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(9/16/98)

THE EVOLUTIONARY PATH TO LANGUAGE

Terrence Deacon's book, THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES brings the most current knowledge of neurology, brain structures, evolution, anthropology, and all the other relevant fields of science together to present the best thinking currently possible about what language is and how it evolved.

Some introductory material from the book is presented below to provide an idea of what this marvelous book provides. It is must reading for anyone with an interest in language.

Page 12: "Why are there no simple languages, with simple forms of nouns, verbs, and sentences? It is indeed a counterintuitive fact."

Page 12: "Most mammals aren't stupid. Many are capable of quite remarkable learning. Yet they don't communicate with simple languages, nor do they show much of a capacity to learn them....[T]he more deeply I have pursued this question, the more it seems like a Pandora's box that unleashes troubling doubts about many other questions that once seemed all but settled. This isn't the question we had been asking, but maybe it should have been.... [T]he alternatives we pose in our scientific questions may not even address the most crucial issues."

"This book starts with this curious question, because it supersedes many of the questions we thought were more important, and because it stubbornly refuses to resolve itself as a side effect of the superiority of human intelligence or the savantlike language ability of young children. But in my efforts to answer it, I am forced to reopen many questions long thought to have been resolved, or at least reduced to a few alternatives which now appear less informative than we once thought."

Page 13: "In the chapters that follow, I investigate how language differs from other forms of communication, why other species encounter virtually intractable difficulties when it comes to learning even simple language, how human brain structure has evolved to overcome these difficulties, and what forces and conditions initiated and steered us along this unprecedented evolutionary course. What results is a detailed reappraisal of human brain and language evolution that emphasizes the unbroken continuity between human and nonhuman brains, and yet, at the same time, describes a singular discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds, or to be more precise, between brains that use this form of communication and brains that do not. My somewhat unprecedented approach to these questions unfolds as a step by step argument, in which each chapter builds on the questions, analyses, and evidence provided in prior chapters. At almost every step of the argument, I arrived at different interpretations from what might loosely be called the accepted theories in the field."

Page 13: "The presentation is broken up into three major sections. The first part of the book -- Language -- focuses on the nature of language and the reasons that it is virtually confined to the human species. The second part of the book -- Brain -- tackles the problems of identifying what is unusual about human brain structure that corresponds with the unique problems posed by language. The third part of the book -- Co-Evolution -- examines the peculiar extension of natural selection logic that is behind human brain and language evolution, and tries to identify what sort of communication 'problem' precipitated the evolution of our unprecedented mode of communication. The book ends with some speculations on the significance of these new findings for the understanding of human consciousness."

Page 13: "A major intent of the book is to engage the reader in a reexamination of many tacit assumptions that lie behind current views."

Page 14: "...assumptions about the nature of language and the differences between nonhuman and human minds are implicit in almost every philosophical and scientific theory concerned with cognition, knowledge, or human social behavior. It is truly a multidisciplinary problem that defies analysis from any one perspective alone, and where the breadth of technical topics that must be mastered exceeds even the most erudite scholar's capabilities. So it is hard to overestimate the immensity of the task or the risks of superficial analysis, and it is unlikely that any one account can hope to achieve anything close to a comprehensive treatment of the problem."

Page 15: "...I believe that the search for knowledge is as often impeded by faulty assumptions and by a limited creative vision for alternatives as by a lack of necessary tools or critical evidence. So I will have achieved my intent if, in the process of recounting my thoughts on this mystery, I leave a few unquestioned assumptions more questionable, make some counter-intuitive alternatives more plausible, and provide a new vantage point from which to reflect upon human uniqueness."

Page 21: "As our species designation -- sapiens -- suggests, the defining attribute of human beings is an unparalled cognitive ability. We think differently from all other creatures on earth, and we can share those thoughts with one another in ways that no other species even approaches. In comparison, the rest of our biology is almost incidental. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have produced hundreds of thousands of species with brains, and tens of thousands with complex behavioral, perceptual, and learning abilities. Only one of these has ever wondered about its place in the world, because only one evolved the ability to do so."

"Though we share the same earth with millions of kinds of living creatures, we also live in a world that no other species has access to. We inhabit a world full of abstractions, impossibilities, and paradoxes. We alone brood about what didn't happen, and spend a large part of each day musing about the way things could have been if events had transpired differently. And we alone ponder what it will be like not to be....In a real sense, we live our lives in this shared virtual world."

