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SCIENCE MUSINGS Did language drive society or vice versa?
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/130/science/Did_language_drive_society_or
_vice_versa_+.shtml
By Chet Raymo, 5/9/2000
Here's a sentence from a report on the evolution of language in a recent
issue of Nature:
''A challenge for evolutionary biology, therefore, is to provide a
detailed mathematical account of how natural selection can enable the
emergence of human language from animal communication.''
A lovely, complex sentence of the kind we used to diagram in high school.
I doubt if kids diagram sentences any more, but I loved diagramming. If
nothing else, it gave us a sense of how a manageable number of
grammatical rules (syntax) could give rise to an endless variety of
communications.
What a thing is language. Start with a bunch of noises - vowels and
consonants; three or four dozen will do nicely. String them together into
words and you have enough combinations to have a verbal expression for
millions of different people, places, things and actions. A babe is born
into the world knowing nary a word. By age 2, she will have a few hundred
words at her command. An adult might have a working vocabulary of tens of
thousands of words.
But even then, we don't go around grunting single words. We put words
together into meaningful sentences using the rules of syntax. And
suddenly the number of possible utterances becomes essentially infinite.
''Hop on Pop'' is a possibility. So is the Holy Bible or ''Finnegans
Wake.''
Where did it all come from? When and where did language evolve? Chimps
and gray parrots can be taught to communicate in a pared-down version of
human language, but the difference between human speech and the most
sophisticated natural animal communication is as different as day and
night.
No animal communication except our own is syntactic, or so it seems. The
territorial calls of birds, the wiggle dance of bees, and the mysterious
vocalizations of whales and dolphins are the best we get in non-human
nature. Yet the language of even the most ''primitive'' human culture is
as complex as modern English. Clearly, language took a big leap forward
as the human brain exploded in size and complexity. Like all humans on
the planet, all spoken tongues can be traced back to a common source.
The fact that all human languages have grammatical similarities suggests,
as Chomsky observed, an innate correspondence between language and the
brain. But whether the acquisition of language drove development of the
brain, or a bigger, more complex brain was a prerequisite for syntactic
language is a question no one can yet answer.
Can language be explained in evolutionary terms? That's the question
asked by Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin and Vincent Jansen in the Nature
article. Their method is mathematical but their conclusion is simple:
Natural selection will favor the development of syntactic communication
when the number of ''relevant communication topics'' surpasses a certain
minimum number.
By ''relevant communication topics'' the researchers mean anything in a
speaker's environment that confers a survival advantage if you can talk
about it. ''The lion is lurking in the grass'' might be such a message,
and it is easy to see how accurate communication of this message would
give the speaker and his listener an edge.
But what made our hominid ancestors' environment more complex - more
''relevant communication topics'' - than that of jackals, dolphins or
gray parrots? Surely other species experience just as many threats to
survival, maybe more. Our authors say: ''Presumably the increase in the
number of relevant communication topics was caused by changes in the
social structure.'' Which seems to say exactly nothing by way of
explanation. We are right back to the chicken and the egg: Did language
drive social structure or was it the other way around?
Nowak, Plotkin and Jansen show how syntactic language might have evolved,
but we are left with the mystery of why it evolved (presumably) uniquely
for the human species. Something truly wonderful happened in the East
African grasslands a few million years ago - the appearance of big,
complex brains articulating a sophisticated repertoire of combinatorial
sounds - and it seems to have happened all of a piece.
It is easy enough to understand the evolutionary pressures that caused
our ancestors to say ''The lion is lurking in the grass'' or ''There's a
nice source of flinty stones just beyond the hill,'' but where, for
heaven's sake, did ''The sunset is beautiful'' come from? And what
dynamic of natural selection conferred upon one species among all the
others the ability to say:
''She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes?''
Chet Raymo is a professor of physics at Stonehill College and the author
of several books on science.
This story ran on page E02 of the Boston Globe on 5/9/2000. © Copyright
2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
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