who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...

331• Why do we ask questions?This is one of the easy questions to answer, and I was wondering whether I needto ask this question at all, but then decided that we need to recall to ourselves howimportant is questioning behavior in our lives. We ask questions for lots of differentsocial and scholarly purposes, generally to find out something that we do not know andwe think others might know. Of course, we may sometimes ask questions to checkwhether others know the answer (I loved making quizzes in my school years), but mostlywe ask questions when we want to gain some knowledge about totally different things,such as the social plans of our teenage children for the coming weekend, the result of thesoccer game that finished in the early morning hours, or the name of the first composer touse polytonality. According to the information requested in our questions, we may askmembers of our family, call our friend, go to the Internet, or go to the library. Throughoutour life we ask questions. We ask our first questions even before we can articulate whatwe want to ask, we start every scientific query formulating questions to which we want tofind answers, we support everyday communications asking questions, we have hugelibraries and a staggering amount of available information because people wereconstantly asking different questions and were looking for the answers. Sometimes aquestion raised in the 16 th century was answered in the 20 th century; and some of theoldest questions have not been answered yet; we even have a talent to answer questionswith other questions (I remember a clever “Jewish” joke popular in Tbilisi: “Tell me,please, why you Jews always answer questions with questions?” – “So, do you think thisis bad? ”).I hope everyone would agree that it is absolutely impossible to imagine humansociety , human intelligence and language without our ability to ask questions. Withoutour ab ility to ask questions our brain would be a closed system, limited by theknowledge of our immediate experience.• What evolutionary advantage could the ability ofasking questions have given to human individuals?If the reader can imagine two individuals, one of whom is able to ask questions,and another one who for some reasons does not have this ability, the intellectual andsocial advantages of the “questioning” individual will be quite obvious. A questioningindividual can solve problems more easily, can easily access and use the knowledge ofother members of society, and can better manipulate people and information for her/hisown advantage. Even without asking questions of other members, just being able toformulate questions in her/his own mind would help tremendously in finding the rightstrategies to achieve different short-range and long-range goals. Human reasoning musthave started with the emergence of the ability to ask questions.Readers might object that this comparison is artificial, because there are nohumans who cannot ask questions. First of all, there are some rare cases when for somereason humans are not able to ask questions (and we will discuss such cases soon), butmost importantly, let us not forget that we are not discussing our contemporary societyonly. We are trying to discuss the evolution of language and the mental abilities of our