about language development that only the highly developed can understand would fail its own test. We intend to pass it.
Because humanity’s greatest achievement should not be measured solely by the sophistication of the technologies we create.
It should also be measured by the extent to which we develop the intellectual capabilities of the human beings who create, use, and live with those technologies.
And now, as artificial intelligence introduces another major transformation in human history, we face a fundamental responsibility:
To ensure that human intellectual development advances alongside technological development.
We can learn to question.
We can learn to investigate.
We can learn to discriminate.
We can learn to understand.
And through these capabilities, we can become increasingly effective participants in shaping our present and constructing our future.
Michael Jackson called on all of us, in his song “Heal the World,” to build a better world for everyone. That is the collective consciousness we are working to develop: one powerful enough to transform how humans live on Earth.
THE FUTURE SHOULD NOT SIMPLY HAPPEN TO US. WE SHOULD DEVELOP THE CAPABILITIES TO SHAPE IT.
WILL YOU JOIN US?
Dr. Ash
Scientific Thinkers Circle
Shaping Our Future Through Language Development, Scientific Thinking, and Human Independence.
