Language

Like the other Social Scientists, linguists have not made a habit of looking to evolution for explanations, even though it is the bedrock theory of biology. Pinker was one of the first linguists to do so. With Paul Bloom, he wrote an influential article with a self-declared “incredibly boring” goal. Its purpose was to explain to linguists that, contrary to the view of Chomsky and the science historian Stephen Jay Gould, “human language, like other specialized biological systems, evolved by natural selection.”

Even this primitive form of language could have been extremely useful to an early human society. Other possible echoes of the inferred proto-language can be heard in syntax-free utterance such as “Ouch!” or the more interesting “Shh!” which requires a listener.

Recently linguists have developed a new window into the innate basis of syntax through a remarkable discovery – the detection of two new languages in the act of coming to birth. Both are sign languages, developed spontaneously by deaf communities whose members were not taught the standard sing languages of their country. One is Nicaraguan Sign Language, invented by children in a Nicaraguan school for deaf. The other, Al-
Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, was developed by members of a large Bedouin clan who live in a village in the Negev desert of Israel.

According to a famous story in Herodotus’s “History”, an Egyptian king tried to ascertain the nature of the first language by isolating two children from birth and waiting to see in what tongue they first spoke. Study of the two new sign languages confirm that King Psammetichus’s experiment was misconceived: it is not specific words that are innate, but rather the system for generating syntax and vocabulary. …..

The apparently spontaneous emergence of word order and case ending in the two sing languages strongly suggests that the basic elements of syntax are innate and generated by genetically specified components of human brain. The Al-Sayyid sing language en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language has been developed through only three generations but some signs have already become symbolic. The sign of man is a twirl of the finger to indicate curled mustache, even though the men of the village no longer wear them. ……

Sign languages emphasize an often overlooked aspect of language, that gesture is an integral accompaniment of the spoken word. The human proto-language doubtless included gestures, and could even have started with gestures alone. Michael Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, argues that language “developed first as a primarily gestural system, involving movements of the body, and more especially the hands, arms and face. Speech would have evolved only later, he believes, because considerable evolutionary change had to occur to develop the fine muscles of the tongue and other parts of vocal apparatus.

Once language started, whether in the form of word or gesture or both, its further evolution would doubtless have been rapid because of the great advantages that each improvement in this powerful faculty would have conferred on the possessors. Even while still in its most rudimentary form, language would have made possible a whole new level of social interactions……… Moreover each small improvement in the overall system, whether in precision of hearing or articulation of syntax formation, would confer further benefit, and the genes underlying the change would sweep through the population

But for linguists, the essence of language is meaning and communication, and it seems unsatisfactory to explain its evolution o9f any other grounds. Pinker artgues one should take into account the new ecological niche that humans had moved into, which was in fact a knowledge-laden environment requiring a wealth of new information abaout plants and animals, about how to make tools and weapons, and about going-on in one’s own society. People’s longer life span made it worthwhile to gather information and transmit it to one’s children and grandchildren. “Language,” Pinker says, “meshes neatly with the other features of the cognitive niche. The zoologically unusual features of Homo sapiens can be explained parsimoniously by the idea that humans have evolved an ability to encode information about the causal structure of the world and share it among themselves. Our hypersociality comes about because information is particularly good commodity of exchange that makes it worth people’s while to hang out together”

Paleoanthropologists have tended to favor the idea that language started early, with Homo erectus or even the australopithecines, followed by slow and stately evolution. Archaeologists, on the other hand, tend to equate full-fledged modern language with art, which only becomes common in the archaeological record some 45,000 years ago. Their argument is that creation of art implies symbolic thinking in the mind of the artist, and therefore possession of language to share these abstract ideas.

If fully articulate modern language emerged only 50,000 years ago, just before modern humans broke out of Africa, then the proto-language suggested by Bickerton would have preceeded it. When might the proto-language first have appeared? If Homo ergaster possessed proto-language then so too would all its descendants, including the archaic hominids who reached the far East and Europe. But in the case the Neanderthals, to judge by their lack of modern behavior, appear never to have developed their proto language into fully modern articulated speech. That might seem surprising, given the advantage any improvement in the language faculty would confer on its owner, and the rapidity with which language might therefore be expected to evolve. So perhaps the Neanderthals didn’t speak at all.

A remarkable new line of inquiry bearing on the origins of language has recently been opened up by human genome project. This is the discovery of a gene that is intimately involved in many of the finer aspects of language. The gene, with the odd name FOXP2, shows telltale signs of having changed significantly in humans but not in chimps, exactly as would be expected for a gene serving some new faculty that had emerged only in the human lineage. And, though the ability of genetics to reach back into the distant past, the emergence of the new gene can be dated, though at present only very roughly.

But its evolution suddenly accelerated in the human lineage after the human and chimp lineages diverged. The human version of FOXP2 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOXP2 protein differs in two units from that of chimps, suggesting that was subject to some strong selection pressure such as must have accompanied the evolution of language.

All humans have essentially the same version of FOXP2, the sign of a gene so important that it has swept through the population and become universal. By analyzing the variations in the FOXP2 genes possessed by people around the world, Pabbo was able to fix a date, tough rather roughly, for the time that all humans acquired the latest upgrade of FOXP2 gene. It was fairly recently in human evolution, and certainly sometime within the last 200,000 years, he concluded.

Societies with two kinds of people, of greatly differing language abilities, may have existed during the evolution of language. As each new variant gene arose, conferring some improvement in language ability, the carriers of the gene would leave more descendants. When the last of these genes – perhaps FOXP2 – swept through the ancestral human population, the modern faculty of language was attained