Page 22: "We are all familiar with this facet of our lives, but how, you might ask, could I feel so confident that it is not part of the mental experiences of other species -- so sure that they do not share these kinds of thoughts and concerns -- when they cannot be queried about them? That's just it! My answer, which will be argued in detail in the following chapters, has everything to do with language and the absence of it in other species. The doorway into this virtual world was opened to us alone by the evolution of language, because language is not merely a mode of communication, it is also the outward expression of an unusual mode of thought -- symbolic representation. Without symbolization the entire virtual world that I have described is out of reach: inconceivable. My extravagant claim to know what other species cannot know rests on evidence that symbolic thought does not come innately built in, but develops by internalizing the symbolic process that underlies language. So species that have not acquired the ability to communicate symbolically cannot have acquired the ability to think this way either."

Page 22: "The way that language represents objects, events, and relationships provides a uniquely powerful economy of references. It offers a means for generating an essentially infinite variety of novel representations, and an unprecedented inferential engine for predicting events, organizing memories, and planning behaviors. It entirely shapes our thinking and the ways we know the physical world. It is so pervasive and inseparable from human intelligence in general that it is difficult to distinguish what aspects of the human intellect have not been molded and streamlined by it. To explain this difference and describe the evolutionary circumstances that brought it about are the ultimate challenges in the study of human origins."

Page 23: "Where do human minds come from? The missing link that we hope to fill in by investigating human origins is not so much a gap in our family tree, but a gap that separates us from other species in general. Knowing how something originated often is the best clue to how it works."

Page 23: "It is not just the origins of our biological species that we seek to explain, but the origin of our novel form of mind.

Page 31: "Unfortunately, animal calls and displays have nothing that corresponds to noun parts or verb parts of sentences, no grammatical versus ungrammatical strings, no marking of singular or plural, no indications of tense, and not even any elements that easily map onto words, except in the most basic sense of the beginning and ending of a sound."

Page 32: "What would be the characteristics of a nonhuman language that would allow us instantly to recognize it as a languagelike form of communication, even if it were quite alien with respect to all human languages?...A languagelike signal would exhibit a combinatorial form in which distinguishable elements are able to recur in different combinations. It would exhibit a creative productivity of diverse outputs and a rather limited amount of large-scale redundancy. And although there would be a high degree of variety in the possible combinations of elements, the majority of combinatorial possibilities would be systematically excluded....Human games, mathematics, and even cultural customs exhibit these features."

Page 33: "...though highly complex and sophisticated, the communicative behaviors in other species tend to occur as isolated signals, in fixed sequences, or in relatively unorganized combinations better described by summation than by formal rules. And their correspondences with events and behavioral outcomes, in the cases where this can be investigated, inevitably turn out to be of a one-to-one correlational nature. Though an as yet undescribed example of an animal communication system that satisfies these criteria cannot be ruled out, it seems reasonable to conclude that the chances are poor that it would have gone unobserved in common animal species, any more than we would miss it in a cosmic radio signal."

Page 33: "We too have a wide range of innately produced and universally understood facial expressions, vocalizations, and gestures....And although these human calls and gestures comprise an entirely familiar system, we find the same difficulty translating them into word equivalents as we do with animal calls and gestures with which we are far less familiar. The problem is not their unfamiliarity but rather that it simply makes no sense to ask what kind of word a laugh is, whether a sob is expressed in past or present tense, or if a sequence of facial gestures is correctly stated. The problem isn't a difficulty mapping human to nonhuman languages, but rather a difficulty mapping languages to any other form of naturally evolved communication, human or otherwise."

Page 34: "It is just as misleading to call other species' communication systems simple languages as it is to call them languages."

Page 34: "Interpreting the discontinuity between linguistic and nonlinguistic communication as an essential distinction between human and nonhuman, however, has led to an equally exaggerated and untenable interpretation of language origins: the claim that language is the product of a unique one-of-a-kind piece of neural circuitry that provides all the essential features that make language unique (e.g., grammar). But this does not just assume that there is a unique neurological feature that correlates with this unique behavior, it also assumes an essential biological discontinuity."

