The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

The study of the evolution of language began in earnest in the 1990s when Paul Bloom and Steven Pinker, linguists at MIT, took issue with Noam Chomsky's views on the subject. In an interview, Bloom said:

"And then, at the same time, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, a colleague and friend of mine in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, published an article in Cognition on the evolution of cognition and language. His article presented in this very sharp, cogent fashion the Chomskyan view on evolution--basically he said that there was very little interesting to make of the connection between natural selection and cognition and that language has features that simply cannot be explained in terms of adaption. I strongly disagreed with it." (p. 52)

Christine Kenneally provides us with the following Chomskyan quotes:

"Chomsky's signature claim is that all humans share a 'universal grammar,' otherwise known as UG, a set of rules that can generate the syntax of every human language. This means that apart from the difference in a few mental settings, English and Mohawk, for example, are essentially the same language. Traditionally researchers committed to Chomskyan linguistics believed that universal grammar exists in some part of our brain in a language organ that all humans possess but no other animals have. (p. 25)

"As he wrote in 1975: 'A human language is a system of remarkable complexity. To come to know a human language would be an extraordinary achievement for a creature not specifically designed to accomplish this task. A normal child acquires this knowledge on relatively slight exposure and without specific training. He can then quite effortlessly make use of an intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles to convey his thoughts and feelings to others, arousing in them novel ideas and subtle perceptions and judgments.' (p. 36 )

"In his book Language and Mind he wrote, 'It is perfectly safe to attribute this development [of innate mental structure] to `natural selection,' so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena.'" (p. 38)

Humans have the observable and definable property of being able to converse with one another. This property is closely related to the unobservable and indefinable properties of free will and conscious knowledge. We can comprehend the unobservable properties because we have the ability to transcend ourselves and make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge. Existentialism is a philosophy that arises from this self-knowledge and addresses our need to decide what to do with our lives. Kenneally acknowledges that the uniqueness of human beings is based on both existential and observable properties:

"But asking what makes humans unique is almost always qualitatively different from asking what makes the antelope unique, or the sloth, or the dung beetle. These questions don't have to be, but have historically been so, the former is never purely scientific, but is inevitably shaded by our self-regard and is always, to some degree, existential." (p. 85)

Science is a method of inquiry that excludes existential questions by focusing on phenomena. In evolutionary biology, the two paramount phenomena are the adaptation of species to their environment and common descent, the latter referring to the evolution of mammals from fish and fish from bacteria. Darwinian natural selection only explains adaptation. The increase in the complexity of life over time, like the Big Bang 14 billion years ago and the origin of life 3.5 billion years ago, lacks a scientific explanation. That Darwinism has this limited scope of applicability appears to be understood only by creationists, advocates of intelligent design, and evolutionary biologist. Like many amateur biologists, Kenneally thinks natural selection explains the complexity of living organisms:

"They [Pinker and Bloom] particularly emphasized that language is incredibly complex, as Chomsky had been saying for decades. Indeed, it was the enormous complexity of language that made is hard to imagine not merely how it had evolved but that it had evolved at all.

"But, continued Pinker and Bloom, complexity is not a problem for evolution. Consider the eye. The little organ is composed of many specialized parts, each delicately calibrated to perform its role in conjunction with the others. It includes the cornea,...Even Darwin said that it was hard to image how the eye could have evolved.

"And yet, he explained, it did evolve, and the only possible way is through natural selection--the inestimable back-and-forth of random genetic mutation with small effects...Over the eons, those small changes accreted and eventually resulted in the eye as we know it." (pp. 59-60)

Kenneally, following Chomsky, says the human eye and language are both complex. The human eye is complex in the ways spelled out by Kenneally. One might add to her macroscopic description that the location of every amino acid in every protein in the eye is exactly known. The complexity of the human eye is an observable property.

The idea that language is a complex is a different matter entirely. Language is the ability to create sentences and requires learning many rules of grammar and many vocabulary words. According to Chomsky, it also means being born with a UG. To make plurals in English you add -s or -es if the word is not irregular, and you put the subject before the verb in declarative sentences. Those who speak American Sign Language (ASL) fluently add the equivalent of the English -ing to verbs to show grammatical aspect.

Investigating the evolution of language is perfectly reasonable, as Kenneally explains, because it presumably evolved from the ability of animals to communicate with one another. As the quotes above indicate, it is also an ability children inherit from their parents. Adults who learn ASL as adolescents, for example, don't sign as well as children--even children taught ASL by grammatically challenged adults.

However, the evolution of language requires an understanding of the evolution of grammar. Grammatical rules are hard to learn and a person trying to understand a book on grammar may exclaim, "Wow. This is complex!" But grammar is not complex in a molecular or thermodynamic sense. The rules of grammar are statements about abstractions.

Abstractions are mental beings that humans, which are real beings, create. Abstractions are drawn from and are based on real beings, but only have a fleeting and mysterious existence. The abstraction represented by the word dog is based on real four-legged beings. It is a first order abstraction, if you will, because it is once removed from real beings. The abstraction represented by the word noun is based on the sound humans make when communicating about dogs and other subjects. This makes nouns second order abstractions and the parts of speech third order abstractions. The rules of grammar are sentences about abstractions involving all five parts of the English sentence: subject, complement, verb, object, and adverbial.

Abstractions do not take up space and have mass. This is why humans are indefinabilities, embodied spirits, or ensouled bodies. This is also why evolution only applies to the bodies of humans, not their souls. To investigate the evolution of an adaptive trait without defining that adaptive trait other than to assert the trait is complex is not scientific.

