The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (8 page)

Before they launched their argument about adaptation and natural selection, the authors reiterated some important and, at the time, well-accepted facts about language. For example, as far as we know, humanity has always had language. There were no creatures that we would think of as effectively human, no highly organized societies of people that hunted, gathered, and nurtured their offspring through a long period of vulnerable infancy, without language.

Additionally, pretty much everyone agrees that all languages are equally complex.
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English, the dominant language of the United States with its advanced technology, is no more or less complicated than the language of the Andaman islanders off the coast of India. Moreover, said Pinker and Bloom, Modern English is no more complex than the English of six hundred years ago. Anyone who’s tried to read Chaucer knows that Middle English is painfully different from today’s English, but even though it has undergone enormous change, our language is in no sense an improvement on Chaucer’s.

Children, said Pinker and Bloom, master complicated grammars by the age of three without any formal instruction. They can make grammatical distinctions that no one has ever demonstrated for them. Once they have acquired language as adults, brain damage can severely affect their language but leave other mental abilities intact. Or it can happen the other way around, with rich and complex language skills continuing to exist in a brain that has trouble with other, simple tasks.

They particularly emphasized that language is incredibly complex, as Chomsky had been saying for decades. Indeed, it was the enormous complexity of language that made it 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, the transparent, dome-shaped tissue that covers the front of the eye and refracts light, and the colored iris, which, like the aperture of a camera, controls the amount of light that enters the eye. Exceedingly tiny muscles pull apart the opening of the iris—the pupil—or shut it down, depending on the amount of light hitting the eye. The lens, suspended by fine fibers behind the iris, adjusts its own shape, so that the eye can focus on objects that are very near or very far. And the retina, layers and layers of differently specialized tissue at the back of the eye, takes the light entering the eye and translates it into a biological signal that’s transmitted along the optic nerve to the brain.

All of these tiny, perfect biological devices operate in brilliant conjunction with one another to produce vision. The paradox of the eye is that evolution occurs in extremely small steps, yet it makes no sense for an eye to have evolved piece by piece. A cornea wouldn’t begin to grow without the rest of the eye around it, and the same goes for all the other components. What about the vitreous humor, the goo that plumps the small globe up? Did it arrive with a sudden squirt, or did it inflate the eye slowly over time? It’s infinitely unlikely that some lucky creature was one day born from unseeing parents with a complete eye in its head. Even Darwin said that it was hard to imagine how the eye could have evolved.
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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 and then the selection creatures with those effects by nature. It evolved to meet a specific need—vision. In the case of eyes, each time a small random change increased a creature’s ability to register signals from its environment, that ability meant that it was likelier to survive and have offspring, and then its progeny got to pass on those changed genes. Over the eons, those small changes accreted and eventually resulted in the eye as we know it.

In the same way that the eye evolved to meet the need of seeing, said Pinker and Bloom, language evolved to meet the need of communication. The survival advantages of our kind of communication are as obvious and profound as the survival advantages of our kind of vision. Language enables us to learn from others. Humans don’t have to experience something directly to know that it’s either a good or a bad thing to do. If we have been warned about them beforehand, we can stay away from dangerous situations and move toward safer ones. The more we all get to share with one another, the more collectively we know.

Because this talking network is so important, knowing what our interlocutors are feeling, thinking, and meaning is also pretty important to survival, and language is superb for interpreting the thoughts and feelings of others as well. Moreover, there are distinct advantages to evolving a language that uses sound as a medium. If you’re talking rather than, for example, signing, you don’t have to look at someone, you don’t even have to see him or be seen by him; it could be the dark of night, you could be hiding behind a tree, and your hands and body would remain free to do other things.

The kind of communication we specialize in, said Pinker and Bloom, is the production of propositions: “I am hungry”; “There’s a bear”; “You are cute.” And the communication of propositions is fundamentally connected to the channel in which it occurs—sound, from mouth to ear. This means that propositions occur one after the other, not all at once. Language is essentially serial.

The building blocks of serial communication, they explained, are nouns and verbs and the rules of structure and sound with which we put them together. They allow us to talk about events, objects, places and times, agents and patients, our intentions and others’. Words and rules allow us to build complicated sentences from smaller ones, and they help us pick the right meaning in an ambiguous statement.

Pinker and Bloom stressed again and again that even though what they were suggesting would be novel for cognitive scientists, it was not new for evolutionary biologists. All we are doing, they insisted, is applying the same kind of reasoning biologists apply when they discover complicated systems in other animals.

Pinker and Bloom originally planned to send their paper to
Cognition
as a reply to the Piatelli-Palmarini article. “But very quickly it grew,” said Bloom, “and we decided to send it out as a freestanding article to
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
.”

For Bloom, working with Steven Pinker was a thrill. “He was always understood to be a genius,” said Bloom.

 

He has a reputation as a genius. But while there are a lot of smart people who are full of themselves and difficult to work with, Steve is a mensch—very intellectually generous and kind.

We submitted the paper, then another thing happened. Steve and I were asked to give a talk at the MIT Center for Cognitive Science seminar series. And so we were set to give this talk and expound the position of this paper, and then I found out that the commentators would be Stephen Jay Gould and Noam Chomsky.

I was absolutely terrified. Besides his obvious status in the field—he’s like the Descartes of our time, people will look back a thousand years from now and will know his name—Chomsky is utterly merciless in debate, and I didn’t really want the experience of getting my ass kicked by him.