Page 35: "The single most influential 'hopeful monster' theory of human language evolution was offered by the linguist Noam Chomsky, and has since been echoed by numerous linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists. Chomsky argued that the ability of children to acquire the grammar of their first language, and the ability of adults effortlessly to use this grammar, can only be explained if we assume that all grammars are variations of a single generic 'Universal Grammar,' and that all human brains come with a built-in language organ that contains this language blueprint. This is offered as the only plausible answer to an apparently insurmountable learning problem. Grammars appear to have an unparalleled complexity and systematic logical structure, the individual grammatical 'rules' aren't explicitly evident in the information available to the child, and when they acquire their first language children are still poor at learning many other things. Despite these limitations children acquire language knowledge at a remarkable rate. This leads to the apparently inescapable conclusion that language information must already be 'in the brain' before the process begins in order for it to be successful. Children must already 'know' what constitutes an allowable grammar, in order to be able to ignore the inumberable false hypotheses about grammar that their limited experience might otherwise suggest."

"This device, a 'language organ' unique to the human brain, could also account for the failure of other species to acquire language. The appeal of this scenario is that it eliminates many troublesome questions in one fell swoop: the discontinuity between human and nonhuman communication, the larger human brain (adding a new part enlarges it), the systemic interdependent nature of grammatical rules (they all derive from one neurological source), the presumed universal features of a language structure (ditto), the intertranslatability of languages (ditto), and the ease with which language is initially acquired despite an insufficient input and a lack of grammatical error correction by adults."

Page 37: "The accidental language organ theory politely begs us to ignore the messy details of language origins, abandon hope of finding precedents in the structure of ape brains or their cognitive abilities, and stop looking for any deep design logic to the structural and functional relationships of language grammars and syntax. This is a lot to ignore. What does this hypothesis provide instead?"

Page 37: "It merely takes what is in need of explanation and gives it a name, as though it were some physical object."

Page 37: "A grammar instinct or a universal grammar serve as place holders for whatever could not be learned."

Page 38: "To be fair, the intent of language organ theories is not to address the question of initial language origins, but rather to explain the source of language competence in development. For this reason, it is not wedded to the hopeful monster assumption. Steven Pinker, a proponent of the Universal Grammar view of language abilities and an articulate champion of many of Chomsky's original insights about the uniqueness of language, argues in a recent book ( THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT) that innate grammatical knowledge is not at all incompatible with an adaptationist interpretation of its origins. He argues that a language instinct could have gradually evolved through the action of natural selection. On the one hand, this is a far more biologically plausible alternative to miraculous accidents and it challenges us to face some of the difficult problems ignored by theories relying on miraculous accidents to fill in the gaps. On the other hand, an adequate formal account of language competence does not provide an adequate account of how it arose through natural selection, and the search for some new structures in the human brain to fulfil this theoretical vacuum, like the search for phlogiston, has no obvious end point. Failure to locate it in such a complex hierarchy of mechanisms can always be dismissed with the injunction: look harder."

Page 38: "A full evolutionary account cannot stop with a formal description of what is missing or a scenario of how selection might have favored the evolution of innate grammatical knowledge. It must also provide a functional account of why its particular organization was favored, how incremental and partial versions were also functional, and how structures present in nonhuman brains were modified to provide this ability. The language instinct theory provides an end point, an assessment of what a language evolution theory ultimately needs to explain. It rephrases the problem by giving it a new name. But this offers little more than the miraculous accident theory provided: a formal redescription of what remains unexplained. Unfortunately, I think it also misses the forest for the trees, even in this endeavor. I don't think that children's grammatical abilities are the crucial mystery of language."

Page 42: "...why is language such a problem? The difference cannot be simple versus complex."

"The complexity of language is important. It demands an explanation, as does the ability of young children to make sense of it, seemingly without sufficient feedback or time at their disposal. These are remarkable aspects of the language mystery, but they are secondary to a more basic mystery that has a lot more to do with the human/nonhuman difference. Despite the intelligence of other species, and the fact that they engage in communicative behaviors that are as complex in other ways as a simple language might be, no other language systems exist. And it's not just a matter of their not being needed. For some reason even a simple language seems impossibly difficult for nonhumans. This poses a profound riddle. So why has it been ignored? Perhaps we have been too preoccupied by the details to recognize this simpler problem. Or maybe we have been too eager to cast the problem in terms of progress in communication, with humans in the lead. Whatever the reason, it's time we recognized that the questions we thought needed to be explained by a theory of language origins were secondary to a more fundamental mystery: Why aren't there any simple languages? And why are even simple languages so nearly impossible for other species to learn?"

I'll end discussions from THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES here and encourage anyone who wants to understand everything about language to study the book. It's tough reading but well worth the effort. It puts the whole issue of language into a framework where it can be understood. In addition it lays the basis for continuing understanding of this central issue in human living.