2. K. Zuberbühler, “A Syntactic Rule in Forest Monkey Communication.”
3. At the 2006 Rome Evolution of Language conference, Seyfarth joked that the size of an animal’s vocal repertoire is best predicted by how long a scientist has been studying its species.
4. The term “syntactic nuts” originated with Peter Culicover, professor and chair of linguistics and director, Center for Cognitive Science, Ohio State University.
5. S. Pinker, R. Jackendoff, “The Faculty of Language: What’s Special About It?” 15–16.
6. P.W. Culicover, R. Jackendoff, Simpler Syntax.
7. In addition, in the mainstream view idioms (where meaning is more than a combination of the separate meaning of the words: “She laughed her head off,” “He hit it out of the park,” “He had a cow”) would be considered peripheral, but Jackendoff believes that idioms and the special structural tools they offer are as important to language as basic ordering of words.
8. J. H. McWhorter, The Power of Babel, 188.
9. P.W. Culicover, R. Jackendoff, Simpler Syntax, 541.
10. E. Pennisi, “Speaking in Tongues.”
11. T.W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, 71. Especially important, says Deacon, is not to “underestimate what can be represented by non-symbolic means,” 397.
12. R. Jackendoff, Foundations of Language, 253.
13. D. A. Schwartz, C. Q. Howe, D. Purves, “The Statistical Structure of Human Speech Sounds Predicts Musical Universals.”
14. M. D. Hauser, J. McDermott, “The Evolution of the Music Faculty.”
15. At the 2002 Harvard Evolution of Language conference, Jelle Atema, a research fellow in the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, entertained attendees by playing a facsimile of a Neanderthal flute.
16. Motherese, or infant-directed speech, is characterized by lots of swings between high and low pitches, short statements, and repeated vowels. It is one of the few true universals in language; all humans do it the same way, no matter what language they speak. For this reason, motherese has been proposed as a candidate language fossil. Instead of analyzing it only as an adaptation to support a child’s comprehension, the linguist Elizabeth Peters at Florida State University says it’s plausible that motherese is a descendant of our ancestors’ proto-language. Steven Mithen, who wrote The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, advocates a return to ideas promoted by Rousseau, Darwin, and others; specifically, that modern language was preceded by a holistic, musical protolanguage. Says Mithen, this stage of linguistic evolution helps explain phenomena like the “inherent musicality of infants.” Robin Dunbar is another scholar who has written a detailed account of why language evolved with respect o music. In Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, Dunbar proposes that language evolved to facilitate social bonding. Interestingly, he proposes a stage where linguistic sophistication was preceded by group chorusing.
17. In a 2003 interview Trehub spoke about how, in addition to parents, groups like the Taliban understood the power of music. “Those in charge have always known the power of music, which is why they’ve sought to control it one way or the other,” she said. The Taliban banned music in Afghanistan, and in doing so, she explained, they removed the potential of others to stir the emotions of the population. In such emotion, a revolt could begin.
Chapter 10. You have a human brain
1. Except for the basal ganglia and a very small piece of the occipital lobe.
2. For all children who undergo hemispherectomy because of a seizure disorder, postoperative progress depends on many factors, including whether the seizures have been brought under control. In Lacy’s case, as happens sometimes for other children, a second operation was required to remove a small remaining piece of tissue that continued to cause seizures.
3. E. Bates, F. Dick, “Beyond Phrenology: Brain and Language in the Next Millennium.”
4. E. Bates, “Comprehension and Production in Early Language Development.”
5. S. Knecht et al., “Degree of Language Lateralization Determines Susceptibility to Unilateral Brain Lesions.”
6. P. Lieberman, “On the Nature and Evolution of the Neural Bases of Human Language,” 38. 7. Ibid., 38–39.
8. Ibid., 57–58.
9. Elizabeth Bates died in 2003.
10. E. Bates, “Construction Grammar and Its Implications for Child Language Research.”
11. E. Bates, F. Dick, “Language, Gesture, and the Developing Brain.”
12. E. Bates, F. Dick, “Beyond Phrenology: Brain and Language in the Next Millennium.”
13. E. Bates, “Comprehension and Production in Early Language Development.”
14. Using imaging to resolve questions about the online processing of tiny increments of language is a new and controversial field.
15. L. K. Tyler, W. D. Marslen-Wilson, E. A. Stamatakis, “Differentiating Lexical Form, Meaning, and Structure in the Neural Language System.”
16. W. D. Marslen-Wilson, L. K. Tyler, “The Lexicon, Grammar, and the Past Tense.”
17. The authors say, “[E]vidence for differentiation of function in the adult brain is in no way evidence per se against an emergentist view.”
