Robin Hanson

Consider a five-year-old girl who finds potty humor hilarious. She knows it’s rude to perform (or talk about) certain bodily functions in front of others, and that she risks being punished if she does. But at the same time, she can’t take every rule at face value; she needs to probe her boundaries. Just how serious are these norms, really? If she soils her pants, of course, she may feel legitimately ashamed—and thus, no laughter. But if she merely farts, she’ll quickly learn that the danger is quite small;

At some point during her development, however, she’ll exhaust the learning opportunities around bodily norms, and they’ll cease to be a fertile source of play. And soon she’ll graduate to the grown-up world, where we’re concerned mostly with social, sexual, and moral norms. These are an endless source of fascination, in part because there are so many of them, with so many nuances, that we can never hope to learn all of their boundaries and edge cases. But they’re also fascinating because they’re always shifting around as circumstances and attitudes change.

our instincts for using language didn’t evolve to help us do science or build empires. Language evolved among our foraging ancestors at least 50,000 years ago (if not far earlier), long before we became the undisputed masters of the planet.