The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

by Christine Kenneally

Technology and wide-ranging discussion are not the only factors that will aid the next big leaps in understanding. Much of the impetus will come from the fact that a generation of scientists has broken free from the iron grip of some old ideas, while other notions that were once regarded as radical, or at least unpopular, have spread into the mainstream in all branches of science. The notion that animals do not think—or that, if they do, it is completely and qualitatively different from human thinking—is finally dying, if not completely dead. This idea shaped research in many different fields for decades, both in a direct way and by scaring people off the topic for fear of looking foolish.

  The flip side of the animals-are-dumb belief is the idea that human thinking is boundless and that our language is infinitely expressive. Yet evolutionary theory, which tells us, first, that we are a particular type of creature, not an über-creature; second, that our brains are particular types of thinking machines, not all-purpose thinking machines; and, third, that although the structure of our language means we can be extremely creative, we are only as likely to express infinite meaning as we are to talk for eternity.

  No matter what their particular take is on complexity or innateness, most theories of language and evolution have one thing in common: they focus on what’s happened in the past up to the present. It’s an obvious frame of reference, but sometimes that focus gives the impression that the present is an eternal moment that will stretch forward into the future, with us—and language—remaining unchanged forever. Some scientists have even argued explicitly that we have stopped evolving.

  Certainly humanity is a powerful force of selection, both on other species and on ourselves. We have been manipulating the genomes of plants for thousands of years in agriculture, and we’ve been doing the same thing with livestock, as well as with dogs, cats, and other domesticated animals. The sheer weight of the human biomass and all of its accessories—its buildings, fields, roads, dams, and cell phone towers—affects the survival of other species by pushing them into smaller and smaller niches. We deselect the genomes of some animals, like the mammoth, by hunting them to extinction, and we pollute, poison, and inadvertently engineer the genomes of others—like fish whose DNA is corrupted by human estrogen in waterways. We introduce alien species into new environments, where they decimate local populations or rapidly evolve themselves in order to survive. Our use of pesticides and drugs induces the ultra-rapid evolution of resistant strains of bacteria and viruses. And of course we change the natural history of the human genome with the mass production of food, medicine, and health care. Diseases and traumas that would otherwise kill us before we had a chance to reproduce can today be completely averted. Similarly, men and women who would otherwise not be able to conceive can now bear children with the assistance of reproductive technologies. In fact, a generation of children whose parents were among the first to undergo in vitro fertilization are now a far-flung group of young adults bearing their own children and spawning a generation that in another time could never have existed.

  Today humanity is tinkering inside the evolutionary machine itself, altering DNA directly. Normally, in the shuffle and flow of evolutionary change, no single genome occurs more than once—except, of course, when twins or other multiples are born. But in 2006 we cloned cats and dogs for the first time, and these animals were just the latest in a growing list. No one can reasonably expect that a cloned human is far off. We’re also tinkering with the ways genes express themselves in individuals. The intent behind this science is not just to head off illness but, for some researchers, to bioengineer designer human beings.

  While all living things affect the evolution of other living things simply by virtue of trying to stay alive, humans interact with the biological evolution of other species in a much more complex and powerful fashion because of one ability: language. Nothing occurs on the human scale without language. No language means no agriculture, no animal farming, no science.

  Still, as fascinating and unprecedented as this moment in the history of life on earth is, it is only a single point in time. We tend to assume that our current evolutionary stage is the inevitable endpoint of some natural drive to complexity and intelligence, but now is merely an arbitrary instant. The future stretches out before us, and, as the saying has it, it’s going to go for a lot longer than the past. As far as our species is concerned, this “modern” era may well be the dawn of time. Certainly, the fossil record reveals that anything can and does happen. Ice ages, meteors, killer viruses, and tsunamis occur and recur, and these are only the most dramatic and obvious events that can alter the course of a species—either by selecting some genomes over others or by extinguishing them entirely. The only real measure of success on this planet remains what it has always been: not language, but life. Our species survives. And every other type of animal that doesn’t possess human language but still exists, by definition, also survives. The notion that we may have halted evolution or stopped evolving ourselves is just another version of the seductive but empty idea that we have control over our destiny, either as individuals or as a species.

  In 2005 scientists published the results of a number of experiments that indicated that humans are still evolving. In one case, a team of geneticists led by Bruce Lahn at the University of Chicago offered proof that the human brain has been continuously evolving since Homo sapiens first appeared. The scientists looked at two genes known as microcephalin and ASPM, both of which are known to contribute to brain growth.2 (They are also expressed in other tissue in the body.) The geneticists sequenced DNA from a collection of human cells that represents the variation in our species, and they found that one variation of each gene, called an allele, occurred with particularly high frequency. The fact that the alleles seemed to occur more than normal genetic drift would allow suggests that they have been actively selected over time. The scientists believe that the frequent allele of microcephalin appeared around thirty-seven thousand years ago and the frequent allele of ASPM appeared only fifty-eight hundred years ago. It’s not known what effect these versions of these genes have, or why they were selected. They could have shaped cognition, as Lahn argues. Other scientists suggest the genes could have had some other effect on the brain that doesn’t directly impact thought.