18. K. D. Long, G. Kennedy, E. Balaban, “Transferring an Inborn Auditory Perceptual Predisposition with Interspecies Brain Transplants.”
19. Y. Kozorovitskiy et al., “Experience Induces Structural and Biochemical Changes in the Adult Primate Brain.”
20. S. L. Williams, K. E. Brakke, E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, “Comprehension Skills of Language-Competent and Nonlanguage-Competent Apes,” 314.
21. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, R. Lewin, Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind.
22. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, S. Shanker, T. J. Taylor, Apes, Language, and the Human Mind.
23. The relationship between the size of your brain and what you eat is a very interesting one. Said Lori Marino: “The species that are the most highly encephalized tend to be the ones that have a more complex dietary strategy, and hunting is a very complex dietary strategy, much more so than picking leaves off a tree. Even in primates, if you take two monkey species that are similar in many ways, but one is an insectivore and one is a foliavore, the insectivore will tend to be more highly encephalized. It could be that there is something about carnivory or, more generally, complexity in dietary strategy that requires a bigger brain. Eating leaves can be complex, depending upon the kind of information that you have to process about the leaves. Eating fruits can be complex. But eating other animals is probably the most cognitively demanding, because you have to process information about the changing behavior of another animal, and you can get into arms races where the prey changes because of the predator, and then the predator changes to match that—and it ratchets up. Being a hunter doesn’t mean that you’re going to develop a language but as a hunter you start having more complicated things to talk about…and if you have human language you’re probably going to be a carnivore not an herbivore.”
24. T.W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, 214.
25. C. Cantalupo, W. D. Hopkins, “Asymmetric Broca’s Area in Great Apes.”
26. E. Bates, F. Dick, “Language, Gesture, and the Developing Brain.”
Chapter 11. Your genes have human mutations
1. C. S. L. Lai et al., “A Forkhead-Domain Gene Is Mutated in a Severe Speech and Language Disorder.”
2. C. Knight, M. Studdert-Kennedy, J. R. Hurford “Language: A Darwinian Adaptation?” in The Evolutionary Emergence of Language, 5.
3. The notion of a language-specific gene echoes the idea from chapter 1 that a little speaker or linguist (a homunculus) is inside our heads and it generates and interprets language for us.
4. S. Olsen, Mapping Human History.
5. S. Wells, The Journey of Man.
6. This kind of gene is often connected with changes at the level of the whole organism.
7. W. Shu et al., “Altered Ultrasonic Vocalization in Mice with a Disru
ption in the Foxp2 Gene.”
8. T. E. Holy, Z. Guo, “Ultrasonic Songs of Male Mice.”
III. What Evolves?
1. With all due respect to Neal Stephenson, whose third book in the excellent, epic trilogy The Baroque Cycle is titled The System of the World. Stephenson’s book draws its title from the third volume of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, De Mundi Systemate (On the System of the World).
Chapter 12. Species evolve
1. In 1997, a team led by Svante Pääbo announced it had compared the mtDNA of a Neanderthal with a modern human. The two examples of DNA were so different that they suggest we are a completely different species. Keep in mind the whole genome would need to be compared for us to conclude fully that there is no Neanderthal DNA in the modern human genome.
2. A. Brumm et al., “Early Stone Technology on Flores and Its Implications for Homo floresiensis.”
3. Since the initial announcement of the Homo floresiensis discovery, there has been considerable controversy of the classification of this creature. Some scientists claim that hobbits were not our cousins in the way that Neanderthals were but that they are the ancient remains of essentially modern humans who were either pygmies (who are known to inhabit the islands) or who suffered from a disease that stunted their growth.
4. P. Mellars, “Why Did Modern Human Populations Disperse from Africa ca. 60,000 Years Ago?”
5. Ibid.
6. S. L. Salzberg et al., “Microbial Genes in the Human Genome: Lateral Transfer or Gene Loss?”
7. H. Teotónio, M. R. Rose, “Variation in the Reversibility of Evolution.”
8. R. Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale, 67.
9. Ibid., 75.
10. It is not clear whether average difference in DNA or expression difference is the more important. In fact, Pääbo and colleagues argued in a 2005 Science paper that it is a moot point—both phenomena have undoubtedly been important, and most expression differences go back to sequence differences in regulatory sequences or regulatory genes anyway.
11. M. Cáceres et al., “Elevated Gene Expression Levels Distinguish Human from Non-Human Primate Brains.”
12. In DNA, the four bases, A, G, C, and T, are always paired together. T is paired with A, and G is paired with C. There are approximately 3.2 billion of these base pairs in the human genome. Of these 3.2 billion base pairs, said Enard, only 5 percent carry information that’s relevant to the organism. Moreover, there is roughly 0.08 percent difference between all people, so we are all more or less equally related. (In contrast, any two individual orangutans differ much more from each other.)
