The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (9 page)

The back-and-forth on the subject of the natural selection of language ran seventy pages: Pinker and Bloom’s original paper was twenty pages, thirty-seven pages of comments from thirty-one different sources followed, and Pinker and Bloom responded in thirteen additional pages.

Many commentators were delighted by the paper. Jim Hurford, a linguist at the University of Edinburgh, who had been interested in the area of language evolution for some years, was thrilled. “I felt freed,” he recalled, and aptly titled his reply “Liberation!” “Pinker and Bloom’s target article is deeply satisfying,” he wrote. “They correctly diagnose the consensus in linguistics and cognitive science, nurtured by the writings of Chomsky and Gould, that ‘language may not be the product of natural selection.’ Pinker and Bloom confront this stifling consensus head on.”

The overwhelming impact of Pinker and Bloom’s contribution stemmed not so much from the specific ideas about adaptation they proposed as from the stand they took against the idea that language evolution was an uninteresting or intractable subject. Working out the details of how language might have evolved remained a monumental task, but with their paper it was as if a door had been flung open. From that point on, more and more researchers felt that studying the origin and evolution of language was a legitimate academic inquiry. After a hundred years or so of uncomfortable silence, it had become intelligent, respectable, and interesting to wonder aloud how on earth we had come to be a species with words.

Influence isn’t easy to define in academia. It may be obvious that a person or his ideas are powerful, but it can be hard to prove beyond simply pointing out that everyone seems to accept them. A more specific, if incomplete, measure of influence is counting how many times a scholar’s papers are mentioned by other scholars in their own work. Yet another measure is the prestige of the journal in which the scholar publishes. (The influence of a journal is determined by how many times anyone cites papers it has published.) For instance,
Language,
the biggest journal in linguistics, has an Impact Factor (a measure of how often it is cited) of only 3.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
has a score of 15.6, making it a powerhouse. In the case of Pinker and Bloom, although it’s not possible to determine the relative contribution of all these factors, it’s clear that together they had an impact. Before their paper, relatively few books and papers were published on the topic. Since then, many books and more than one thousand papers have been published on language evolution.

Why did the paper have such an impact? There’s no guarantee that a clever, fascinating, and quite possibly correct academic article is going to be read. The products of science, like works of art, require intense focus and a lot of time to create, and then, typically, all but a few are ignored.

In part, the paper had the effect it did because of Pinker’s stature. “Finally,” Jim Hurford explained, “someone prominent, someone sort of in the Chomsky camp, someone generativist, was interested in language evolution.”

Pinker agreed, “I think people liked it possibly because I was coming from so close to the politburo headquarters—being at MIT, where Chomsky was, and also just down the street from Gould at Harvard. Many people saw the paper as coming from someone who had no ideological ax to grind against Chomsky. I’m often seen as Chomskyan, even though I disagree with him on many things. But I’m close enough that that statement was all the more attention-getting.”

Ironically, others were angered by the piece for the same reason—that Pinker was seen as an influential Chomskyan and yet he was disagreeing with Chomsky.

“Overall,” said Pinker, “some people were grumpy. I think they were disgruntled because we contradicted the official line. And there was one exceptionally long and sarcastic letter written in response to our paper that was withdrawn from publication.”

The language evolution paper also turned out to be a turning point in Pinker’s development as an academic, for it got him started in evolutionary psychology. About a year after it was published, he started to think about writing a book for nonspecialists. In 1994 he published
The Language Instinct,
a prizewinning account of language as a biological instinct that hit the bestseller lists.

Bloom also did well. The
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
piece, only the second paper he had published, drew a lot of attention, and at the time he was on the job market—a fortunate coincidence for any graduate student. Today Bloom is a professor at Yale and a successful author, as well as a coeditor of
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
.

After Pinker and Bloom, more and more people stopped asking, “Did language evolve?” and instead wondered, “How did language evolve?” Instead of being treated as an indivisible mystery, the problem of language evolution began to fracture into many good and answerable questions, like “What does gesture have to do with human language?” “How did categorical perception evolve?” “What’s the relationship between music and language?”

