Babel's Dawn

The Co-evolution of Speech and Speakers

Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot. What sort of language would a race of them evolve?

Two kinds of evolution tangle thinking about the origins of speech. The first is biological evolution that adapted our bodies to the task of speaking. Then there is the linguistic evolution that shaped the languages we speak. If we define evolution vaguely as change over time, we can agree that both bodies and languages evolve. But if we speak more precisely and say that evolution refers to the Darwinian processes that produce change, can we also say that language really evolves? A recent report in the journal Cognitive Processing says yes, linguistic evolution is more than just analogous to biological evolution; it uses Darwinian processes. If the report’s authors are correct, two evolutionary processes were triggered when people began to speak. One adapted our bodies to speech, the other adapted speech to our community. The dual evolution is very much like the co-evolution of brain and language that Terrence Deacon proposed in his book The Symbolic Species.

Three Mysteries

Nature at work.

If there is one thing this blog takes for granted, it is that evolution played a critical role in the origins of speech and its spread throughout the species, so I was caught off guard to find a skeptical article in a journal put out by graduate students at the University of Colorado. Like most writing that leans toward Intelligent Design, it does not offer a counter-theory so much as a critique of existing knowledge. The article, “The Evolution of Evolutionary Linguistics,” by Jeff Roesler Stebbins can be found here.

TwoTypes of Words

Words, words, words. Hamlet (2,2: 195)

Along with all the sophisticated issues that are part of speech origins, it is good to remember every once in a while that the primary fact was and is the rise of words. From one angle, they seem empty as a dead man’s glove. “Words, words, words,” sighs Hamlet as he laments hollowness itself. But move your head a notch and words look almost miraculous — sounds, voluntarily shaped, that signify. How did two people, or, on this blog, protopeople, ever come up with such a thing? A couple of recent articles, however, suggest that a word, or at least sharing words, is not so miraculous after all.

Moving Beyond the Interesting

So which of these things is the parlu?

Several new articles explore the question of where words come from. The basic association between sound and sense is the most obvious one and it explains why many mammals can learn to recognize their name and respond appropriately to certain ones. “Com’on boy,” you say to your dog, and you dog comes to you. We take the feat for granted, but it is no small thing to control an animal by means of speech and gesture alone. And when behaviorism ruled the psychology departments, association was considered the only way words could be learned. Even theorists now grant that the idea was as naïve as a middle-schooler in Kokomo, but what else in going on? How about some mind-reading?