WHY ONLY US: LANGUAGE AND EVOLUTION

This is not a book for the faint-hearted and, unless there has been some serious brightening-up in recent years, readers able to understand its every paragraph will be very few in number.

Berwick and Chomsky (yes, I was surprised too, for this is the very Chomsky who rose to controversial prominence sixty years ago and is now nearing ninety) want to report on where we are now in the vexed matter of when, how and why language evolved biologically. I think that they could have done it more clearly for the general public, but in the event they have chosen to speak to fellow-researchers in their discipline. For this reason they take no prisoners and often seem happy to exclude the rest of us. Their book is awash with the special terms of their many disciplines, many of them unexplained, and the sense of being excluded from a small esoteric club is constantly being sharpened as we read. Take this sentence as a sample:

Very, very little systematic abstraction-layer circuit design knowledge, from dataflow architectures, to pipelined CPU designs, to asynchronous processing, has yet to make its way into cognitive modelling practice. (p. 133)

All perfectly true no doubt, but how many readers will know what each and every one of these monsters actually is? The contrast between the rhetorical flourish at the start of the sentence (the repetition of 'very') and the brain-freezing specialist register of the rest of it is a tiny glimmer of amusing light discernible among these opacities. And there are pages and pages like this.

However, leaving the problems posed by this highly-academic register aside, one is able to discern something very useful here. Thus: we know that language evolved at some point and we know that language has been a sine qua non of human development ever since, but there are problems: how could so complex a feature of being human have developed in the very short evolutionary time-span available for it? Was there no language among hominid populations? Among Neanderthals? Is there any real language among primates such as chimpanzees? To quote the title of this book: Why Only Us? (I don't know why the publishers have omitted the question-mark from this obviously-interrogative implied clause.) Is there a gene for language? What is it about the development of the brain of Homo sapiens that permitted language to emerge?

I could not possibly rehearse the compacted, even clotted, arguments that sustain Berwick and Chomsky's answers to these questions, but it does seem that they have done the work for us by reviewing and assessing all the relevant research and scholarship in the area. They leap polymathically from biology to game theory to linguistics to anthropology and philosophy in the most impressive manner and even if we cannot follow them we can perhaps believe that they know what they are talking about after what amounts to a century of thought and work, which is what they have amassed between them.

Here are some of their answers, as they present them, opaquely for we outsiders but tentatively and modestly it has to be admitted.

• Human language is very special. Songbirds and chimpanzees do not really have 'language' in our advanced sense of the term. The term 'language' is simply not suitable to describe the abilities of even the best-educated ape.

• There was no real 'protolanguage' among hominids and Neanderthals. They may have done the communicating of animals (roaring, birdsong, mating calls) but they show no signs of a second-degree consciousness of language such as we find among early men in cave-paintings and the like.

• This is because real human language is NOT a matter of simple 'communication' as is assumed by most biologists. Nor is language referential: it doesn't simply indicate pre-established entities within the world but rather creates the world we inhabit.

• Instead of these external orientations language evolved as an internal matter, an 'internal mental tool', a way of organising the new thoughts being experienced by early man. Language does a great deal more than merely communicate, notably in internal spheres such as planning, calculating, daydreaming and poetry.

• 'Externalisation' – that is speaking and writing – come second to this internal process and may not even be a necessary consequence of it.

• Language evolved NOT in a slow, gradual, pure-Darwinian way but very quickly, probably as a result of some minor mutation in the brain that pulled various of its capacities together.

• Subsequent language development is another matter entirely and is not 'evolution' as such. The history of language from the beginning is inexorably dependent on that first mutation, that chance concatenation of circumstances in the brain. Since then nothing much has changed in the Basic Property of the brains of language-users. A Martian might easily see all the planet's languages as dialects emerging from this same basic ability. Little or no actual biological evolution has occurred in our linguistic abilities since they came to us.

• Real language arrived on the scene about 80,000 years ago, before the exodus from Africa and the diaspora of Homo sapiens across the world which took place about 60,000 years ago. As a result of this point and the preceding one we may conclude that we all belong to the same family, Hom sap, in the sense that we all have the Basic Property that makes language possible – aboriginal Australians, Africans, Chinese, Amerindians and Caucasians alike.

All these ideas have come forward in recent decades because of advances in the study of the brain and in the study of fossil and other records and, of course, because of work in linguistics. In spite of its dense and at time rebarbative nature I found myself surprisingly inspired by this book once I had waded through it. First because, in spite of its high and exclusive professionalism, it shows the very best of interdisciplinary thinking at work: perhaps only great brains like the brains of these two authors, along with that of Steven Pinker say, could have put together biology, anthropology, linguistics and many other considerations to come up with an authoritative synthesis. Not only do they remind biologists, for instance, that they need to keep up with advances in linguistics before pronouncing on the evolution of language, they remind all of us that a monocular approach to matters human is almost bound to miss something important or simply fail to understand what is going on.

Second and following from this, it is wonderful to feel some of the great currents of modern thought coming together. Berwick and Chomsky are happy to quote Saussure though they come from a very different school, and they sound like Derridians in their description of how language formed the world of early man and how it forms our later world too in just the same way. Great minds think alike, as they say.

Thirdly and finally, my feeling of inspiration after reading this book is based on its provision of something scientific and palpable to hold on to in our endless political arguments: I am not an obsessive egalitarian but it is very nice to learn that at a deep level all humans are the same because they all have the same real language capacity. Language is so much the heart and soul of everything we do as humans that this easily trumps a large number of more superficial differences.