More than nature needs: Language, mind, and evolution by Derek Bickerton (review)

Derek Bickerton, now in his eighties, after distinguished and controversial contributions to creole studies, has for several decades turned his attention to the origins and evolution of language. There are still too few linguists thinking about language evolution,¹ it being deemed speculative and/or demanding a serious grasp of the principles and findings of neighboring, often quite technical, disciplines, such as neuroscience, genetics, and paleoanthropology. And nonlinguists thinking about language evolution tend to pay insufficient attention to the genuine intricacies and peculiarities of language. B is remarkably energetic, writes very well, and steers a tactical course between lively defense of his own previous theories and working out new (to him) ways of viewing language evolution. If you have a story to tell, market-conscious publishers will usually allow you up to about 400 pages to do so. Add to this the conventional strictures of a balanced chapter plan, with about thirty pages per readily identifiable theme, and you have a reader’s and publisher’s template for a good book. B is a prolific and accomplished author, and he writes good marketable books, according to this template.

Like any biological phenomenon, the language faculty has evolved, so we cannot avoid questioning how it happened, which inevitably begs the question of what exactly the language faculty, the evolved phenomenon, is. Considering language as an evolved phenomenon, that is, language in the light of evolution, forces us to adapt our views of what language is. This is a difficulty other evolutionary theorists do not face. It is clear, for example, what the structure of the mammalian eye is, and building an account of its evolution can proceed with a solid target in mind. The distinction between language ‘in the narrow sense’ (FLN) and language ‘in the broad sense’ (FLB) is a product of this lack of consensus about what exactly the evolved language phenomenon is, and there is still disagreement about whether one can even separate the evolution of FLN from that of FLB. This book is at least as much about the basic, and preliminary, question of what language is as it is about what events may have happened, and when, in the prehistory of our species: ‘if there is any kind of [universal grammar (UG)], it must have evolved, and we know that much of what has been proposed for UG is extremely unlikely to have been produced by evolution’ (38).

This review follows B’s train of thought through his proposed three-stage story. I do not have sufficient space fully to acclaim what seem to be valid conclusions, or to criticize problematic points, except in the skimpiest fashion. To anticipate my conclusions here, putting it metaphorically, B has managed to construct an edifice worth taking seriously in its broadest outlines, even though some of its argumentative foundations are questionable or erroneous. Somehow, despite going off the rails in places, B’s onward momentum carries his journey on to conclusions coinciding broadly, but not in detail, with a consensus that a majority of other thinkers have begun to arrive at recently. The book has nine chapters, organized expertly to develop B’s main argument.

The necessary introductory chapter, ‘Wallace’s problem’, sets up B’s theme in a nontechnical way. (There is a growing movement to give Alfred Russel Wallace more credit for expounding natural selection, along with Darwin.) What B dubs ‘Wallace’s problem’ is the fact that humans have massively more brain power than we need to survive and reproduce, and this capacity is costly in energy. B briefly adumbrates his solution to Wallace’s problem here: it was the advent of symbolic language that transformed our cognitive powers.

The second chapter is a nice review of the course of generative theorizing over the past fifty years. This brisk historical account reasonably divides the course of the research program into three stages: standard theory (1957–1980), principles and parameters (1981–1994), and the minimalist [End...