In addition to its political impact, Pinker and Bloom’s paper had the effect it did because they were writing about an idea whose time had come. Indeed, it was remarkable how many of the commentaries on their paper began with a remark like “Oh, how nice to see that Pinker and Bloom are now saying what I’ve been saying for twenty years. How nice that they agree with me.”

It’s true—while no one had previously enjoyed the attention that Pinker and Bloom got, a number of researchers had been toiling for years on the mystery of language and adaptation. By encouraging scholars to move beyond the Chomsky-Gould consensus, Pinker and Bloom not only inspired them to ask questions anew but created an opportunity for scholars to seek out earlier research on the topic and find out what had already been discovered beyond the borders of mainstream linguistic respectability.

B
ecause the light of evolution is not instantaneous or blinding, it is difficult to visualize the immensely slow and gradual change that is brought about by mutation and natural selection. When you consider a protozoan cell or an amphibian, on the one hand, and dolphins or, say, commuters, on the other, there is no intuitive way to make sense of the line that runs from one form of life to the next.

The popular cartoon of evolution, where an ape slowly unbends, straightens up, starts walking, and mutates into some form of modern-day human, is probably the easiest way to think about it. But as Stephen Jay Gould insisted, this caricature is misleading. Evolution does not follow the course of a single line. The tree of life bristles with stems, boughs, and branches. Most lines from one form to another are densely surrounded by branches leading to different species or to dead ends.

When it comes to the idea of language as an adaptation, the challenge of grasping evolution is further compounded by our inability to imagine ourselves without language. Language not only fills our lives, but we do our imagining, to a large extent, with language. Every now and then, we get a glimmer of what it might be like to exist without words. Sometimes there is a moment on waking when we are conscious but not self-conscious and our thoughts aren’t shaped by language. We are looking up at the ceiling or across the room, and the ceiling or the objects in the room are just there, as we are there. We’re awake but not much more. Is this what it’s like to be pre-linguistic?

In addition to the natural obstacles to imagining how language, or anything, evolved, the way language was defined by generative linguistics made its evolution seem even more incomprehensible. Although Chomsky forswore explicit discussion of the language evolution question, many scholars thought the answer was implicit in his model of language. Indeed, Chomsky spoke often of innateness, and when you invoke innateness, it’s hard not to make a few assumptions about genetics and evolution.

As a result, it seemed to many linguists and other cognitive scientists that the only way an innate universal grammar could exist, the only way humans could be born with a language organ, was if it was genetically endowed. The implication was that the language organ was specified in the genome, and generally it was assumed that there was a gene or genes specifically for language.

At the same time, Chomsky saw language as a perfect, formal system. So it appeared that a gene for this mathematical entity must have appeared out of nowhere with no precursors in other animals. This contributed to the widespread view that language evolution was impossible and language’s very existence was miraculous.

Although Pinker and Bloom helped considerably to challenge that belief, some researchers had been resistant to this idea even earlier—Philip Lieberman, for example. Although Lieberman was once a student of Chomsky’s, there is no interaction between them now. Both men are famously combative, and they have taken opposite positions on the subject of the evolution of language. In the 1980s and 1990s, while Chomsky expressed no interest in its study, Lieberman was examining skulls, listening to apes, and testing brains, all in search of clues to language’s origins. Lieberman argues that not only should you study language evolution, but you can’t even begin to understand language if you don’t start with evolution. His research is grounded in the basic tenets of messy biology. When you look at the problem through his eyes, it becomes harder to see language evolution as either mystical or impossible. Instead, it looks merely insanely complicated.

Lieberman was born to a family of idealists and fix-it types. Both his parents had gone to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to save the world, but after a few of their Russian friends disappeared in purges, they left. Still, Lieberman grew up with books like
The Commissar of the Gold Express
lying about the house in Brooklyn. (He suspects his mother remained a sympathizer.) Lieberman’s father, who learned his plumbing skills in the Soviet Union, ended up building highly classified plants for the atomic bomb project.

