How did humans acquire cognitive capacities far more powerful than any hunting-and-gathering primate needed to survive? Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of evolutionary theory, set humans outside normal evolution. Darwin thought use of language might have shaped our sophisticated brains, but this remained an intriguing guess–until now. Combining state-of-the-art research with forty … forty years of writing and thinking about language origins, Derek Bickerton convincingly resolves a crucial problem that biology and the cognitive sciences have systematically avoided.Before language or advanced cognition could be born, humans had to escape the prison of the here and now in which animal thinking and communication were both trapped. Then the brain’s self-organization, triggered by words, assembled mechanisms that could link not only words but the concepts those words symbolized–a process that had to be under conscious control. Those mechanisms could be used equally for thinking and for talking, but the skeletal structures they produced were suboptimal for the hearer and had to be elaborated. Starting from humankind’s remotest past, More than Nature Needs transcends nativist thesis and empiricist antithesis by presenting a revolutionary synthesis that shows specifically and in a principled way how and why the synthesis came about.
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This book was written to attempt an answer to a problem, Wallace’s problem, that has long bedeviled those who study evolution. Why are human brains and language so much different and more complex than would seem necessary? How could this leap, this gap, occur?
Derek Bickerton has outlined the most likely scenario yet for the development of language, probably beginning with Homo erectus. He combines common sense with developmental data and evidence, drawing parallels and noting differences between the human origin of language and language acquisition in infants today, the development of creoles from pidgins, and work with the great apes using symbols, to cross that seemingly insurmountable gap in three smaller steps, not one large leap.
First would have had to come the protowords of the lexicon. This makes logical sense. You can’t have syntax without a lexicon, the words. Then, perhaps much later, the attachment of these words to each other in short, two-word phrases, a protolanguage, with the emergence of “telegraphic speech”. Finally, in fits and starts, after a long period of brain reorganization, the phrases and clauses of full-blown syntax developed. Bickerton sees this attachment and organization into phrases and clauses as a type of Universal Grammar, although one much different and less specified than pictured by Chomsky. I personally lean toward the idea, as put forth by Daniel Everett and others, that learning is sufficient to explain childhood language acquisition, granted the more efficient economy and automatization of modern human brains.
Bickerton saw language as being primarily a system of representation. (See Language and Species.)
Communication is what that system does, but a system of representation is what it is. And as in any significant new source of information or representation (like those of the senses) the brain went through a long period of wiring reorganization and automaticity to make its work of connecting, first, protowords to concepts, and then those concepts to each other, easier and faster.
Bickerton posits that the significant departure from other animal communication came with displacement, or offline thinking. When combined with fully-developed syntax, this hypothesis explains much, including our expanded ability to mentally travel in time and make plans. Offline thinking would have been necessary for the gradual expansion of our special type of human self-consciousness as well as imagination, recursive thinking, and artistic and other forms of representation.
Although the evidence is sparse and inconclusive, this hypothesis fits what evidence we have better than any other. It is parsimonious and elegant while explaining and retaining the phenomena. Research into child language acquisition, ape symbol use, and the development of creoles from pidgin offer some support for Bickerton’s position. Protolanguage (or merely early language, as preferred by Everett) would have given Homo erectus conceptual ability for both limited tool use and navigation at sea, while the much later complete syntax would account for the lack of evidence for more advanced representational thinking and artifacts until circa 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.
This theory of the development of language contains elements of both invention and innateness. The advent of protowords would have been an invention, Bickerton posits, to aid in cooperative scavenging. The rewiring of the brain for economy and ease in handling this new source of information introduced an innate element, although the topic of innateness is highly controversial. Finally, as full-blown language developed, culture took over to produce the variety of diversity in language we see today.
Is this science? I think it undoubtedly is. Science is sometimes taking the evidence we have and making our best hypotheses. Perhaps the most speculative part of this theory is language’s origin in cooperative scavenging, but it is a likely scenario. Although fire could have been the catalyst, or possibly monogamous pair bonding, or something else entirely. Improved information retrieval methods may someday tell us more.
Derek Bickerton passed away this year, at the age of 91. I didn’t have the honor of knowing him personally, but I can vividly imagine the sense of satisfaction and fulfillment he must have felt after crowning a lifetime of linguistic study and scholarship with the completion of More than Nature Needs.