Asceticism Religion And Biological Evolution

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

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JOHANNES BRONKHORST
ASCETICISM, RELIGION, AND BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
399
tional dimension-is particularly important and has received a fair. amount of attention in recent years: language.
The idea that language has an innate component has gained many adherents since Noam Chomsky first published his review of J. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in 1959. The expression "language instinct" is sometimes used, as in the title of Steven Pinker's recent book (1994), in which he traces this usage back to Darwin. One of Chomsky's arguments against the behaviourist Skinner, and there. fore for the language instinct (although Chomsky does not use this expression), is that many sentences uttered by language users have never been uttered before, which excludes the idea of a limited number of learnt responses, as Skinner proposed. That is to say, the innate component of language is invoked to explain the fact that linguistic behavior is not limited, not confined to the constant repctition of a finite number of learnt expressions.
Much has been written about the precise nature of this language instinct. Some believe that it is responsible for the Universal Grammar (UG) that is supposed to underlie all human languages. Others maintain that the innate component of language does not rigidly determine the limits of the possible in human languages, but embodies preferences--preferred ways of using language. This is the position of Derek Bickerton (1981), who has tried to show that "new" languages, primarily Creoles, always share certain syntactic features which are not necessarily present in already existing languages. In other words, although children are pre-programed to learn languages that obey certain syntactic rules, they can adjust to, and therefore learn, languages that do not correspond to their inbom expectations.
In spite of the almost general agreement about the innate nature of the ability to use language, there is no agreement that this ability has been acquired as a result of Darwinian selection. Surprisingly, even prominent linguists such as Chomsky and evolutionary thinkers such as Stephen Jay Gould have suggested otherwise (PiattelliPalmarini 1989). This position has come under attack in recent years (e.g., Pinker and Bloom 1990; Pinker 1994; Dennett 1995: 384-393), even though critics find it difficult to specify how exactly Darwinian evolution could have given rise to language.
Perhaps the most convincing solution to this problem suggested to date comes from Terrence Deacon in his book The Symbolic Species (1997). A characteristic feature of human language is that words do not merely refer to their objects; words also represent other words.
They are incorporated into individual relationships with all other words of the language. This explains that we can learn the meaning of a word merely from other words, as in when using a dictionary, sometimes without having direct acquaintance with the denoted object: we all know the meaning of "angel", but few of us have ever met one. This referential relationship between words is what Deacon calls "symbolic reference"; it forms a system of higher-order relationships that is to be distinguished from the indexical relationship between a word and its object. Accordingly, language acquisition cannot take place without symbol learning. The part of the brain primarily linked to symbol construction, Deacon argues at length, is the prefrontal cortex. It is the prefrontal cortex that is relatively much bigger in human beings than in other animals, including our nearest relatives, the apes. The conclusion seems inevitable that there has been coevolutionary interaction between brain and language evolution. Symbol learning, once in use in whatever primitive and undeveloped form in our early ancestors, put a premium on brain developments in the prefrontal region that would facilitate and enrich this practice. Since the capacity for symbol leaming, though limited, is feebly present in chimpanzees and bonobos, it is not necessary to assume that the brain had to grow before the earliest manifestation of speech (or other form of symbol learning) could take place. It is rather the use of speech in whatever form, but based on symbolic reference) that explains the subsequent growth in evolution of the relevant parts of the brain.
This is no doubt an attractive explanation for the evolutionary development of general language ability, yet it says very little about how a specific language instinct, or a UG, might have come about. In this connection Deacon reminds us that languages, far from being unchanging, evolve over time at a rate thousands of times faster than genetic evolution in human beings. If therefore, linguists are sur prised by the capacity of children to learn to speak, and if they postulate that those same children must already, in the form of UG, have an innate capacity (since otherwise they would not be able to distill the rules of grammar out of the sentences they get to hear), they overlook a crucial fact. During the time that humans have used some form of language, language has adjusted to its speakers, generation after each new generation. The UG that linguists speak about is therefore situated, not in the child, but in the language it is learning It is due to the evolution of language, and much less to that of human