Natural Language and Natural Selection

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory -that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets this criterion: grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions file:///I|/phil/wp/SEMINARS/evolution/pinkerbloom_bbs_13_4_1990.html (1 of 50) [20/04/2004 17:41:48] NATURAL LANGUAGE AND NATURAL SELECTION that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process. Language could not have begun in the form it was said to have taken in the first recorded utterance of Thomas Babbington Macaulay (the infant Lord Macaulay): once when he was taken out, his hostess accidently spilled hot tea on him. The little lad first bawled his head off, but when he had calmed he said in answer to his hostess' concern, "Thank you Madam, the agony is sensibly abated." -P. B. and J. S. Medawar