And once that had happened, there seemed no limit to what could be accomplished. With the full force of a symbolic-syntactic language at its service, our species began to turn out novel artifacts. Slowly at first, since there are many steps that can’t be taken unless they’re preceded by certain other steps.
That’s a part of what explains the apparent time lag between the emergence of the human species and the flowering of creativity that occurred when that species arrived in Europe. But only a part; there’s also the fact that what looks like the Great Leap Forward is largely a sampling error. The vast majority of archaeological sites so far investigated lie inside Europe; as more and more African sites are opened up, the picture changes, and human innovations appear at earlier and earlier dates. And there’s a third, perhaps even more potent factor involved.
Humans tend to embody contradictory traits. We are highly cooperative yet highly competitive. We are strongly innovative yet staunchly conservative. It’s the second contradiction that applies here. There’s a strong tendency to hold on to what we know, to fear change rather than desire it. And remember, biological developments don’t mandate new behaviors—they merely make them possible. Whether those possibilities are exercised is a matter of choice, entirely up to us.
“War is the locomotive of history,” Trotsky said. Just as World War II called forth all the energy and ingenuity of the English and Americans, so did the conflict with a species of almost equivalent abilities—the Neanderthals—call forth all the energy and ingenuity of the Cro-Magnons. That, rather than any mutation, any sudden surge in capacity, is most likely what accounts for the Great Leap Forward.
After that, the construction of new niches developed at an unprecedented rate. First the herding niche, then the agricultural niche, finally the industrial niche, as humans struggled to adapt the world to them-selves—first controlling other animals, then plants, then energy and matter themselves. Was there no limit?
Of course there was. Of the types of niche construction that John Odling-Smee and his colleagues described, one was negative niche construction. By exhausting the capacity of a niche, or by choking on the debris caused by construction, a species could construct itself into extinction. How close to that we’ve already come is anyone’s guess.
But in the process humans set in motion, a stranger fate lurked.
FROM APE TO ANT?
Imagine the following scenario.
You’re looking at a split screen, with different videos showing simultaneously on each side. The video on the left shows an anthill with its top removed so as to reveal the network of tunnels beneath, and the ants moving to and fro along those tunnels. The video on the right, taken from a much greater height, shows a human city with its network of streets, and the humans moving to and fro along those streets. What you see in each is a multitude of small dark objects moving constantly and rapidly around, seemingly at random, with no apparent purpose but yet with a vigor and intensity that reeks of purposeful action. What are they all doing, you wonder?
I can think of no comparable display, featuring two species as phylogenetically remote from each other as we are from ants, where the images on the two screens would so closely resemble each other. Is this just a freakish accident, or does it contain within it some deep and disturbing truth?
Ants have already cropped up in our story. Adoption of an antlike form of subsistence—the scavenging of carcasses far larger than ourselves—seems likelier than any other proximate cause to have given rise to the birth of language. But as we developed, more and more aspects of our existence came to resemble those of ants.
Our numbers increased to antlike size. From the few hundred thousand, or maybe million or two—typical mammalian-species numbers—who inhabited the earth less than a thousand lifetimes ago, our population ballooned, with ever-increasing speed, to numbers that before had been achieved only by insects. Just as ants domesticated aphids, pasturing them on plants, stroking them until they exuded fluids, so did we domesticate cattle, pasturing them on grass, milking them. Just as ants prepared beds, planted spores, brought in plant food, and harvested the resulting fungi, so did we prepare fields; plant seeds; fertilize, compost, and manure them; and harvest the resulting cereals and other crops. Just as ants built enormous underground cities, so did we build enormous aboveground cities. Are all these things merely coincidences?
Of course not. Niche construction processes determine the kind of occupations a species will follow and the kind of society it will have to live in as a result. Whether the niche is created slowly, by instinct, over millions of years or (in part at least) by cultural learning over mere thousands makes no difference. The niche makes the difference. The only question is, are we through yet, or is it still changing us?
Nonsense, the humanist answers. We’re free, independent souls, above the laws that rule the rest of creation. Poppycock, says the orthodox biologist. We’re just a species of primate, full of those good old primate genes—a gentrified ape, true, but one still too ornery to succumb to an ant fate.
