The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (7 page)

Tamuli never developed language skills comparable to those of the other apes. In this respect she is like human children who, for whatever reason (for example, undiagnosed deafness or abuse), are not exposed to language at an early age. There is a crucial learning period for humans when they must be exposed to language. Even if they are neurologically normal, they will never fully acquire language if its foundations are not laid in this early period of brain development. Genie, the most famous of these cases, was kept locked in a room, denied normal human communication, and never taught language, and by the time she was rescued, she was unable to acquire much more than basic language skills. Her experience shows that if you are denied language, you don’t spontaneously produce it. Since Genie’s case was studied, it has become fairly well established that language is not innate in the same way as, say, our instinct to breathe or cry. Tamuli’s experience suggests that apes have a similar window of opportunity.

Even though Tamuli could not relate at the sophisticated level that Kanzi and Panbanisha did, she at least seemed to understand that the keyboard was intended for communication. While the apes often tried to use it to relay messages, Tamuli’s usage was a bit like that of a young child banging away on a piano or a keyboard. She made no sense.

One thing that Tamuli lacked was the ability to recognize that her interlocutors had separate minds and that communication with them could alter their perceptions. Kanzi and Panbanisha, on the other hand, seemed to have acquired a theory of mind along with language. When Panbanisha saw her trainer remove candy from a box, replace it with a bug, and then give the box—supposedly still with candy—to Kanzi, she called her “bad.” The chimp demonstrated that she could understand what was going on in her trainer’s mind independent of the reality and apply language to the situation. She herself scared Kanzi when she used language to tell him there was a snake nearby, when in fact there was no snake. Panbanisha used language to manipulate the contents of Kanzi’s mind, just as her trainer had manipulated the contents of the box.

The ape experiments indicate how memory is a vital component of language use, even at this rudimentary level. A chimpanzee, Panpanzee, who was raised with Kanzi and Panbanisha, would sometimes make language mistakes that demonstrated a limited memory, such as when she was asked to put a sweet potato in the microwave. Typically in an experiment like this, an object, like the potato, would be made readily available for Panpanzee, placed right before her eyes. But in this example, the chimpanzee had to retrieve one from the refrigerator in order to complete the request. This she did. But instead of putting the vegetable in the microwave, she took it to the sink and proceeded to wash it. Somewhere between the retrieval process and the end task, the request became scrambled for the chimp. In similar situations, Panpanzee’s incorrect response suggested she was falling back on her knowledge of routines, rather than correctly remembering a novel request (something people occasionally find themselves doing as well).

Sometimes language mistakes can be as useful as correct responses. Eliciting errors in human speech is one of the main methods that psycholinguists use to expose the mental strategies that underpin language use. Spoonerisms, for example, aren’t just sound swaps: “pea tot” (teapot), “dood gog” (good dog), and “band hag” (handbag) suggest that speech is not entirely spontaneous. If a speaker accidentally begins a word with the first sound of the next word, he must be planning what he is about to say, even if he is not aware of it.

Lyn analyzed eleven years’ worth of Kanzi’s and Panbanisha’s language error data and found that when the apes accidentally pressed one keyboard picture instead of another, or when they misunderstood a spoken word, their errors usually revealed an underlying connection between the intended word and the mistaken one. Just like humans, the apes made category substitutions, like mistaking colors, such as red for black. They made word association errors, confusing the names of locations with items that were found in those locations. And they made phonological (sound) errors, like using a word because it rhymed with the intended word.

Lyn and colleagues found that Panbanisha and Panpanzee have more symbol ordering rules in common with each other than with their caretaker. It’s possible, even probable, that the last common ancestor between these apes and humans had the ability to understand meaning-based ordering strategies. Lyn also found that these apes have a gesture-last rule: they always touch the lexigram, and then gesture in the real world.

Bonobos acquire language up to the level of human children. For example, they can understand sentences that contain one verb and a three-noun phrase (“Will you carry the M&M’s to the middle test room?”), but they have trouble with conjoined sentences that require two separate actions (“Bring me the ball and the orange”). They do not speak English words, though they attempt to do so. Their short-term memory seems to be only half the capacity of human children’s, so they are not as good at imitating a series of utterances without a lot of repetition.
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The more complicated syntax gets, the more trouble they have with it.

The ape language research led Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues to conclude that language consists of “a large number of component parts and interacting functions.”
⁶
Even though their work has not had the impact of Chomsky’s, most researchers in language evolution would today think about language in these terms.

What’s most striking about the older criticism of ape language research is its basic attitude, which is more motivated to discredit than evaluate. In much ALR commentary, there is a strong sense that the critics have already made up their minds before arguing or offering reasons why ape language couldn’t work. There are claims of falsifying data and even of people being out to get each other. In the 1980s the debate was rarely conducted without tones of disdain and contempt.