And there were other people who were very unhappy about the article. One colleague of Steve’s at MIT was extremely upset. He was very much of a Chomskyan and was really mad. He thought we were being hugely naive about evolution and wrote a long letter that was quite angry, accusing us of all sorts of things.

And I think a lot of people were really upset in part just because we disagreed with Chomsky. A lot of that anger was directed at Steve. I might have been thought of as a poor graduate student who was seduced into it, an Oliver Twist to Steve’s Fagin. But Steve was at MIT, Chomsky was at MIT, and I think some people felt it was betrayal. You’d expect it from Phil Lieberman at Brown or Elizabeth Bates at the University of California, San Diego, they were always disagreeing with Chomsky, but Steve was at the center of things.

That evening, something happened. I think Chomsky’s back went out and he couldn’t do it. I felt
transcendent
relief. Chomsky was later replaced by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini.

 

Still, going up against Stephen Jay Gould in debate was no small feat for any academic, let alone a student:

 

We met before for an informal dinner, but I was too nervous to eat. When we got there, the auditorium was packed, and they sure as hell weren’t there to see me.

The room was crowded for Gould, but a lot of people wanted to hear what Steve had to say. Leda Cosmides was there. And there were a lot of major figures like Ray Jackendoff and Daniel Dennett. On a previous Tuesday night thing, Steve and Alan Prince had had a major battle with Jay McClelland over computational models of language. It was an astonishing intellectual event, and the graduate students were talking about Steve’s presentation many months later.

So Steve and I split our talk. Then Gould began his talk with, of all things, a mildly offensive joke. He said something like, “I just got back from a flight from Japan, and I’m exhausted—I got jet rag!” People hissed.

 

Pinker likewise remembered the auditorium for the Tuesday night colloquium overflowing with people. “The crowd was far bigger than any previous audience at the series, and a partition had been taken down to double the room size. They were all there to hear Gould.
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“But what Gould said,” observed Pinker, “was surprisingly feeble. It was clear that he hadn’t prepared at all. He said something like, ‘Well, language can’t be an adaptation for communication because it isn’t always used for communication. For example, when I came here tonight from the airport, people asked me how I was, but they didn’t really mean it.’”

The main thrust of Pinker and Bloom’s argument was that it was obvious from the design of language that it had evolved: “If someone told you that John uses X as a paperweight, you would certainly be hard-pressed to guess what X is because all sorts of things make good paperweights. But if someone told you that John uses X to display television broadcasts, it would be a very good bet that X is a television set or is similar in structure to one, and that it was designed for that purpose. The reason is that it would be vanishingly unlikely for something that was not designed as a television set to display television programs; the engineering demands are simply too complex.”

No matter how you look at it, they said, whether you consider organs that evolved to serve a specific purpose or something that started off as one thing, like a heat exchange, and then evolved to fulfill another purpose, a wing; there was no a priori reason that language could not have evolved stepwise like many other products of evolution.

It made as much sense to say that language evolved as a spandrel as it did to say that the eye could be some kind of architectural side effect of another kind of evolutionary change, said Pinker and Bloom. The reason you have all these very specific parts of the eye that perform particular jobs is because they evolved to do those jobs. Their jobs were their very reason for existence. The same is true for language. The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction—not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well.

In addition to arguing for evolution from the design of language, Pinker and Bloom said there were many reasons why language could not be a Gouldian spandrel. Language was just too complicated. Spandrels are usually quite simple features. Even if a spandrel ends up being modified by evolutionary change and used in complicated ways, spandrels are typically “one-part or repetitive shapes or processes that correspond to simple physical or geometric laws, such as chins, hexagonal honeycombs, large heads on large bodies, and spiral markings.”
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They reiterated that one of Gould’s main problems with language evolution was that its supporters tended to rely on “just-so” stories, like the Rudyard Kipling tales that told how the leopard got its spots, to explain some critical developments. (Chomsky calls them “fairy tales.”) In academia this is considered a term of abuse, and it essentially means you are making things up. The fear of being accused of fabrication was one reason that people stayed away from the issue of language evolution, said Pinker. But he and Bloom laid out many reasons why the evolution of language was a legitimate area of study. There are other compelling clues to the ways that language evolved; for example, our vocal tracts are shaped to produce speech, just as our hearing is specialized to register it.

Finally, they said, the argument against the evolution of language seemed to be based on nothing at all but the force of incredulity.

“Dan Dennett was there that night,” said Pinker, “and more than once since then he has told me that he thought the debate was won by us. And yet as everyone was leaving, he was shocked to hear many people saying that Gould had clearly won.” (Dennett was so incensed by this that he was inspired to write
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,
a bestselling book about the theory of natural selection.)

“After the talk,” said Pinker, “we sent the paper to
Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
It had one round of reviews. We made the changes, and then it was accepted. We wrote it in 1989 and it got published in 1990, which for academia is fast.”

Behavioral and Brain Sciences
has an unusual format. When it publishes a paper, it includes comments from many other academics, to which the authors then get a chance to respond. Compared with just reading a single paper from a team of researchers (and then possibly reading a response to it two years later in another journal), it’s a rich way to gauge the complexities of a subject and to understand what is at stake. The effect is of a dialogue.