  At the same time that Lahn’s results were published, another team of scientists based at the University of California, San Diego, announced the discovery of a positively selected gene called SIGLEC11 that is expressed in brain cells called microglia. Although they can’t yet explain the effects of the gene, it is interesting because it is one of the very few found only in humans and not in our ape cousins. This could make it a candidate for explaining some of the differences between us and them.

  Another direct case study of natural selection at work in humans today is an experiment carried out by scientists in Sweden. The study showed that a chromosome with a particular arrangement known as an inversion is positively selected for in the people of Iceland. The inverted form is one of two possible arrangements of the chromosome, and it occurs rarely in other human groups (hardly ever in Africans and virtually never in East Asians). Nevertheless, it is carried by 20 percent of the population of Iceland, and the women who carry this particular form of chromosome have more children than those who do not.3

  The two possible arrangements of the Iceland study chromosome are known as H1 and H2, and they are thought to have split from the original chromosome three million years ago. As findings like these accumulate, they reveal not only that evolution has not stopped but that we are necessarily creatures of time. We could never have existed in our current form three million years ago—and if the evidence for ASPM is correct, we didn’t even exist in the same form only ten thousand years ago. From gene to chromosome to different kinds of gene expression, human beings are as changeable as all that. In a 2006 study, the geneticist Jonathan Pritchard and his colleagues at the University of Chicago announced that there were at least seven hundred regions of the human genome that had clea
rly undergone positive selection in the last five thousand to fifteen thousand years. Some of the genes affect taste, smell, digestion, and brain function. It is thought that some of these changes resulted from the pressures involved in moving from a hunting-gathering lifestyle to a more agriculture-based one.4

  Not all change is good. As much as language enables us to control nature and keep our environments stable, it also makes possible the dramatic altering of our environment in unexpected and dangerous ways. The same language skills that promote technological innovations like water irrigation, road building, and air-conditioning also produce the ozone-destroying pollution and countless other ecological dangers of the modern age. Any of these phenomena could result in a sharp left turn for the human genome. And perhaps the same linguistic skills that give us science, and currently some control over DNA, will lead to our own extinction in less obvious ways. Language and material culture have greatly increased the mobility of the world’s population, and some researchers believe that this will lead to an unhealthy and irreversible diminishing of variation in our genome. As more and more humans breed across the boundaries of genetic variation, we become a blander, more homogeneous bunch than our diverse parent groups. This could be a problem because variation is important to the evolutionary health of a species, for the more we are the same, the easier it is for one single thing to make us extinct. Indeed, some genetic variants of the human species are disappearing altogether as small indigenous groups die out.5

  Freeman Dyson, a well-known writer and retired professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, argues that one day in the not too distant future, biotechnology will become widely available to all. Gardeners will use do-it-yourself kits to engineer the plants of their dreams, and hobbyists and animal lovers will directly tinker with the genome of their favorite animal. Dyson thinks that children will also have access to toy genetic kits in much the same way his generation played with Erector sets. “When teenagers become as fluent in the language of genomes as they are today in the language of blogs,” he writes, “they will be designing and growing all kinds of works for fun and profit.”6

  Is it possible that even if we have not stopped evolving, language itself has?7 Mainstream linguistics assumes that language has hit a steady state, and that even if words and phrases appear and disappear—indeed, even if there is a change in the way fundamental roles like actor and object are marked—language remains essentially the same. And yet the linguistic landscape appears to be a rapidly changing one. Today there are about six thousand languages in the world, and half of the world’s population speaks only ten of them. English is the single most dominant of these ten. British colonialism initiated the spread of English across the globe; it has been spoken nearly everywhere and has become even more prevalent since World War II, with the global reach of American power. Currently about 400 million people have been born to speak English, and another 430 million have learned it as a second language. (It is the most popular language for students of a foreign tongue.) But even its commanding dominance doesn’t mean English will always be the world’s most spoken language, and experts even doubt that it will be the chief language of the near future.

  It’s not yet possible to say which of the large and complicated currents that move through the world’s languages are indicative of evolutionary change or just change. Within languages, some linguists see signs that evolution is afoot, such as John McWhorter, who argued persuasively that all languages are not the same because they are not equally complex. Perhaps this is the kind of variation that future moments in evolution will act upon?