Even now, scholars who work with animal language are often characterized as daft idealists or outright frauds, believing that beneath the fur or behind the beak are creatures with souls. Yet if you speak to these researchers, you won’t find anyone downplaying the enormous differences between humans and other animals, despite the fact that they happen to be interested in the commonalities.

One legacy of the Terrace paper has been an ongoing difficulty getting funding for this kind of work. Researchers often have to go outside the typical funding bodies of academia to keep their studies going, turning to special interest groups and private individuals. The promotional literature for the Koko research mentions visits from Sting and Robin Williams, for example, a gambit that gives animal language research a weird profile. Such marketing gives the impression that it is not solid, straightforward science.

Still, the basic tenor of the commentary has begun to shift over the years. Critics used to dismiss the research by saying, “All that the animals have is a few words, and they don’t have any syntax whatsoever.” Now the fact that apes can acquire words is treated as an interesting phenomenon.

Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University and the author of
The Ape and the Sushi Master,
says:

 

I think the trend is clearly towards poking holes in the wall that exists between us and animals, and increasingly people embrace the comparison, so to speak. In the 1970s, when I had to give a lecture on chimpanzees, some people would say, “How can you use the term ‘reconciliation’?” They would have strong objections. Or let’s say it was about sex differences, and they would say, “How can you compare chimpanzees and humans?” Because obviously, we are cultural beings and we can change our behavior.

When I give lectures on these topics today, that never happens anymore. It’s because there’s a gene on the cover of
Time
or
Newsweek
almost every week, a gene for this or a gene for that, so people are getting very used to the idea that genes add something to behavior. So the climate is totally different, and there’s a much greater openness to seeing us as animals, as Darwin always wanted and as many other people wanted.

I was recently invited to give a talk for business ethicists. Now, business ethicists are basically philosophers who teach at business schools. Even there, there is an enormous openness for these comparisons, whereas I’m sure twenty years ago they would not want to even touch a monkey. So I think the trend is clearly towards more comparisons. More comparisons doesn’t necessarily mean that we fully accept the similarities. Usually they’ll want to keep something like, “This is typically human” or “This is unique to humans”—they want to keep this to some degree.

 

One of the most important contributions of ape language research is its challenge to the traditional idea that other animals have a fixed mental bag of tricks, and humans are different because we have language and that makes us mentally flexible. If that were the case, Kanzi would have been unable to learn the language skills he has. Clearly, these apes who have the rudiments of language can also be flexible and creative with their communication.

Ape language research, and Kanzi in particular, opened one fascinating window into the problems of language evolution. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom opened another in 1990 when they published a paper in which they sidestepped the question of how much animal language training can teach us about language evolution and instead argued directly that not only could language evolution be studied but it
should
be studied. The two scholars—one a rising academic star, the other a graduate student with a brilliant idea—inflamed hearts and minds because their proposal was clever, innovative, and engaging. And even though they weren’t the first to propose that language evolution was a valid topic of inquiry, their paper ignited a small blaze that quickly grew and spread.

I
n 1989 Paul Bloom, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student in the psychology department at MIT, was doing research in child language development. He was interested in word learning in young children, which had nothing to do with evolution, but he was increasingly bothered by the general agreement that language could not have evolved.

“Two things happened at once,” he recalled in an interview.

 

One was that Leda Cosmides, who is now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, came to give a talk at MIT. She’s a prominent evolutionary psychologist, and she started talking about the mind and language from an adaptive point of view. When we met later, I said,

“This is ridiculous!” I responded to her with the Stephen Jay Gould line, which I had totally been persuaded by years before. There was no reason to favor an adaptionist account of language (as opposed to the view that it was an evolutionary accident).

She was very civil and intelligent, and she said, “No, no, you’re mistaken.” And she convinced me that it made sense to apply an evolutionary analysis to mental life. Some things may be artifacts of biology, but there are good reasons to believe that something as rich and as complicated as language could have evolved by natural selection.

It was one of the rare case where an academic changes his mind. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that it made sense.

And then, at the same time, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, a colleague and friend of mine in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, published an article in
Cognition
on the evolution of cognition and language. His article presented in this very sharp, cogent fashion the Chomskyan view on evolution—basically he said that there was very little interesting to make of the connection between natural selection and cognition and that language has features that simply cannot be explained in terms of adaptation. I strongly disagreed with it.