Lieberman himself completed a B.S. and an M.S. in electrical engineering at MIT in 1958, but after working on a few real-world projects for General Electric, he was bored with transistors and breadboards and decided to take a linguistics class. It was a low-key arrangement. There were only three other students, and the teacher handed out purple-ink ditto-machine copies of his notes on syntactic structures and transformations. The idea of transforming one syntactic structure into another by preordained steps had been around in linguistics, but in this class it was taken a step further. Transformations weren’t just notational devices, said the teacher, but actual operations of the mind. It was the first linguistics class that Noam Chomsky taught.

Lieberman, who was twenty-two years old, found the class exciting, for he liked language and was intrigued by the idea of using it to understand the mind. Despite his enjoyment, however, his path soon diverged from Chomsky’s. One day soon after his shift to linguistics, he wandered through the department—it was housed in a wooden building on campus where the first laser had been built—and was drawn by funny noises coming from a room off the hallway. He had heard the DAVO, one of the first speech synthesizers, and the engineer-turned-linguist became interested in how speech actually works.

He ended up writing his Ph.D. thesis (which eventually became the second book ever published by MIT Press) about how the physiology of breathing structures how we speak. Speakers make all sorts of muscular maneuvers in articulating words, and these are carefully controlled to make sure that the air pressure generated by their lungs stays at a steady level as they talk. Lieberman found that these maneuvers are keyed to the length of the sentence we
intend
to speak, showing that humans anticipate a long sentence before they utter a sound. The more he became engaged with these fundamental physical constraints on human language, the more he moved away from the abstract properties of language and toward all the things that Chomsky had dismissed as epiphenomena.

The problems of speech synthesis and voice recognition are far from solved today. When Lieberman began to wonder about speech, scientists were just beginning to get a glimmer of how complicated it was, and how enormously difficult it was to get a machine to either produce or understand speech. (One of the big differences between now and then is not that the problems have been solved but that researchers have come to appreciate the magnitude of the task.)

Once he started investigating the biophysics of speech, Lieberman only became more intrigued. The revelation that really shaped his future career came to him one night in the bath. After finishing his Ph.D., he got a job at the University of Connecticut, and one evening after work he lay in the tub, listening to WGBH. The presenter remarked that apes couldn’t talk, and this struck him as worthy of investigation. Why not?

Lieberman often traveled to New York to teach at Haskins Laboratories and started spending time at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Zoo. When he took his tapes of hours and hours of ape vocalizations back to the lab to analyze, he found that apes do not make the full range of human sounds. This, he discovered, was because of the physiology of their tongues.

The human tongue extends from the larynx, deep in the throat, to just behind the teeth. At points along its length it can change its shape. It can be moved up, down, forward, and back; it can be bunched up or extended, widened or curled. Whenever the tongue changes shape, the whole vocal tract is altered, and each different configuration results in a different sound. In contrast, the tongues of other apes lie mostly in their mouths. As a consequence, they don’t have the facility for generating as many specific sounds.

Lieberman also realized that even though there weren’t as many sounds in the ape repertoire as in human speech, there were enough for the creatures to make a decent stab at talking. Chimpanzees can make
m, b, p, n, d, t,
and a number of vowel sounds. For a nonhuman, this is not bad. Few other animals can get close—if you could transplant a human brain into, say, a horse’s head, it would not be able to speak human language, because its mouth and tongue could never make the sounds we do.

Where we differ from the chimpanzees is that they don’t selectively articulate these sounds and manipulate their sequence, as we do when, for example, we say “pie,” “my,” “buy,” “die,” “tie,” or “nigh.” It is as if they have the same vocal instrument—or at least one that is reasonably similar—but they just don’t use it in the same way.

If it was not the actual range of sounds produced by our respective vocal tracts that enabled us to speak but prevented apes from doing so, then, thought Lieberman, we must differ in our ability to control those sounds. This realization launched him on a quest to determine the connections between motor control and the higher levels of language. He quickly came to the conclusion that in order to truly understand language, you have to begin with biology, and—he is very fond of quoting Theodosius Dobzhansky, a famous evolutionary biologist who died in 1975—“nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.”

