Language

When it comes to the idea of language as an adaptation, the challenge of grasping evolution is further compounded by our inability to imagine ourselves without language. Language not only fills our lives, but we do our imagining, to a large extent, with language. Every now and then, we get a glimmer of what it might be like to exist without words. Sometimes there is a moment on waking when we are conscious but not self-conscious and our thoughts aren’t shaped by language. We are looking up at the ceiling or across the room,, and the ceiling or the objects in the room are just there, as we are there we’re awake but not much more. Is this what it’s like to be pre-linguistic?

In addition to the natural obstacles to imagining how language, or anything evolved, the way language was defined by generative linguistics made its evolution seem even more incomprehensible. Although Chomsky forswore explicit discussion of the language evolution question, many scholars thought the answer was implicit in his model of language. Indeed, scholars thought the answer was implicit in his model of language. Indeed Chomsky spoke often of innateness, and when you invoke innateness, it’s hard not to make a few assumptions about genetics and evolution

As a result, it seemed to many linguistics and other cognitive scientists that the only way an innate universal grammar could exist, the only way humans could be born with a language organ, was if it was genetically endowed. The implication was that the language organ was specified in the genome, and generally it was assumed that there was a gene or genes specifically for language.

At the same time, Chomsky saw language as a perfect formal system. So it appeared that a gene for this mathematical entity must have appeared out of nowhere with no precursors in other animals. This contributed to the widespread view that language evolution was impossible and language’s very existence was miraculous.

Although Pinker and Bloom helped considerably to challenge that belief, some researchers had been resistant to the idea even earlier – Philip Libermann, for example. Although Liberman was once a student of Chomsky’s, there is no interaction between them now. Both men are famously combative, and they have taken opposite positions on the subject of the evolution of language. In the 1980s and 1990s, while Chomsky expressed no interest in its study, Liberman was examining skulls, listening to apes, and testing brains, all in search of clues to language’s origins. Liberman argues that not only should you study language evolution, but you can’t even begin to understand language if you don’t start with evolution. His research is grounded in the basic tenets of messy biology. When you look at the problems through his eyes, it becomes harder to see language evolution as either mystical or impossible. Instead, it looks merely insanely complicated. ~ Pages 68/69