What Evolved? (Part Three)

This item concludes a series of three posts on the subject of just what did we get when we evolved speech? The first (here) accepted the consensus that speech is a tool for communication, but argued that human communication is fundamentally different from machine communication, which is really a form of control. The second (here) said that instead of seeing the evolution of speech as an advance in biological control, we should think of it as a great advance in the mutual cooperation made available through joint attention.

A paradoxical element in this view of speech origins is that speech is unique to humans while joint attention is not. If speech performs a function already enjoyed by the great apes and other primates, what has happened to make it so unlike the joint attention of chimpanzees, etc? The brief answer is that we have greatly expanded our field of attention to include one another’s thoughts. If you are ever pressed to state the difference between humans and the rest of the world’s fauna in 10 words or less, try this one: We alone pay attention to the thoughts of others.

You can see this difference when you examine the efforts to teach sign language to gorillas and chimpanzees. (Classic texts are here and here) Although this work is generally agreed to have failed in its effort to teach chimpanzees to converse, it has established that apes can communicate at least as well as a toddler of eighteen months. So why don’t they do that in the wild? One answer seems to be that human scientists care about what is on a chimpanzee’s mind, but other chimpanzees do not. Chimpanzees have the smarts to name separate parts in the continuum of experience, but they don’t have the social interests to pay attention to what’s said by others. (See this site for the basics of primate social relationships.) It would be impossible for chimpanzees to evolve a tool for mutual cooperation unless they also evolved an interest in what other chimpanzees have to say.

This situation is not so different from that facing two-year-olds. If you watch toddlers in pre-school, you will notice that they entertain themselves and are not much interested in what their age-mates are doing. They are, however, interested in older children and adults, and adults are interested in them. During this period, children’s speech is quite unlike adult speech and it is easy to imagine that during speech’s long evolution proto-humans went for many generations speaking at the level of a two-year-old. It would not have been as useful as full speech, but it would have been something.

Two-year-old sociability (or rather unsociability), however, provides an argument against the speculation that proto-humans went through a long toddler-speech stage. You cannot develop even a proto-language unless somebody cares about what you have to say. In most species, if anybody in the world is interested in another, it is a mama with her young, and what do you know?, parent-young interaction is often noisy. But even there, the noises commonly focus on control, rather than mutual attention, although anybody who has ever watched a lioness teach her cub how to kill knows that parent-young interactions are not just about controlling.

Human social attention differs from typical parent-young attention in the way it persists throughout life, and the way it is not limited to kinship.

Speech, therefore, is profoundly dependent on the most precious and unlikely human trait, sympathy and fellow-feeling. Understanding where that emotion came from will have to be part of any full understanding of the evolution of speech. I say sympathy is our most unlikely trait because it is in such contradiction with the brutal selfishness of most Darwinian processes. Anyone who has been following discussions about evolution in the last few decades knows that “altruism,” benefiting others at cost to oneself, is a challenge to Darwinian concepts, although not an impossible challenge. (See this Stanford site for a discussion of the issue.) Cooperation is such a valuable trait that it has broken many evolutionary barriers, producing multi-cellular organisms (based on shared DNA), social insects (based on close kinship), and bird and mammal societies (based on looser kinship). Human societies have found a way to mix the autonomous pleasures of mammalian societies with the more complicated cooperation of insect societies (based on concern for one another). Yet, sympathy is not enough to support speech.

Speakers also have to have something to say. Part two of this series noted the use of alarms and emotional signals that keep fellows informed about the objective, changing world, Objective information seems to be sufficient to the needs of, say, a chimpanzee. Not so, for humans. Part one of this series mentioned Chomsky’s review of B.F. Skinner’s theory of verbal behavior. In that review Chomsky rebuts Skinner’s assertion that a person’s response to seeing a certain painting would be to utter the word Dutch. Chomsky offered a series of possible alternate responses.

• Clashes with the wallpaper.
• I thought you liked abstract work.
• Never saw it before.
• Tilted.
• Hanging too low.
• Beautiful.
• Hideous.
• Remember your camping trip last summer?

Tilted and hanging too low are objective comments, the rest are subjective. The speaker and listener are paying joint attention to a painting, but most of the comments offered tell us as much about the speaker as they do the painting.

In order to make the response range noted by Chomsky, an existing primate faculty, that of joint attention, had to undergo some form of transformation that

• generalized mutual parent-young attentiveness to some wider group of members, and
• included subjective responses in the attention field.

Once the world had creatures who paid joint attention to each other's subjective ideas, people had appeared. It may have been a long time before they could pronounce things clearly, and organize their speech into recursive sentences, but they were already people.

Comments

[TLTB]

You seem to be setting up joint attention as a social pressure that led to the evolution of speech.

But why not the other way around? Why not speech first and then that made joint attention possible?

I would argue that speech is required for joint attention of the kind you are referring to to take place. I think that's also the position of Daniel Dennett. Dennett argues that being able to put our thoughts into language allows those thoughts to be stored in memory. This allows us to think about our thoughts, to comtemplate and suffer, an ability he argues other species lack. Joint attention seems to fit in here since in order to carry out that act, one has to suppose what another's thoughts are and then think about those thoughts.

If indeed one of language's primary effects was to 'boostrap' our cognitive abilities by allow us to think about our thoughts, then it would seem language would have to precede joint attention (and note my use of 'language' here rather than speech, referring to the mental capability and not pronunciation).