13. An alternative possibility is that it resulted from the relaxation of a constraint—i.e., do other animals need it in the form they have and we don’t?
14. Another reason that it is tempting to look for a single genetic mutation to explain language and culture is that although we looked the same from about 150,000 years on, the behaviors that we recognize as modern do not appear to have sprung forth for a long time, another 100,000 years or so. Perhaps a mutation caused radical rewiring of the brain, and therefore changes in behavior and culture, without necessarily modifying our appearance? There are many reasons why this may not be the case. We may simply have not found the evidence showing that modern culture did begin to emerge around the 150,000-year mark. Moreover, we know that a number of mutations have taken place in this time frame, although we don’t currently have as much information about their effects as the effects of FOXP2. To say that any one genetic change is responsible for all of language and culture is to ignore our broad evolutionary platform.
Chapter 13. Culture evolves
1. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, R. Lewin, Kanzi.
2. K. J. Hockings, J. R. Anderson, T. Matsuzawa, “Road Crossing in Chimpanzees: A Risky Business.”
3. Hunting is probably one of the most baffling examples of complicated, coordinated animal behavior that occurs without the shared planning that takes place in language. Many animals hunt, including our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. How do pack animals act independently but together in the absence of the clear imperatives humans would issue? (Imagine a group of ten humans bringing down a rearing zebra without any verbal communication between them whatsoever.) Some researchers suspect that the “order” we observe in, say, a lion attack is an emergent outcome of individuals acting alone.
4. J. Mercader, M. Panger, C. Boesch, “Excavation of a Chimpanzee Stone Tool Site in the African Rainforest.”
5. J. Mercader et al., “4,300-Year-Old Chimpanzee Sites and the Origins of Percussive Stone Technology.”
6. Carel van Schaik, “Why Are Some Animals So Smart?”
7. John Locke and Barry Bogin explored the importance of life stages of the individual for language evolution. They identify four developmental stages that humans pass through before adulthood, and they link different functions of language to these stages. Only humans pass through all four stages; they are infancy (birth to three years), childhood (three years to approximately six), juvenility (sexual immaturity but independence of others for survival), and adolescence (sexual maturity). The result, say Locke and Bogin, is that the entire course of a human life in its many different phases (rather than, say, just infancy, adolescence, then adulthood) is essential for the evolution of language over time. One consequence of this is that tracking the origin of different life stages in the fossil record can reveal the course of language evolution. See J. L. Locke, B. Bogin, “Language and Life History.”
8. T.W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, 112.
9. Ibid., 110.
10. The opposite of a compositional utterance is a holistic one. Said Kirby: “In some sense, noncompositional language doesn’t even have words, or at least not meaningful ones. Compare the following (noncompositional versus compositional):
Hi versus I greet you Chutter versus I thought I saw a pussy cat Went versus walked Bought the farm versus Ceased to live” There is a related debate within the discipline about whether language may have first been holistic and then become compositional or whether it began as separate units that could be combined. It’s an interesting question for which there are no data.
11. Further research could show how complementary the two approaches are.
12. M. H. Christiansen, S. Kirby, Language Evolution, chapter 15.
13. Ibid., 277.
14. For more on emergent systems read Steven Johnson’s Emergence and Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control.
15. AIBO owners and researchers all over the world mourned in early 2006 when Sony decided to cancel production of the robot dog. The QRIO was canceled at the same time.
Chapter 14. Why things evolve
1. N. Chomsky et al., On Nature and Language.
2. T.W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, 184.
3. Ibid., 147.
4. Ibid., 224.
5. Ibid.
6. J. Diamond, P. Bellwood, “Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions.”
7. An odd but interesting line of inquiry into the prehistory of language is the work done on click speech sounds that are found in many African languages. Some researchers contend that clicks are extremely ancient in origin and that click languages of today all descended from one of the oldest, if not the first, human language. But there are many issues to be resolved, including the fact that much inspiration for looking at clicks in this way comes from a linguistic analysis carried out by Stanford linguist Joseph Greenberg. Greenberg grouped all click languages together into one language family, yet subsequent analyses have claimed there is little relationship between many of these languages. Greenberg’s classification of the world’s languages, which Luigi Cavalli-Sforza also used in his attempt to trace the history of languages and genes recounted in Genes, Peoples, and Languages, is regarded as highly controversial, if not flat-out wrong, by many linguists today.
The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language Page 37