Intelligence, for example, is an adaptive trait because it can be defined as problem solving. Kenneally tells about a collie named Rico who knows the meaning of hundreds of words and can fetch items by name. When commanded to fetch an item whose name it doesn't know, it solves the problem by retrieving an object it never saw before. Chimpanzees are known to engage in deceptive behavior. The idea that language is just another example of the superiority of human intelligence was abandoned with the work of Chomsky.

Another reason language creates a problem for evolutionary biology concerns the past and the future. The ability to create and understand sentences requires an ability to know what was said in the past and is likely to be said in the future. The word cat, for example, consists of three phonemes--there are 40 in English--and lasts for about a second. The listener has to remember all three phonemes. A story that begins "Once upon a time" requires the speaker to predict the rest of the clause and the hearer to remember the beginning adverbial. But what is the past and what is the future? The past and the future are mental beings, like abstractions, that exist only in the minds of those contemplating the past and the future.

This is what Kenneally says about time:

"Only recently we believed that animals lived forever in the present, unable to think about the future. But in 2006 Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call showed that orangutans and bonobos could plan for a future event. In a number of experiments Mulcahy and Call demonstrated that both kinds of animals were able to select from a range of tools the appropriate instruments for getting food out of a specially constructed device, even though they wouldn't have access to the device for up to fourteen hours." (p. 105)

These experiments demonstrate that the sense knowledge of animals includes knowledge of the future. The experiments do not show that animals have the conscious knowledge of humans about the past and future. The distinction between conscious knowledge and sense knowledge is made in the famous poem by Robert Burns:

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

We can assume animals have no concept of the past and future because no animal ever said it did. It might be objected that no animal has ever said that it walked. However, we can define walking. We can't explicate what the past and the future are because the past and future are mental beings.

The other problem with understanding the evolution of language is what linguists call the "productivity" of language. Humans have the ability to create sentences that have never been created before. There are an infinite number of possible sentences. This is the unobservable infinity of existentialism, not the definable or observable infinity of mathematics and science. The ability of humans to create an infinite number of clauses and sentences is related to our finitude. Our finitude is based on the unobservable truth that we are unified with respect to ourselves and different from other beings.

In dismissing the idea that language evolved, Chomsky and his followers were saying human beings have spiritual souls, without actually using the four-letter word. They were saying as much without consciously knowing that the human soul is the metaphysical principle that makes us unique among other categories of organisms and the human body is the correlative principle that makes us different from one another.

The study of the origins of language, as we learn in this book, is in many ways a new field. It is a field which involves not only linguistics, but also biology, anthropology, computer science, and so on. Christine Kenneally tries to cover the specific points of contention as she reviews the field, and therefore the book is certainly not light on content. But this book is written with a very engaging style, and because it assumes very little knowledge, it is certainly accessible to us non-linguists.

The book has much interesting information, and you will learn a lot about the evolution of language. It covers how the field started, and how for a long time people claimed that language just "appeared" all at once, and that it did not evolve (a view that few people hold now.) It covers how experiments have deduced facts about our brains by comparing us to apes and other animals, and how there is no a single specific "language" part of the brain. It also covers how almost all parts of the brain that facilitate language in humans are also present in apes. It is written from a mostly-neutral standpoint, presenting the theories of Pinker, Chomsky, and others without picking who is "correct" in most cases.

Unfortunately, the book has some organizational issues. It jumps around, and it often delves too deeply into less interesting personal clashes among the academics. However, overall, this book is a good read, and I certainly learned a lot from it.

The author provides a useful and interesting overview of the current directions in linguistics research. While I am in no sense scholarly competent in the subject, I'm interested, find it a fascinating effort to understand how Homo sapiens became what we are: the most widely distributed, numerous, and ecologically dominant species of our size ever to evolve on our world. By paths yet speculative, we acquired language, our completely novel capability for communicating ideas of great complexity, novelty and applicability in the physical world as well as the purely imaginary. As children we learn this skill without apparent effort or special tutelage. Throughout life we rely on language to learn whatever we are able about our world, even ourselves, what we can do and cannot, how we relate to others and take a role in a vastly complex society of our fellows. We use language to preserve and accumulate new knowledge and to exercise the power it provides over our environment and each other. Yet few of us even think about it, let alone understand much about how language works or why only one species has it. Language capability make us unique among the uncountable multitude of species that live or have lived in the half billion years complex life forms have inhabited the earth. No one knows what circumstances in our evolution led to its development. The author does a competent job of summarizing the lines of research being followed currently to learn more its origins, about the fundamental structures of our many different languages, the neurologic peculiarities that give us the ability to use it, about our differences and similarities with other creatures more limited in their ways of communicating. Her discussion is lucid, accessible to non specialists, interestingly presented. Any reader can learn a great deal from her discussion. I recommend the book highly.

I picked up this book because the title suggested an interesting topic with which I am barely acquainted. I quickly became discouraged as it seemed to be a scattergun approach instead of a readable, well focused one. Perhaps this result is due as much to my inabilities as to the writing skills of the author. This field of study appears to have evolved not much further than mathmatics before Euclid. Unless you are a serious student of language or a phd in the field don't bother.

What a satisfying book to read! Kenneally takes us through decades of language evolution debates in a captivating, readable way. She makes her impressive cast of quirky characters ranging from Alex the talking parrot to Noam Chomsky come alive in her well-organized account of the evolution of a controversial field.

I found the book full of results from intriguing experiments worth digging deeper into. For example, Kenneally describes research conducted by Philip Lieberman on Mount Everest climbers. Lieberman found that climbers' comprehension of complex syntax degraded as they were more and more oxygen deprived, suggesting basal ganglia damage similar to that in Parkinson's patients. This loss in syntactic ability appears to be a good predictor for loss of motor control and orderly thinking -- potentially deadly on a mountain.

I found the book easy to follow and engaging but I do owe a disclaimer: though I don't work in the field, I do have an undergraduate degree in linguistics.