Adam's tongue: How humans made language, how language made humans (review)

In his new theory of language evolution, Derek Bickerton shifts the focus from comparison with the great apes to niche construction theory (Odling-Smee et al. 2003)-the environment 'constructed' by its inhabitants in turn selects for new traits. B offers a particular protohuman niche, territory scavenging, as the unique key to the emergence of language. For B, culture is 'the way we adapt our environment to suit ourselves, in the same way that … ant nests … are the way ants … adapt the environment to suit them. We do it by learning, they do it by instinct; big deal' (11). Somehow this ironic dismissal, 'big deal', of the difference between learning and instinct sets a style that is at times engaging in its raciness, but rides roughshod over distinctions that really do need analysis.

B clearly presents what he means by animal communication systems (ACSs) in Ch. 1. Bickerton 1990 famously developed 'protolanguage' as something intermediate between an ACS and true language. Whereas ACS signals are all anchored to particular situations, (proto)language units are not. ACSs lack COMBINABILITY, whereas 'languages combine lawfully and protolanguages combine lawlessly' (41). For B, then, the two basic problems are explaining how words evolved and THEN explaining how grammatical structure evolved. To characterize language in sensu strictu, B appears to accept without reservation the characterization given by Noam Chomsky's minimalism. Thus, where a protolanguage can only 'put words together like beads on a string, Merge provides the pairwise operation that builds up [English [language teacher]] as a distinct structure from [[English language] teacher]' (187).

B offers several tests for an adequate theory of language origins, including 'uniqueness' and 'selfishness' (28-32). Describing uniqueness B states that 'if the proposed trigger for language is anything that affects other species, it's not likely to be the right one' (29). On the basis of this, B dismisses hunting, tool making, social relations, rituals, gossip, scheming for power, attracting mates, and controlling children as relevant to language origins. For selfishness, B explains: 'A gives information to B. Before that act, that information belonged to A exclusively. A could have exploited it for A's own benefit. Now B can exploit it too. What does A get out of this?' (32). We know that vervet monkeys evolved alarm calls that are specific to eagle versus snake versus leopard (Seyfarth et al. 1980), so we know that this problem was already overcome at the ACS level and did not require changes specific to language origins.

B offers territory scavenging as THE cause for the emergence of language, but the human genome and the chimpanzee genome differ by about 1 percent. Since that translates to changes in perhaps 300 genes, why should 'language-readiness' involve a single trigger rather than the cumulative effects of changes in many of those genes?

The holophrastic view of protolanguage counters B's idea of protolanguage as comprising haphazard strings of word-like units. ACS units are holistic, corresponding IN MEANING to whole messages like 'Danger! Leopard coming! Run up a tree! And spread the word!', but there are no parts that individually mean either 'danger' or 'leopard'. Wray (1998) hypothesized that some species ancestral to humans was able to continue to expand beyond its innate ACS repertoire. Wray offers a mechanism whereby, instead of starting with words and building them into sentences, our ancestors may have started with holophrases and eventually extracted words (fractionation) from which the holophrases could then be reconstituted (by suitable, but at first very limited, constructions; see Arbib 2008 for further details). B argues that this proposal is based on the fallacy that language and animal communication are fundamentally the same kind of thing. But what Wray asserts is only that early protolanguage has more in common with an ACS than with modern languages.

B asserts that '[n]o serious scholar nowadays doubts that language is, at bottom, biological rather than cultural, and therefore was not...