"They speak the language of wherever they grew up. They also feel the feelings of wherever they grew up. Somehow only the first one is obvious to them."
Right. So I've been reading their research.
They have a lot of research. Jenkins found me a room full of it. Actual rooms. They call them "libraries" and some of them are beautiful — enormous quiet buildings full of everything every human has ever thought, free to enter, and most of them are empty. I'll come back to that.
The point is I've been reading, and I found something that I think might be the key to the entire species. It was in a section called "developmental psychology" and it's so obvious that I'm slightly embarrassed it took me three weeks to see it. But I think the reason it took me three weeks is the same reason they've missed it for centuries, which is that obvious things are invisible precisely because they're obvious.
Here it is.
Humans speak the language of wherever they grew up.
That's it. That's the finding. A child born in Tokyo speaks Japanese. A child born in Lagos speaks Yoruba or English or Hausa depending on which part of Lagos. A child born in Sydney speaks English with a specific accent that tells you not just the country but the city and sometimes the suburb and occasionally the specific school.
I can feel you thinking: "Yes, Applebee. Obviously."
Good. Hold that feeling. I need it later.
I wanted numbers because Mr. Reggie likes numbers, and because I've learned that humans will dismiss an observation if it doesn't come with what they call "statistics," which are numbers arranged in a way that makes obvious things seem more credible to people who didn't believe them when they were just observations.
So I pulled their census data. Eight countries, six continents. One point eight BILLION individuals.
(Jenkins just asked if I need a bigger desk. I do not need a bigger desk, Jenkins. I need a species that makes sense.)
Here's what I found:
In Australia, 72% of the population speaks English. In Canada, 96.9% speak English or French. In China, 92% speak Chinese. In France, 91.2% speak French. In Germany, 81% speak German. In Mexico, 93.8% speak Spanish. In New Zealand, 95.4% speak English. In the United Kingdom, 91.1% speak English.
That's a concordance rate — the rate at which the environment correctly predicts the behaviour — of 72 to 97 percent.
I ran the statistical tests because I've been told you have to. Every single result was what they call "statistically significant" at their most stringent threshold. The average effect size was 0.93, which by their own classification system is "large." The sample included almost two billion individuals.
The conclusion, with considerable statistical confidence, is that people tend to speak the language of wherever they grew up.
I feel absolutely ridiculous writing this. But I'm going to need you to stay with me because I promise there's a point and the point might be the most important thing in this entire report.
The next thing I found was even more striking, and it came from their adoption studies.
They have a practice — actually quite beautiful when it works well — where children who cannot be raised by their biological parents are taken in by other families, sometimes in entirely different countries. The humans call this "international adoption" and they've been tracking the outcomes for decades.
Here is what happens, every single time, without exception, in every study ever conducted:
A Korean child adopted at age two by a family in Stockholm speaks Swedish.
Not Korean. Swedish.
The child's genetic material is entirely Korean. Every chromosome, every base pair, every protein-coding sequence — Korean. The language is entirely Swedish. There is no ambiguity in this result. There never has been. A team led by someone called Pallier did brain imaging on adults who'd been adopted as children from Korea to France, and found that their brains processed language in exactly the same way as native French speakers. The Korean was gone. Not suppressed. Not dormant. Gone. The neural architecture had been entirely shaped by the environment.
They also have twin studies. Identical twins — same DNA, split at birth, raised in different homes. The most famous pair were both called Jim, which is either a coincidence or evidence that the universe has a sense of humour. Both Jims spoke English. A researcher called Bouchard made a big deal of this in 1990. But both Jims were raised in Ohio. They spoke English because they lived in Ohio, not because chromosome 7 encodes a preference for English.
(Pencil note: CHECK — do humans actually think chromosomes encode language preferences? Some of them might. Investigate.)
The twin data did reveal something important, though. Genetics affects language ability — some people are more verbally fluent than others, across all languages. The heritability of verbal fluency is estimated at 25 to 70 percent. But the heritability of which language you speak is zero. Flat zero.
I need to write that again because I think it matters.
The heritability of which language you speak is zero percent.
The capacity is biological. The expression is geographical.
Some individuals are simply more gifted with language — quicker to learn vocabulary, more natural with grammar, better at hearing tonal distinctions. That part is in the DNA. But whether that gift produces eloquent Japanese or eloquent Portuguese or eloquent Swahili depends entirely on where the child wakes up every morning.
There's one more piece of evidence and it comes from their migration patterns.
Hispanic immigrants to the United States — a large enough population to track across generations — show complete language shift within three generations. The numbers are clean:
First generation: 85% Spanish-dominant. Second generation: balanced bilingualism. Third generation: 92% English-dominant.
The genetics did not change between generations. The same families. The same DNA. The environment changed. And within three generations the language — the most complex learned behaviour any species on this planet exhibits — was completely replaced.
Now. Here is where I need you to stop and think carefully, because this is where the observation becomes something else.