Lieberman’s first book,
The Biology and Evolution of Language,
was published in 1984. In it he argued against the popular notion that there was a “linguistic saltation”—that is, no single dramatic event gave birth to human language. The Chomskyan idea of an ideal speaker and hearer confused the origins of language rather than illuminated them he said. Instead, he proposed: “Human syntactic ability, in [my] view, is a product of the Darwinian mechanism of preadaptation, the channeling of a facility that evolved for one function toward a different one.”
¹
He cited Darwin’s discussion of the evolution of lungs from swim bladders: “The illustration of the swim bladder in fish is a good one, because it shows us clearly the highly important fact that an organ originally constructed for one purpose, namely flotation, may be converted into one for a wholly different purpose—namely respiration.”
²

Lieberman was not arguing, as he was careful to explain, that there was no uniquely human specialization for syntax. Rather, his point was that in the brain there was an overlap between the parts that control bodily movements and the parts that allow us to order thoughts and words in cognition and speech. This physical overlap had come about because of the way we had evolved, he said, first developing the ability to physically move our bodies in space and then, overlaid upon that, developing the ability to move words in abstract patterns.

All was peace and tranquility before the book, said Lieberman, but after its publication he and Chomsky fell out. For months, they argued back and forth, and then for the next eighteen years there was silence.

In 1990 Lieberman was invited by
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
to contribute one of the comments on Pinker and Bloom’s paper. He wrote, “It is refreshing to see Pinker and Bloom adopting some of the major premises of my 1984 book: (a) that human linguistic ability evolved by means of Darwinian processes, (b) that the biological substrate for human linguistic ability is subject to the constraints of biology, in particular variation, and(c) that data from psycholinguistics, anthropology, neurophysiology, and so forth, are germane. However, Pinker and Bloom still carry much of the baggage of the MIT School of Linguistics, in particular that guiding principle ‘Not invented here.’”

What he meant was that if research hadn’t been done at MIT, then, as far as MIT was concerned, it didn’t really exist. Clearly he was more annoyed than gratified.

Even though Lieberman, Pinker, and Bloom were all writing about language evolution, and even though they all agreed that any analysis of language needed to take biology seriously, there was at least one fundamental difference in their goals. Pinker and Bloom believed that Darwinian evolution and Chomsky’s universal grammar were compatible, and sought to prove both Darwin and Chomsky right. Lieberman, on the other hand, believed the incongruity between slow evolutionary change and an innate language-specific organ was irresolvable. Pinker and Bloom’s argument that universal grammar should and could take account of genetic variation was not acceptable, he said. In order to explore language evolution, you have to completely abandon the idea that humans are born with some kind of grammar device. It just wasn’t possible for both Darwin and Chomsky to be right.

What Chomsky had wrong about language, according to Lieberman, fell into a larger category of misunderstanding biology. Throughout history, he argued, the most complicated piece of current technology was often used as an analogy for the human body or brain. For example, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the brain was often thought of as a clock or a timepiece. It was imagined to be a telephone exchange in the early twentieth century. And from the 1950s onward, the brain was seen as a digital computer.
³

These metaphors, Lieberman explained, often take on a life of their own. In the early nineteenth century, for example, physicians likened the body to a steam engine. When early steam engines became hot, they would explode, unless safety valves were used to release the intensely heated pressure inside. By analogy, doctors of the time bled patients who had a fever in the belief that releasing blood would lower the body’s temperature.
⁴

The human mind-brain implied by Chomsky’s theory of language, Lieberman argued, was fundamentally based on the architecture and processes of a computer. In a computer, the central processing unit is a discrete device that generates output by algorithms. Random-access memory and hard drives are also modular mechanisms. The Chomskyan brain, similarly, has a localized language organ that generates syntax. Sound, structure, and meaning are constructed separately. And the language organ is separate from other parts of the brain, these parts also being separate from one another.