Wait a minute. There was a time when ants too were free-roving organisms. It happened to them; why can’t it happen to us? The degree of social control under which we already labor would have been both incomprehensible and intolerable to our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. Why is it, do you suppose, that when a hunter-gatherer group is sucked into the vortex of “civilization,” so many of its members seem to undergo a kind of spiritual death, quickly falling victim to drugs, alcohol, irrational violence, or suicidal despair? Think about it.
And think about this: for ten thousand years, ever since cities and government began, we have been selecting against the most independent, individualistic members of our species. Rebels, revolutionaries, heretics, criminals, martyrs—all those opposed to the current norms of society—have been systematically imprisoned, exiled, murdered, or executed throughout the last hundred centuries. Since the vast majority died young or spent their procreative years in monosexual jails, their contribution to the human gene pool has been negligible. But the passive, the compliant, the loyal, the obedient—they prospered like the green bay tree, spreading their seed far and wide. Has this really had no effect on human nature?
I used to think, in common with most people, that (apart from oddities like lactose tolerance or sickle-cell anemia) evolution in the human species was effectively over. In the last few years we’ve learned that this is not the case. Evolution is proceeding, genes are changing, in ways we still can’t fully understand. By the time we understand them, the damage may have been done. It doesn’t take many generations to turn a wolf into a dog.
Already there have been signs and portents. During the past couple of thousand years, caste systems—systems like those of ants, where an individual’s occupation and fate are predestined at birth—have come into existence in many parts of the world, most strikingly in India. To most of us, caste systems are just quaint and rather repellent aberrations, quirks of history swamped now in a rising world tide of democracy. I’m inclined to suspect that this view may be dangerously optimistic. They may instead be better seen as trial runs, premature precursors of what is to come once the last few kicks in our ape nature have been eliminated.
At least, that’s something worth starting to think about.
There is one consolation. The path of runaway niche construction moves with a powerful current, but not necessarily an undivertable one. The very notion of niche construction asserts the autonomy of the organism, the power latent in species to influence their own destiny. Our niche gave us language, language gave us intelligence, but only the wise use of that intelligence can keep us free and fully human.
* Under pressure from the above argument, generativists such as Luigi Rizzi have moved to a weaker definition of recursion: “Any process that takes the output of one step as the input to the next.” If we accept this definition, Merge itself becomes a recursive process. But then so are many behaviors regularly produced by nonhuman species�
��for example, birds building nests (step one, interweave two twigs; step two, weave a third twig into the original two; step three, weave a fourth twig into the preceding three . . .). Generativists thus find themselves in the following dilemma: they must either accept the first definition and admit that recursion plays no part in syntax, or accept the second and admit that no part of syntax is unique to humans.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
3 gestures hearing people use: Frishberg 1987, Torigoe and Takei 2002.
5 Look up “human being”: www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/275376/human-being.
5 “If it be maintained”: Darwin 1871, p. 330.
6 the psychologist Eric Lenneberg: Lenneberg 1967.
6 “the hardest problem in science”: Christiansen and Kirby 2003.
8 I have written elsewhere: Bickerton 2008.
8 “human animals”: Penn et al. 2008.
9 flight in insects: Pringle 1975, Sane 2003.
10 “Adaptation is always asymmetrical”: Williams 1992.
10 “selfish gene”: Dawkins 1976.
10 just too many things: Johansson 2005, especially chapter 11.
10 the “primate-centric” approach: Pepperberg 2005.
11 But that environment: Odling-Smee et al. 1996, 2003.
13 people who talk about “precursors”: e.g., Pollick and de Waal 2007, Hurford 2007.
1: THE SIZE OF THE PROBLEM
16 Marc Hauser published: Hauser 1996.
17 the earliest ethologists: Lorenz 1937, Tinbergen 1963, Krebs 1991.
18 the sounds chimps make: According to Michael Wilson (www.discoverchimpanzees.org/activities/sounds_top.php), “The precise number of call types is difficult to determine, since many calls grade into one another, producing intermediate forms”—something that is never the case with words.