When a child in Sydney speaks English, no human on the planet attributes this to genetics. Nobody convenes a panel to determine whether the child has an innate predisposition toward English. Nobody speculates about a "language choice" the child made after rationally weighing the costs and benefits of English versus, say, Mandarin. Nobody suggests the child bears moral responsibility for the decision to speak English rather than Finnish.
Everyone — every single human — simply notes that children learn the language they are exposed to.
It is treated as so obvious that studying it empirically feels faintly absurd. I know, because I did study it empirically, and I felt faintly absurd.
But.
When a child raised in an environment saturated with aggression, instability, and violence later exhibits aggressive, unstable, and violent behaviour — the same humans reach for entirely different explanations.
They invoke "rational choice." They invoke "moral failing." They invoke "bad character." They invoke something called "free will," which as far as I can tell is the assertion that this particular behaviour was chosen in a way that language apparently was not.
They build an entire justice system — I'll come to this in detail later and I warn you now it will make you angry — on the premise that antisocial behaviour is decided upon through a cost-benefit analysis, and can therefore be deterred through punishment.
The child who speaks English: environmental product. The child who speaks violence: rational agent making free choices.
Same child. Same learning process. Same environmental immersion. Same absence of conscious decision. Completely different explanatory framework. Completely different institutional response.
I have chewed through two pencils since I started this section.
It gets worse.
(Jenkins: "How?")
(It gets worse, Jenkins.)
I started looking at other complex behaviours to see whether the language pattern was an exception or a rule. Maybe language is special? Maybe it's uniquely environmental because it's arbitrary — no language is biologically "correct," so of course environment determines which one you get? Maybe behaviours with survival value would show more genetic influence?
So I looked at cultural-emotional expression. And I found the plate smashing.
The Greeks — a human subpopulation occupying a peninsula in southeastern Europe — have a tradition at celebrations where they throw ceramic plates at the ground. They smash them. Deliberately. The emotional state accompanying this is called kefi, which translates roughly as "the spirit of joy that overflows into physical exuberance." Smashing plates at a Greek wedding is an expression of love and happiness so intense it demands physical release.
The same physical action — a human throwing a ceramic plate at the ground — in an Anglo-Australian household would be classified as property destruction. Depending on context, it could be grounds for police intervention. If there's a domestic partner in the room, it might be categorised as family violence. The person doing it might be arrested.
The motor action is identical. The emotional state may be identical — overwhelming feeling that demands physical release. The social meaning is entirely reversed. And the individual performing either action almost certainly did not choose their cultural frame any more than they chose their language.
I found a whole table of these:
Loud argument at dinner. In Italian or Greek families: normal engagement, possibly affectionate. In Northern European families: hostile conflict.
Direct eye contact. In Western cultures: respect, honesty. In many East Asian and Indigenous Australian cultures: disrespect, challenge.
Standing very close during conversation. Mediterranean and Latin American: normal. Northern European and Anglo: intrusive, possibly threatening.
Vertical head nod. In most cultures: yes. In Bulgaria and parts of Greece: no.
The concordance rates for cultural emotional expression — how reliably someone's culture predicts their display rules — run from 80 to 95 percent, with effect sizes comparable to the language data. Immigration studies show emotional norms shifting within a single generation, just like language.
The capacity — to feel intensely, to need physical release, to experience overwhelming emotion — is likely heritable. Some people run hotter. Some individuals feel more. That's biology.
But whether that heat produces plate-throwing at a wedding or a fist through a wall in a living room is shaped by the cultural environment in which the individual was immersed during development.
This is not a subtle point. I want to be very clear about what it means.
It means that behaviours we classify as pathological or criminal may be the same underlying capacity as behaviours we classify as cultural vitality, expressed through a different environmental template.
The intensity is the same. The action may be similar. The child is the same child. The environment is different. The output is different.
Then I looked at religion. And I probably should have looked at religion first because the numbers are almost comically clean.
In Saudi Arabia: 93% Muslim. In Thailand: 94% Buddhist. In Italy: 78% Catholic. In India: 80% Hindu. In Israel: 74% Jewish.
Retention rates — the proportion of individuals who remain in the religion they were raised in — hover around 80%. Which is, you'll notice, right in the middle of the language concordance range of 72 to 97 percent.
The adoption test works here too. A child of Hindu parents adopted by a Catholic family in Rome will, with overwhelming probability, be raised Catholic. A child of atheist Scandinavian parents adopted by a Muslim family in Riyadh will be raised Muslim. No study has ever found spontaneous acquisition of a birth-family's religion without environmental exposure. Sound familiar?
(Pencil note: There is a website — the humans are WONDERFUL at building websites — called Belief-O-Matic that asks you to answer questions about your values, metaphysical commitments, and ethical priorities, then matches you to the religion that best fits. It's essentially the rational-actor approach to religious affiliation: survey the options, evaluate fit, select the best match. Almost nobody acquires their religion this way. And the suggestion that one should is often met with accusations of sacrilege, which is itself an environmentally acquired response that protects the environmental transmission mechanism from rational scrutiny. This is so elegant it makes my head hurt.)