  Linguists who take a functionalist approach to grammar argue that the complexity of a language is shaped by the needs of its speakers rather than an innate grammar module. It is these relatively universal forces, they say, that mean some languages are more or less complex than others. This implies that grammatical structures arise in a language only as required by its speakers. Joan Bybee describes how languages that are historically and geographically unrelated undergo syntactic change in very similar ways—for example, verbs meaning “want” or “go” may become future tenses (as in English, “wanna,” “gonna”), and the numeral “one” can turn into an indefinite article (as in English “a/an,” German “ein/eine,” French “un/une,” and Spanish “un/una”).

  A pure functionalist would find little that is linguistically innate in humans, while an extreme nativist position finds almost everything innate. Taken as a whole, the data presented in this book support neither end of the continuum. Instead, they are compelling evidence that human specialization for language exists, and that forces that have often been neglected, such as the needs of speakers to communicate and indeed the need of a language to survive, contribute to the dynamic character of human language and to evolutionary change.

  Extinction is as fundamental to the big evolutionary picture as survival, and certainly the extinction of languages continues all over the world. As human groups perish or shift cultural and political allegiances, their languages die too. The world loses one of its six thousand languages every two weeks, and children have stopped learning half of the languages currently spoken in the world. It’s been argued that languages are under greater threat than any endangered bird or mammal.8 Whether or not it’s moral to let language extinction occur, it is the case that languages are irreplaceable records of the development of human societies and alternate windows into the human mind. When a language dies, we lose the knowledge that was encoded in it. Though we assume that when knowledge is lost, it has been superseded by a superior version, a dead language, with all its unique ways of carving up the world, is as irreplaceable as the dodo and the Tyrannosaurus rex.

  Unfortunately, even if we, and our languages, are still evolving, we still don’t know where we are heading. Things will probably remain unchanged for quite some time, and then…they won’t.

  Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the end of the world in Galápagos. In the novel a global disaster kills off most of the human species, but one small group survives, washed up on the Galápagos Islands. As time passes, evolution works its magic on the survivors’ descendants, and traits that are not conducive to survival are inevitably superseded by those that are. In Vonnegut’s brave new world, big brains are no longer an advantage, but a sleek, powerful swimming body is, and Homo sapiens end up seal-like and simple.

  Vonnegut exposes the assumption that if we do change biologically, we typically think we will end up smarter in the terms in which we consider ourselves smart today.9 But to survive means only that we’ll be smart in the context of the environment we find ourselves in. If we continue to exist, we will by definition be smarter than the versions of us that did not survive, but that intelligence won’t necessarily be comparable to what we have today.

  At least individually, we do know where we are going: you and everyone you know are going to die. For this awareness, you can thank language. Talk about spandrels.10 The same linguistic structures that allow us to soar through time and space and model entire universes in our heads also enable us to foresee our own mortality. Language also permits us to imagine a self that isn’t earthbound and a world beyond death. So far it hasn’t offered a way to avoid it.

  Scientists typically offer up the wondrous metaphysical architecture we build with language as a consolation for our mortality. We may not be here for long, but because we have language, we can understand the way that the cosmos spins and twists back on itself, we can see the scintillating and sticky interplay of all the particles of existence, and we can work out the way that small evolutionary changes build steam and spread throughout a population, cascading through a species, funneling it through particular environments, over pressure humps, and around the threat of extinction, along the way turning it into another species entirely.

  Awareness of our impending death seems to be an artifact of language’s reaching a certain stage of complexity. Now we are coming to another realization about langua
ge and our species that may be the seed of an equally profound idea. We have believed for a long, long time that language is a monolithic thing. But all the evidence reported in this book argues that it is not. The bottom line is that language is not how we intuitively think of it. As Terrence Deacon says, language is not language in the way the Lego is Lego. Lego is Lego all the way through, but language, which we experience as an integrated whole, is instead a bitsy pile of stuff, some parts ancient and others less old.11

  It turns out that the same can be said about us—neuroscience indicates that individuals are no more unitary or whole than language is. We think of ourselves as single creatures, but as individuals and as a species we are assemblages of traits, features, and experiences, and these all shift in relative importance in different contexts. Certainly, language is fundamental to our identity. It shapes who we are in ways that are irreversible, and there is no going back to who you were before you were taught to speak. But if we weren’t taught, we would never speak. As evolution works upon us, it may choose to elaborate parts of ourselves that we don’t really see or elements of behavior that we don’t regard as separable from the rest of us. In this way, our descendants might become unrecognizable to us. There is only so much destiny in our genome—life arises when DNA and the world wind together, and that’s not in our control.

  Think back now to the worldwide language web. Imagine all the language networks, parent to child, that extend from the present back through time. It’s small wonder that humans dream in myth and in art about other worlds, because we all have the experience of inhabiting one world and, as we are taught language, of walking through a door into another. Even physicists are obsessed with the idea of a multiverse. But we already live in one.

  Epilogue: The babies of Galápagos