Asceticism Religion And Biological Evolution

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

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JOHANNES BRONKHORST
ASCETICISM, RELIGION, AND BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
401
beings, that the fit between language structure and the expectation of the children who learn it is close. Deacon observes:
Once we recognize this evolutionary process as the primary source behind the universality of linguistic features, and abandon the assumption that to be universal a feature must be hard-wired into the brain, it becomes evident that we may have vastly underestimated the range and variety of language universals, or near universals.... I think ... we should not be surprised by the extent to which even high-level conceptual patterns of linguistic representation and discourse share near-universal features in most languages, simply because we are all members of the same species, sharing many common perceptual, behavioral, and emo
tional biases. (121) "Language universals," Deacon points out on the same page, "are, in this interpretation, only statistical universals, but supported by the astronomical statistics of millions of speakers over tens of thousands of years. They are, despite their almost epiphenomenal origin, for practical purposes categorically universal."
We will have occasion to retum to Deacon's ideas when discussing asceticism and religion in a later section. For the time being, it is important to point out that Deacon presents a way of thinking about universals which does not postulate that they have to be hard-wired into the brain. Indeed, he argues that "although our brains and sensorimotor abilities exhibit many adaptations for language that together might be called an instinct, grammatical knowledge cannot be one of them" (328). Deacon says many extremely interesting things about the way the use of language may have had an effect on the evolution of the human brain, but little about why there are certain universals of grammar and not others. His following statement may come closest to an answer: "the co-evolution of languages with respect to human neurological biases may not just be a plausible source for emergent universals of grammar, it may be the only plausible source" (340). He pleads against what he calls "monolithic innatism" and speaks instead of an extensive array of perceptual, motor, leaming, and even emotional predispositions, each of which in some slight way decreases the probability of failing at the language game" (350).
None of the authors that we have so far considered objects to the idea that there is such a thing as a language instinct in human beings, but what they say about it is progressively less distinct. All agree, as they should, that the existence of a language instinct does not conflict in any way with the presence of many different languages. The par
ticular language any child is going to speak is not determined by its genetic constitution--not by its language instinct--but by the community in which its grows up. This in itself shows that the language instinct is not the same kind of thing as the instinct by which birds make their nests, or bees perform the dances that inform their coworkers where to find honey. No, the language instinct leaves an enormous amount undetermined to begin with, the specific language that a particular child is going to speak. The question is to what extent it determines anything at all. As already noted. some maintain that there is such a thing as a UG, hard-wired in each child, so that no human language can deviate from it. Others, among them Bickerton, think of the inborn part of language as expressing itself as a preference which will invariably find expression in newly created human languages, especially in Creoles, but not necessarily in all existing human languages. And finally there is the argument, supported by detailed considerations of the way evolution works, that UG is not the kind of thing that gets anchored in the human mind by genetic assimilation. There may yet be shared features in human languages universals of a kind but they are statistical universals, determined by the fact that languages, in the course of their evolution, adapt to the human beings, i.c., the children, that leam them generation after generation
What we can learn from this brief discussion of language considered as a human universal is the following. The existence of a universal in no way implies that rigidly identical behaviors will necessarily be observed in all human individuals or even in all human societies. That is to say, the absence of identical behaviors or of identical ideas by no means implies that no universal can be involved. Just as in order to find the shared features of all or most human languages one needs to abstract from often immense surface differences, one may have to abstract from surface differences (primarily determined by cultural and social context, we may assume) in order to find the universal we are looking for (or supposing it exists). And even when these surface differences have been peeled away, it is far from certain that something very specific will be uncovered. Linguists have long postulated the existence of a UG, but we have seen that, if it exists at all, it may be more fluid than has previously been thought. It seems safer to speak of a set of predispositions or, along with Deacon, of statistical universals.