Insufficiently Radical

(Note: This post is the final one in a series of posts exploring the contents of Jean-Louis Dessalles' book, Why We Talk.  For a summary of what came before see Why We Talk: Summary.)

Yesterday’s post presented Dessalles position that we developed full, syntactical speech in order to check for inconsistencies in what speakers tell us. In so doing we could form coalitions of reliable allies. Today’s post discusses why I am not satisfied with that account.

I love Dessalles’ book, but when I got to the part that said “the biological reason for the existence of our sensitivity to cognitive conflicts is resistance to lying” (p 314) my mouth dropped. Besides the banality of the idea, it strikes me as hopeless to take a general purpose tool like speech and say this particular use is THE reason we got it. Anybody can say, Yeah? I always thought it was this other reason here.

Adding to the problem is the general human weakness at finding liars, especially when it comes to analyzing statements. Cross examination looks for details that go against the prevailing prejudices, leaving us to dismiss surprising truths that contradicts the old while accepting the most utter nonsense. Dessalles asserts that it is hard to get away with a lie and I assume he has some basis for his claim, but somebody must make a more persuasive case, one that takes into account the enormous amount of nonsense that people do believe, before I accept that the truth or falsity of remarks has been a (let alone the) central issue in the evolution of speech.

Dessalles is a bold iconoclast, smashing conventional wisdom like so many piñatas, but in the end he is insufficiently radical and he stays with the philosophical tradition holding that humans are rational intellectuals who speak from rational motives. At one point he dumbfounded me by saying that “speech motivated by emotion is infrequent in corpuses of recorded talk, which consist essentially of conversations on reported situations” (p. 288). Surely he cannot have gotten all of his corpuses by taping conversations of student philosophers in cafés.

Ever since Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene it has been evident that the human species constitutes an unusual case. We can certainly be a selfish, nasty group, but compared with what Dawkins described we are a mystery. Humans are far more altruistic than makes Darwinian sense, way more loving, or at the other end, way more spiteful. It is just as crazy, in Darwinian terms, to die for spite as for love.

Dessalles recognizes the problem of language in a Darwinian universe and devotes a chapter to “Language as an evolutionary paradox.” He writes:

How can we explain a communication behaviour which consists of passing on to one’s fellows information which is by definition useful to their survival? In such a scenario, everything points to the conclusion that the individuals who do not play by the rules, who keep useful information to themselves while benefiting from information given to them by others, will have a greater chance of having offspring, other things being equal. Such a conclusion would appear to mean that there is no possibility for language to exist! It also happens to be the best explanation of why the systematic sharing of information does not exist in other species. (p. 321)

If speech were the only violation of the Darwinian norm, we might excuse it as some kind of pseudo-altruism in which, say, each individual sociopath pursues his own interest by forming and informing coalitions of allies. But mostly we are not sociopaths and altruism is not a stranger to us. If you are looking for an account of human experience that challenges Darwinian explanations, check out Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between. It’s the story of a walk across Afghanistan immediately after the fall of the Taliban. Stewart walks into some of the world’s poorest, least sophisticated, and most recently traumatized villages on earth. Nobody is especially glad to see him, but they tolerate him and provide support. Why on earth do they do that? The man is not kin, not Moslem, not an Afghan. Darwinian principles do not demand that they kill him, but everyone’s doors should always be closed to him. Peripatetic baboons cannot walk across East Africa and expect grudging hospitality from the troops they meet along the way.

The only way I see of remaining true to Darwin and true to empirical observation is to bite the bullet and say something happened to move the Homo line out of the sauve qui peut mode and into some situation in which individual survival depends on group survival. Once you get from stage 1 to stage 2, the mysteries of language disappear. Suddenly, instead of being a contradiction, sharing information between people becomes as reasonable as it is for bodies to keep themselves informed through the use of hormones.

Even so, the book makes a great contribution, particularly in its sorting functional differences between protolanguage and full language and in its insistence that things we take for granted about language are very peculiar when looked at from either an evolutionary or engineering perspective.

Comments

[Jean-Louis Dessalles]

Many thanks for this comprehensive and insightful series of reviews on my book “Why we talk”. I am really impressed by the quality of your reading, and greatly appreciate the good words you have about the book.

I am sure we would both appreciate discussing several issues concerning the proximal and ultimate reasons of why we are a talking species. Let me just react to your last post.

I am a little bit surprised, not that you might disagree with my political account of the origin of language, but that quit the ship (that seeks for a Darwinian explanation for language) just before she lands. You say:

“The only way I see of remaining true to Darwin […] is to bite the bullet and say something happened to move the Homo line out of the sauve qui peut mode and into some situation in which individual survival depends on group survival.”

We don’t think of changing the laws of physics every time we encounter a bizarre phenomenon. This old idea about group selection, besides the fact that no known plausible model supports it, is fortunately dispensable. (I suspect that its attractiveness comes from a confusion between ‘group’ and ‘coalition’, the latter being a political reunion of individuals that constantly choose each other).

If Afghan villagers felt the urge to be helpful to Stewart, it was not the consequence of some new biological law especially designed for our lucky species. As in other political species, the behaviour of any human individual is scrutinized by conspecifics. The villagers’ generous conduct was perhaps not primarily directed at Stewart, but at other villagers.

The classical idea that language would be the mere instrument of some sort of Informational Collectivism is contradicted by the fact that those who pay for a phone call are those who have something to say, not those who are eager to listen. (a similar logic applies to writing books and to writing good blogs).

This small disagreement about the conclusion of the book should not obscure the fact that we do agree on most important issues.

Best wishes,

J-L. D.

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BLOGGER: I don't think I'm calling for new laws of physcis, or quitting Darwin, but something radical has to be done. What fun, by the way, to get a comment from the author of the book.

[TLTB]

Thanks for the review.

It seems that one sub-theme of this blog has become cataloging various failures to give Darwinian accounts for the development of the formal properties of language (syntax in particular).

I think at the root of this problem is the fact that syntax can actually be argued to impede communication (think of the way we drop functional elements like determiners and auxiliaries when trying to communicate with non-native speakers of English or children); therefore, any account that relies on communication as a motivation for selecting syntax isn't going to be satisfying.

Keep looking for answers...

[incze]

You can be interested in this Kirby et al. paper: Innateness and culture in the evolution of language (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104/12/5241 ). There is some math, but not too hard in it.

Basically it states, that at very weak biological biases, language universals arise as a result of individual learning and social (generation to generation) transfer. Even this social transfer parenthises the evolution of these biases, there would be no pressure for change.