------------------------
THE BLOGGER RESPONDS

"Why not speech first and then that made joint attention possible?"

Simply because joint attention is found in other species. It is demonstrably older than language, which was the point of Part 2.

The Dennett line of argument is too complex to argue here and deserves its own several postings, but I want to draw people's attention to the words "to contemplate and suffer." I will leave it to visitors decide for themselves whether other animals can suffer.

[TLTB]

Just a note to say that unless those visitors are animal behavior researchers, there's no way they'd know whether animals can suffer. It's an empirical question that has to be (and has been) shown by controlled experiment.

I'd be interested to see your take on some of Dennet's stuff.

---------------------
THE BLOGGER RESPONDS

We're getting way off topic. Ethologists are in no better position than anyone else to say if animals suffer because suffering is a subjective experience not available to direct observation. Animals are regularly subject to a terrible number of experiences -- such as being eaten alive -- that in humans would bring immense suffering. I used to know a priest who insisted that animals did not feel pain the way we did because it carried no redemptive possibility and therefore was not something God would inflict on the animal world. Even in my religious period I thought that an extreme position and I still do.

[Giorgio Marchetti]

I can comment on this very interesting topic and on Bolles’ interesting observations only now because only recently have I had the chance to read them.

(fortunately, Bolles keeps open the possibility to comment on old posts!)

Primates had certainly to undergo some very important transformation, such as those indicated by Bolle (sympathy, a capacity to share attention in a wider group, to be able to pay attention to the thoughts of others).

In my opinion, however, all this (or at least, the capacity to pay attention to the thoughts and ideas of others) requires a more substantial and fundamental transformation.

Let’s first make some preliminary considerations.

The main aim of language/words/speech (as we know and use language today) is to allow us to share our ideas, feelings, emotions, thoughts, and so on, with the other human beings, with ourselves, and sometimes with other kinds of creatures and beings (plants, animals, God, the wall – to talk with the wall -, etc.). Generally speaking, we can say that language/words/speech give us the possibility to share our “experiences” with other beings (and, conversely, to share the other beings’ experience).

The experience language/words/speech give us the possibility to share can be of various kinds: sensory or perceptual (someone says to us: “Look at that man!”, and then we turn, look and really see that man), imaginal (“Try to imagine the following”, and we imagine what the speaker describes), of a memory kind (“Do you remember what we did when we used to go there? It was really a beautiful time!”, and we remember, see the past actions through the eyes of memory, etc.), of a very abstract kind (“If A then B”, “The theory of the evolution states that …” etc), mystical, etc.

How can language/words/speech give us the possibility to have and share all these kinds of experiences? In my opinion, thanks to the fact that language/words/speech pilot attention. Piloting somebody’s attention means and implies first of all – at least in my theory – making somebody’s consciously experience something: namely, what the words/speech mean.

A peculiarity of (human) language/words/speech is that we can experience the meaning of a word/speech even without necessarily experiencing all the sensory/perceptual experiences the word/speech can refer to: I mean: we can understand perfectly well the words “red” or “cheese” even without having (when listening to what the speaker says) any physical or sensory experience of red or cheese.

(Probably, we had these sensory/perceptual experiences the first time we heard these words. Moreover, if, when we hear these words, we have enough time to think about what they imply, we still have sensory experiences of red and cheese. But, strictly speaking, it is not necessary that, in order to understand a speech where these words are used, we have these sensory experiences. Consider also the fact that we can understand words that do not refer to any thing real, physical, or of perceptual/sensory kind, such as “all”, “and”, “same”, etc.).

Well, if this is the main function of language/words/speech (to make somebody consciously experience something: namely, what the words/speech mean), and if we can consciously experience meanings (of words and speech) without necessarily having also to physically (I mean, by or five senses) experience what words/speech could actually refer to (the colour red, the taste of cheese), then a fundamental transformation had to occur in evolution.

This transformation implied for primates to be able to detach themselves from (to abstract away from) the immediacy of the sensory and perceptual world.

This makes sense in evolutionary terms. It makes an organism free itself from the contingency, immediacy of the physical world. While very primitive organisms heavily depend on the environment, evolved organisms (such as humans) are (relatively) independent from the environment (and they tend to acquire higher and higher degrees of freedom).

But to detach oneself from the physical world, one has to be able to develop a form of “internal world” that can be shaped, formed, changed, and so at will. A world that has its own rules and that is independent of the external one. This world is our mind.

How could develop such internal world? In my opinion, the most important step was the possibility to focus one’s attention not so much on the object/being of the environment referred to by the sign (that is, what a sign immediately point and refer to in the environment), as on the essential attentional operations that always and invariably (that is, independently of the specific time, place, conditions of perceptions and observations, etc) characterize the conscious experience elicited by that object/being. These essential attentional operations are precisely those which, once you perform them again, give you the possibility to consciously experience, firstly, the meaning of the word/speech, and, secondly, the actual, physical object/being (either as a real perception, a mental image, a memory or something else) referred to by the word/speech.

Once primates developed such an ability (to detach themselves from the immediacy of the environment), they could build up an internal code (based on attentional operations) independent of external world/environment. By means of this internal code, they could subsequently develop an internal world (our mind) which made thoughts, ideas, concepts, etc. possible.

Giorgio Marchetti