19 Now researchers have found: Cheney and Seyfarth 1990.
19 As Darwin long ago: Darwin 1871.
20 the whites of our eyes: Tomasello 2007.
20 “imagine what might happen”: Pinker 1994, p. 333.
24 ranges overlap: Wilson 1972.
24–25 chimpanzees: Gardner and Gardner 1969, Terrace 1979; gorillas: Patterson and Linden 1981; bonobos: Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1986, Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin 1994; orangutans: Miles 1990; bottlenose dolphins: Herman et al. 1984, Herman and Forestell 1985; African gray parrots: Pepperberg 2000; sea lions: Schusterman and Krieger 1984.
26 chimps on the Ivory Coast: Boesch and Boesch 1990.
26 the last common ancestor was: Chen and Li 2001.
26 when chimpanzees were observed: Boesch 1994.
26 social intelligence: Humphrey 1976, Povinelli 1996, Worden 1998.
26 “Machiavellian strategies”: Byrne and Whiten 1988.
27 “grooming and gossip” theory: Dunbar 1996.
29 female choice: Miller 1997.
29 if you trim a peacock’s tail: Alcock 2001, p. 348.
29 John Wilkes: Sainsbury 2006.
31 the harder a signal is to fake: Zahavi 1975, 1977. (For a critical view see Maynard Smith 1976.
33 “in order to survive”: Jablonski 2007.
33 three levels of intelligence: Macphail 1987.
35 the continuity paradox: Bickerton 1990, p. 8.
36 an engineering perspective: Hauser 1996, pp. 638–52.
2: THINKING LIKE ENGINEERS
38 pidgins and creoles: Bickerton 2008, Arends et al. 1994.
39 not necessarily a good model: Slobin 2001.
40 protolanguages: Westcott 1976.
40 a Broca’s aphasic: Goodglass and Geschwind 1976.
42 Diana monkeys: Zuberbühler 2002, 2005.
43 The vervets’ calls: Cheney and Seyfarth 1990.
45 “The Human Revolution”: Hockett and Ascher 1964, 1992.
47 An indexical sign: Peirce 1978, Deacon 1997, chapter 3.
49 marriage?!: Deacon 1997, pp. 402–407.
50 “probably not until Homo erectus”: ibid., p. 407.
50 “displacement”: Pearce 1997, p. 258.
52 An iconic sign: Armstrong 1983.
52 According to him: Deacon 1997, pp. 69–79.
3: SINGING APES?
55 popular works on human evolution: Morris 1999, Diamond 1992, McCrone 1992, Burling 2005.
56 “And yet it is”: Mithen 2005, p. 113.
57 In the Shadow of Man: Goodall and von Lawick 2000.
59 ACSs of bonobos and chimpanzees: Estes 1991, Pollick and de Waal 2007.
60 “food-peep” vocalization: Krunkelsven et al. 1996.
62 it appeared “probable”: Darwin 1871, p. 573.
62 “language was born”: Jesperson 1922, p. 434.
62 “musilanguage”: Mithen 2005.
62 a form of sexual display: Miller 1997, 2000.
62 Gibbons: Deputte 1982.
62 aquatic ape hypothesis: Morgan 1982.
63 several main functions: Geisemann 2000.
65 the idea of protolanguage: Bickerton 1990, chapter 5.
66 another highly appealing idea: Wray 1998, 2000, Arbib 2008.
68 there’d be the problem: Tallerman 2007, 2008.
70 Which presents a problem: Falk 2004.
71 In my commentary: Bickerton 2004.
4: CHATTING APES?
73 “strange creature . . . from Guiny”: Pepys 2000, p. 160
73 their chimpanzee Viki: Hayes and Nissen 1971
74 Wild Boy of Aveyron: Candland 1993
74 “the one great barrier”: Müller 1870
75 Clever Hans: Pfungst 1911
76 “Washoe learned”: Gardner and Gardner 1978, p. 73; “Apes appear”: Miles 1978, p. 114; “Koko has learned”: Patterson 1985, p. 1
78 Kanzi scored correctly: Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1993
81 Lana, an ape: Rumbaugh 1977
82 “Neurons that fire together”: Hebb 1949
84 a nice distinction: Számadó and Szathmáry 2006
85 Sea lions: Schusterman and Krieger 1984; dolphins: Herman 1986; parrot: Pepper-berg 2000
87 never say “higher” or “lower”: Darwin, cited in Mayr 1982, p. 367
88 their brains are configured: Jarvis and Mello 2000, Striedter 1994
89 ape research facility: www.iowagreatapes.org/index.php.