 

At the time that the
Cognition
article appeared, it looked to Bloom as if everyone else agreed with Piatelli-Palmarini. “Back then if you didn’t independently have an interest in evolutionary biology or evolutionary theory, the arguments of Chomsky, on the one hand, and Gould, on the other, were very persuasive. Chomsky is the smartest guy in the world and the dominant figure in linguistics, and Gould is this lay saint, this wonderful writer and brilliant synthesizer. And they’re both telling you the same thing—that language didn’t evolve as a result of natural selection.

“You can’t underestimate the influence that Chomsky had,” said Bloom. “People believed this line partly because of the force of Chomsky’s personality. A linguistics friend of mine told me in all seriousness about what he called the C-principle. The idea is that if Chomsky believes something, then it makes sense to agree with him in the absence of other knowledge. Because, you know, he is a really smart guy.

“There was also something of an ideological taint about adaptionist explanations,” remembered Bloom. “It was a sort of a dark association with racism and sexism and the evils of biological determinism, and people were wary of being associated with that.

“So I approached Steve Pinker.” Bloom was acquainted with Pinker as a young professor in the psychology department who studied language.

 

I don’t know whose idea it was originally, but we discussed writing a response to Massimo’s article. We did not disagree with Massimo about his characterization of language. We did buy the Chomskyan party line that there was an innate, mental language organ. But we disagreed about evolution.

So I wrote up this little thing. It was five pages long, something like that. It was very drafty. And I gave it to Steve, and he came back to me with this thirty-page thing. It was monolithic and far more ambitious than the paper I had written. At that time neither of us knew much about evolutionary biology or the issues in detail, and so we were both reading up on it. Trying to keep up with Steve when he’s acquiring new knowledge was a difficult task. At that point, it definitely became “Pinker and Bloom,” not “Bloom and Pinker.” Steve was the dominating intellectual force here.

 

Stephen Jay Gould, whose line Bloom had taken with Leda Cosmides, was at the time an intellectually flamboyant and highly influential evolutionary biologist. He was based at Harvard as the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, and he believed passionately in spreading the word about evolution. For years he wrote essays for
Natural History
magazine, many of which had been collected into popular books like
Bully for Brontosaurus
and
The Lying Stones of Marrakech.

Gould’s
Natural History
column was widely read within the academic community, and his books sold extremely well to both specialist and popular audiences. He wrote with enormous verve about the lessons and mysteries of evolution, ranging from the subtleties of natural selection, “the wriggles of a million little might-have-beens,” to faked fossils, racism in science, and the most singular minds of scientific history.

The “Stephen Jay Gould line” was that scientists were too quick to apply evolutionary explanations to everything. Some features of our lives did not result from adaptation, he argued, but are just accidental by-products of other evolutionary changes. Gould called these biological artifacts “spandrels.” As he explained:

 

Since organisms are complex and highly integrated entities, any adaptive change must automatically “throw off” a series of structural by-products—like the mold marks on an old bottle or, in the case of an architectural spandrel itself, the triangular space “left over” between a rounded arch and the rectangular frame of wall and ceiling. Such by-products may later be co-opted for useful purposes, but they didn’t arise as adaptations. Reading and writing are now highly adaptive for humans, but the mental machinery for these crucial capacities must have originated as spandrels that were co-opted later, for the brain reached its current size and conformation tens of thousands of years before any human invented reading or writing.
¹

 

Throughout his career, Gould stressed the ways in which the human species was a glorious accident. The wonder of evolution, he emphasized over and over, was that it was “an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity.”
²
In life, there is only forward motion, just the drive to keep driving. At some point in the past, Gould believed, our brains evolved to a level of complexity that would enable us to reason our way through certain situations, and at that level we had the structures for language already in place. In a sense, language simply “happens” when you have a machine complex enough to accommodate it. So rather than language being selected, we lucked into it, and it wasn’t part of what initially made us successful as a species—even though now it’s essential to our existence.

In 1997 Gould gave a talk at Iowa State University. It was one of probably hundreds he presented as one of the century’s most ardent popularizers of evolutionary theory. And it went, no doubt, as most of those talks did. Gould, short and remarkably loud, spoke with vigor about evolution. After his speech, he spent a lot of time answering questions about evolution and equal amounts of time batting away the creationists who had come to bait him. When someone asked about the evolution of language, he was uninterested, even a little annoyed by the question. He waved his hands about and said, “It’s probably a spandrel.”

Steven Pinker was thirty-five years old in 1990. A decade earlier he had completed his Ph.D. thesis in an unusually short amount of time. He was hired by Harvard in 1980, and was lured to Stanford in 1981, only to be lured to MIT in 1982. Pinker began to work there on regular and past-tense forms of verbs and how children acquire them. When Paul Bloom approached him, he had not thought a lot about evolution, but he eagerly dove into the research. “I was motivated,” he said, “by the feeling that there was a premature consensus from two charismatic figures who did not have a sensible argument.”