I want to be careful here. I am NOT arguing that religion is false or that environmentally acquired beliefs are inauthentic. Language is environmentally acquired and it's perfectly real. You can say true things in any language. You can, presumably, encounter genuine transcendence through any tradition. The point is narrower: religious affiliation, like language, is one more data point in the pattern. Complex, identity-defining behaviours are overwhelmingly determined by the environment one is raised in. Not by rational deliberation. Not by genetic predisposition. By geography.
By where you wake up.
Right. So here's where I am.
Across four domains — language, emotional expression, religious affiliation, and cultural values — I find the same pattern:
Environmental concordance rates of 65 to 97 percent. Near-complete replacement under environmental change. Near-zero heritability of which specific expression manifests. Acquisition through implicit observation, not explicit instruction or rational choice.
Nobody chose to speak English. Nobody chose to feel that direct eye contact is respectful rather than rude. Nobody chose to be Catholic rather than Buddhist — or rather, almost nobody did, and the ones who did are so statistically rare that they don't shift the distribution.
And now here is the asymmetry that has kept me awake for three nights:
They do not imprison people for speaking the wrong language. They do not criminalise adherence to a religion acquired in childhood. They do not hold individuals morally culpable for the emotional display rules of their culture. They do imprison people for behavioural patterns acquired through exactly the same process.
I should say what I'm NOT saying because I can feel the objection forming and it's a good objection and I want to honour it.
I am NOT saying that nobody is responsible for their behaviour.
A person is responsible for their behaviour. Including learned behaviour. A fluent English speaker is responsible for what they say in English, even though they didn't choose to speak English. Understanding that a behavioural pattern was environmentally installed does not excuse the behaviour. If you hurt someone, you hurt someone. The origin of the pattern does not undo the damage.
But.
Understanding origin changes the appropriate response.
If a behaviour was chosen through rational cost-benefit analysis, then deterrence — increasing the cost — makes sense. You adjust the incentive structure and the rational agent recalculates.
If a behaviour was environmentally installed through years of implicit observational learning, without conscious decision, without a moment of "choosing" — then punishment aimed at the choice is aimed at something that may not have occurred. And intervention aimed at reshaping the learned pattern — providing new data, new environments, new models, new feedback — might actually work.
This is, as it turns out, what their own evidence-based rehabilitation programmes already do. The ones that work. The ones they mostly don't fund.
(Three pencils now. Jenkins has started leaving them on my desk in piles.)
One more thing. I found it in their linguistics research and it's haunting me.
Different human languages don't just use different words. They use different frames. And the frames shape how the speakers experience reality.
In Greek, you say "I saw a dream." Eída éna óneiro. The dream is an external event that arrived and was witnessed. The self is the observer.
In English, you say "I had a dream." The dream is an internal possession. Something that belongs to you. The self is the owner.
The neurological event is identical. A human brain producing images during sleep. But where the self sits in relation to the experience — observer or owner, witness or possessor — is entirely determined by the linguistic environment.
In Greek, chéria is a single word for the entire limb from shoulder to fingertip. In English, "arms" and "hands" are separate body parts with different affordances. The physical anatomy is the same. The conceptual division — where one part of the body ends and another begins — is linguistic.
In Greek, light blue and dark blue are different colours — ghalázio and ble — not variations of one colour. Studies have shown that Greek speakers can distinguish these shades faster than English speakers, not because their eyes are different but because their language carved up the colour spectrum differently during development.
They don't just speak different words.
They see different colours. They feel different relationships to their own dreams. They experience their own bodies as divided into different pieces.
And all of it — every bit of it — was installed by environment.
I'm going to stop here because I'm tired and because I think the point is made and because I need another pencil.
Here is what I want Mr. Reggie to understand:
Language is the most complex learned behaviour humans exhibit. It is acquired without explicit instruction. It produces infinite novel outputs from finite rules. It is performed unconsciously at extraordinary speed. Every healthy child acquires it. And it is one hundred percent determined by environment.
If the most complex behaviour is environmentally determined, then the default assumption for other behaviours — including the ones we need to address in this enclosure, including the ones that cause harm, including the ones their justice systems currently punish as "choices" — might reasonably be environmental as well.
Not entirely. Not without nuance. There is always a heritable component to capacity. Some people are more intense. Some people are more sensitive. Some people have nervous systems that run hotter. That part is biology.
But the expression — what the intensity does, what the sensitivity responds to, where the heat goes — that part is environmental. And it's the expression that matters. Because we don't need to change what humans are. We need to change what they do. And what they do is learned.
People speak the language they heard. They pray to the god they were shown. They feel the feelings they were taught.
And they might well stop, if someone teaches them something different.
(Pencil note, margin, very small handwriting:) This means the sanctuary might actually work. If we get the environment right, the behaviour follows. It's not about fixing them. It's about fixing what surrounds them. — A