89 bonobos: de Waal 1988, 1995, 1997, Kano 1992.
5: NICHES AREN’T EVERYTHING (THEY’RE THE ONLY THING)
92 “Nothing in biology”: Dobzhansky 1964, p. 449
92 “Adaptation is always”: Williams 1992, p. 484
93 Beavers: Muller-Schwarze and Sun 2003
95 Lamarck: Packard 1901
97 98 percent of Swedes: Simoon 1969
98 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Dennett 1996. 98 niche construction theory: Odling-Smee et al. 2003
99 importance of behavior in evolution: Waddington 1969, Lewontin 1983, Dawkins 1982
99 “an animal’s behaviour”: Dawkins 1982, p. 233
100 “the ecological niche”: Odum 1959
100 earthworms: Lee 1985, Satchell 1983, Darwin 1881
103 “pernicious”: Dawkins 2004
104 Japanese macaque monkeys: Kawai 1965; Ivory Coast: Boesch and Boesch 1990
105 “While other species”: Bickerton 1990, p. 232
105 termites: Lüscher 1961, Abe et al. 2000; leaf-cutter ants: Wilson 1980.
6: OUR ANCESTORS IN THEIR NICHES
110 “Over time, genetic change can alter”: encarta.msn.com/text_761566394_1/human_ evolution.html.
110 FOXP2: Marcus and Fisher 2003
110 pleiotropic genes: Caspari 1952, Williams 1957
111 a very simple niche distinction: Wrangham and Peterson 1998; Estes 1991
112 the climate began to change: deMenocal 1995
112 australopithecines: Dart 1925
112 They had big teeth: Wolpoff 1973, Walker 1981
113 Man the Hunted: Hart and Sussman 2005
114 names are enough to induce fear: Carroll 1988, Turner 1997
&nbs
p; 114 the Taung child: Berger and Clark 1995
116 “functional reference”: Dittus 1984, Cheney and Seyfarth 1988, Hauser 1998
117 the overall drying trend: Reed 1997
118 ambush hunting: Chazan and Horwitz 2006
118 endurance hunting: Bramble and Lieberman 2004
120 Australopithecus garhi: Asfaw et al. 2000
120 bone marrow: Cordain et al. 2001
120 cutmarks made by primitive tools: Semaw et al. 2003
121 brains began to grow: Lee and Wolpoff 2003
122 the size niche: Case 1979
122 Nicholas Toth: Schick and Toth 1993
123 “Initially, the sight”: ibid., p. 166
123 “catchment scavenging”: Binford 1985, Ulijaszek 2002
123 “territory scavenging”: Binford 1985, Blumenschine 1991, Larick and Ciochon 1996
124 the African elephant: Species Survival Commission, African Elephant Specialist Group’s 2007 status report: data.iucn.org/themes/ssc/sgs/afeg/aed/aesr2007.html.
125 sequences of cut marks: Blumenschine 1987, Blumenschine et al. 1994, Monahan 1996, Domínguez et al. 2005
126 optimal foraging theory: Stephens and Krebs 1986, Schmitz 1992, Irons et al. 1986, Velasco and Millan 1998
127 Nathan Bedford Forrest: Catton 1971.
7: GO TO THE ANT, THOU SLUGGARD
128 an article coauthored: Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002
128 “Current thinking in neuroscience”: ibid, p. 1572
129 “evo-devo”: Goodman and Coughlin 2000, Carroll 2005
129 “Much that has been learned”: Mayr 1963, p. 609
130 the mouse and the fly: Müller et al. 1995, Thor 1995
131 ACS of bees: Frisch 1967; Gould 1976; Dyer and Gould 1983
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