“On the one hand, there was the Gould-inspired consensus that we were questioning. And the thing about Gould was that his views were not mainstream within evolutionary biology though people outside the field were not aware of that. And there was also the Chomsky viewpoint.” He continued:

 

It’s by no means the case that everyone in child language acquisition or cognitive science in general is a Chomskyan. He’s a deeply divisive figure. But there are large sectors that are in almost religious thrall to him. If he says it, it must be true, and if you disagree with him, then you must misunderstand. Non-biologists even get their evolutionary biology from Chomsky’s footnotes. I remember Chomsky made a throwaway mention in a footnote of an argument by a mathematician and an engineer that natural selection could not work. It was a back-of-the-envelope calculation, whose flaws were immediately pointed out by biologists, and no one but Chomsky ever took it seriously again.

 

Pinker is now back at Harvard. His suite on the ninth floor of William James Hall is airy, spacious, and clean. The walls are lined with books, and a large table with room for six, as well as space in the middle for one-on-one discussions. Against the wall near a large window is Pinker’s desk, and on it a brass statue, the Emperor Has No Clothes Award, from the Freedom from Religion Foundation. At the other end of the room, behind a sliding whiteboard, is a brain in a jar. Pinker himself, apart from the famous flop of curls seen in his many author photos, is contained, his comments brief and well measured.

As a first-year student Pinker had cross-registered for a course at MIT taught by Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor. When he became a professor at the school, he attended a few lectures Chomsky gave, but he never worked directly with him. “Although in the grand scheme of things I’m probably closer to Chomsky than many people in cognitive science,” he said, “I’m not part of the cult of personality that has grown around him.” Pinker is now the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. In response to a question about why people were so willing to take one of the most fundamental questions about language—how it evolved—on faith, he replied, “There were a few reasons. Chomsky was a well-known left politician, and people perceived sociobiology, as it was then called, as right-wing. Truly, it doesn’t need to be seen that way.

“Also, academics are lazy. They are unwilling to make their discipline rigorous in terms of the standards of another discipline, and that’s how it was with evolution and cognitive science for a long time.”

After a few months Pinker and Bloom wrote their paper up for the MIT Occasional Papers series. These technical reports are circulated throughout the university and sent to interested individuals outside it as an opportunity for researchers to get commentary from their peers.
³
In it they wrote: “Noam Chomsky, the world’s best known linguist, and Stephen Jay Gould, the world’s best known evolutionary theorist, have repeatedly suggested language may not be the product of natural selection but a side-effect of other evolutionary forces such as an increase in overall brain size and constraints of as yet unknown laws of structure and growth.” As a result, they said, “in many discussions with cognitive scientists, we have found that adaptation and natural selection have become dirty words.”
⁴

Pinker and Bloom continued with an appeal to rationality. “In one sense our goal is terribly boring,” they wrote. “All we argue is that language is no different from other complex abilities, such as echolocation or stereopsis [the visual process that gives rise to depth perception], and that the only way to explain the origin of such abilities is through the theory of natural selection.”
⁵

An e-mail exchange between the two authors and Chomsky ensued. In his e-mail, Chomsky made a series of unambiguously clear statements about the evolution of language. He said that he was not at all opposed to the idea that language evolved—of course it did—and that many parts of it were adaptive for communication. But he had great reservations about whether what he and serious linguists called language—the unique mental syntactic component—originated in the act of communication. He reiterated that there were factors in evolution other than natural selection, which were as likely to be significant. And in this regard, Chomsky, Pinker, and Bloom were essentially in agreement, their debate arising more from differing emphases than actual discord. Pinker and Bloom were still generativists at heart, and their goal was to discover where evolutionary theory and generative grammar were compatible. They also said that natural selection couldn’t explain everything about the evolution of language. Yet they questioned how much “as yet undiscovered theorems of physics” would explain language’s intricate design. In their e-mail to Chomsky, they wrote, “No matter what the constraints are on how you can grow a fin in a biological system, you need an explanation as to why fish have them and moles don’t.”

Certainly, the researchers also disagreed on fundamental issues, if not about what the key aspects of language were, then about how much they mattered in evolution. Though they concurred that language was indeed used for communication, they differed on how much this mattered for natural selection.

Ultimately, they disagreed most in what they felt the value of the debate was. On the one hand, Chomsky believed many of the relevant issues were either too trivial or too hard, and on the other, Pinker and Bloom claimed the study of language evolution was neither too mysterious nor too challenging to grapple with. It was, instead, a productive and scientifically valid endeavor.