On the Origin of Language
In 1866, the founding statutes of the new Linguistic Society of Paris included this curious ban: "The Society will accept no communication concerning either the origin of language or the creation of a universal language." Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species just seven years earlier, and he was intrigued by the parallels between linguistic and physical evolution. The Society, with Catholic leanings, would have none of it.
For more than a century afterwards, little was learned about the evolution of language - even though evolution had become the standard explanation for nearly all biological phenomena, whether physical or behavioral.
Today, the debate is lively. But there is still no consensus on how, when, or why language evolved. There is hardly even the barest agreement that it evolved at all, in the sense of having been the specific product of gradual natural selection.
One figure who initially kept mum on the subject was Noam Chomsky. For decades, the towering figure of modern linguistics refused to be drawn into theorizing about how language arose, arguing that although it must have arisen by evolution in some broad sense, it was impossible to know much in detail. Speech leaves no fossils. Paleontologists know when the human brain began to grow to its unusually large size, but not when or why Homo sapiens started putting that big brain to linguistic use.
In 1990, Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, both then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Chomsky's home turf, published an article making a surprisingly controversial case. In their view, language had of course evolved in a typically Darwinian fashion: slowly, first as a result of random genetic mutation, but gradually giving early humans a survival advantage. That advantage was that each new human need not learn valuable information by direct experience but can learn it from those who had come before: eat this, not that; this animal is dangerous; here's how to make an axe. While no one can say what the stages between basic cries and intricate modern syntax were, Pinker and Bloom were confident in positing a gradual unfolding.
Noam Chomsky later came to an unusual and different solution: that a single mutation in a single human gave that human an ability called "Merge." This ability was not for communication but for thought: it allowed simpler thoughts to be combined into larger and more complex ones, and this complex thought was the real survival advantage. The truly human bit of language - the ability to nest small units (words) inside larger ones (phrases, clauses, and sentences) is, in this view, a useful by-product of "Merge."
One fruitful avenue of research is what elements of language are shared by humankind's animal cousins. Birds can use a small number of units to make an infinite series of different calls - as humans do with words. Chimps and other apes can learn hundreds of hand signs and even combine them in crude but creative ways. Michael Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, thinks that gesture was crucial to the rise of complex language, a theory he expounds in The Truth About Language. Sign languages have all the complexity of spoken ones, and deaf children even "babble" with their hands just as hearing children do with their mouths.
That so many great minds, including household names like Pinker and Chomsky, give such wildly different accounts, could be seen as a scientific failure. Or it can be taken as a charming reminder that even if science has left creation myths and just-so stories behind in the past, some problems - like consciousness, as well as language - remain hard to solve just because they are humankind's most human traits. Nobody ever said that studying the fascinating but flawed human mind with that very same mind should be easy.
THE ECONOMIST