The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

by Christine Kenneally

  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.

  Before they launched their argument about adaptation and natural selection, the authors reiterated some important and, at the time, well-accepted facts about language. For example, as far as we know, humanity has always had language. There were no creatures that we would think of as effectively human, no highly organized societies of people that hunted, gathered, and nurtured their offspring through a long period of vulnerable infancy, without language.

  Additionally, pretty much everyone agrees that all languages are equally complex.6 English, the dominant language of the United States with its advanced technology, is no more or less complicated than the language of the Andaman islanders off the coast of India. Moreover, said Pinker and Bloom, Modern English is no more complex than the English of six hundred years ago. Anyone who’s tried to read Chaucer knows that Middle English is painfully different from today’s English, but even though it has undergone enormous change, our language is in no sense an improvement on Chaucer’s.

  Children, said Pinker and Bloom, master complicated grammars by the age of three without any formal instruction. They can make grammatical distinctions that no one has ever demonstrated for them. Once they have acquired language as adults, brain damage can severely affect their language but leave other mental abilities intact. Or it can happen the other way around, with rich and complex language skills continuing to exist in a brain that has trouble with other, simple tasks.

  They particularly emphasized that language is incredibly complex, as Chomsky had been saying for decades. Indeed, it was the enormous complexity of language that made it hard to imagine not merely how it had evolved but that it had evolved at all.

  But, continued Pinker and Bloom, complexity is not a problem for evolution. Consider the eye. The little organ is composed of many specialized parts, each delicately calibrated to perform its role in conjunction with the others. It includes the cornea, the transparent, dome-shaped tissue that covers the front of the eye and refracts light, and the colored iris, which, like the aperture of a camera, controls the amount of light that enters the eye. Exceedingly tiny muscles pull apart the opening of the iris—the pupil—or shut it down, depending on the amount of light hitting the eye. The lens, suspended by fine fibers behind the iris, adjusts its own shape, so that the eye can focus on objects that are very near or very far. And the retina, layers and layers of differently specialized tissue at the back of the eye, takes the light entering the eye and translates it into a biological signal that’s transmitted along the optic nerve to the brain.

  All of these tiny, perfect biological devices operate in brilliant conjunction with one another to produce vision. The paradox of the eye is that evolution occurs in extremely small steps, yet it makes no sense for an eye to have evolved piece by piece. A cornea wouldn’t begin to grow without the rest of the eye around it, and the same goes for all the other components. What about the vitreous humor, the goo that plumps the small globe up? Did it arrive with a sudden squirt, or did it inflate the eye slowly over time? It’s infinitely unlikely that some lucky creature was one day born from unseeing parents with a complete eye in its head. Even Darwin said that it was hard to imagine how the eye could have evolved.7

  And yet, he explained, it did evolve, and the only possible way is through natural selection—the inestimable back-and-forth of random genetic mutation with small effects and then the selection creatures with those effects by nature. It evolved to meet a specific need—vision. In the case of eyes, each time a small random change increased a creature’s ability to register signals from its environment, that ability meant that it was likelier to survive and have offspring, and then its progeny got to pass on those changed genes. Over the eons, those small changes accreted and eventually resulted in the eye as we know it.

  In the same way that the eye evolved to meet the need of seeing, said Pinker and Bloom, language evolved to meet the need of communication. The survival advantages of our kind of communication are as obvious and profound as the survival advantages of our kind of vision. Language enables us to learn from others. Humans don’t have to experience something directly to know that it’s either a good or a bad thing to do. If we have been warned about them beforehand, we can stay away from dangerous situations and move toward safer ones. The more we all get to share with one another, the more collectively we know.

  Because this talking network is so important, knowing what our interlocutors are feeling, thinking, and meaning is also pretty important to survival, and language is superb for interpreting the thoughts and feelings of others as well. Moreover, there are distinct advantages to evolving a language that uses sound as a medium. If you’re talking rather than, for example, signing, you don’t have to look at someone, you don’t even have to see him or be s
een by him; it could be the dark of night, you could be hiding behind a tree, and your hands and body would remain free to do other things.

  The kind of communication we specialize in, said Pinker and Bloom, is the production of propositions: “I am hungry”; “There’s a bear”; “You are cute.” And the communication of propositions is fundamentally connected to the channel in which it occurs—sound, from mouth to ear. This means that propositions occur one after the other, not all at once. Language is essentially serial.

  The building blocks of serial communication, they explained, are nouns and verbs and the rules of structure and sound with which we put them together. They allow us to talk about events, objects, places and times, agents and patients, our intentions and others’. Words and rules allow us to build complicated sentences from smaller ones, and they help us pick the right meaning in an ambiguous statement.

  Pinker and Bloom stressed again and again that even though what they were suggesting would be novel for cognitive scientists, it was not new for evolutionary biologists. All we are doing, they insisted, is applying the same kind of reasoning biologists apply when they discover complicated systems in other animals.

  Pinker and Bloom originally planned to send their paper to Cognition as a reply to the Piatelli-Palmarini article. “But very quickly it grew,” said Bloom, “and we decided to send it out as a freestanding article to Behavioral and Brain Sciences.”

  For Bloom, working with Steven Pinker was a thrill. “He was always understood to be a genius,” said Bloom.

  He has a reputation as a genius. But while there are a lot of smart people who are full of themselves and difficult to work with, Steve is a mensch—very intellectually generous and kind.