The Kingdom of Speech (14 page)

“Little enough is known about cognitive systems and their neurological basis,” Chomsky had said to John Gliedman back in 1983. “But it does seem that the representation and use of language involve specific neural structures, though their nature is not well understood.”

It was just a matter of time, he intimated then, until empirical research would substantiate his analogies. That was thirty years ago. So in thirty years, Chomsky had advanced from “specific neural structures, though their nature is not well understood” to “some rather obscure system of thought that we know is there but we don't know much about it.”

In three decades nobody had turned up any hard evidence to support Chomsky's conviction that every person is born with an innate, gene-driven power of speech with the motor running. But so what? Chomsky had made the most ambitious attempt since Aristotle's in 350
BCE
to explain what exactly language is. And no one else in human history had come even close. It was dazzling in its own flailing way—this age-old, unending, utter, ultimate, universal display of ignorance concerning man's most important single gift.

Language—what is it?
What is it?
Chomsky's own words at age eighty-five after a lifetime of studying language! The previous 150 years had proved to be the greatest era ever in solving the riddles of
Homo sapiens
—but not in the case of
Homo loquax,
man speaking. A parade of certified geniuses had spent lifetimes trying to figure it out—and failed.

The first breakthrough, leading at last to the answer, was Everett's thirty-year study of the Pirahã in their remote and forgotten malarial jungle. Historians often idly wish they could somehow spend just a little time, even fifteen minutes, in the worlds they're writing about. In effect, that was what Everett was doing…when he converted from his Christian faith to linguistics and anthropology. The Pirahã were not frozen in time. They were living in real time and using man's greatest artifact, language, as best they could…with the world's smallest vocabulary. They had no one to pressure them, cajole them, or force them—say, through military coercion—to change. Without planning it, Everett found himself studying a language not by dissecting and analyzing it as a finished product, the way it existed in Europe, the United States, or the Pacific Rim, but by starting with a prototype. And in the Pirahã he had found the most basic prototype of
Homo sapiens
. The Pirahã lived entirely in the present, spoke only in the present tense, did not analyze their past or agonize over their future—which in no small part accounted for their generally amiable, relaxed, laugh-light demeanor. For the same reason, they spent virtually no time making artifacts, not even the simplest. Artifacts are an elementary part of thinking about the future.

Most tellingly of all, they had no social gradations, no hierarchy of social classes, and not even any status groups, so far as Everett had been able to determine. They didn't have occupations…wise men here, fighting men there, spokesmen, repairmen, builders, messengers, young rips, party girls, or, for that matter, parties.

In 1869, under the pressure of competition with Wallace, Darwin had come up with the theory that speech evolved from man's imitation of birdsong. As the sounds became more complex, he explained in 1871 in
The Descent of Man,
they developed into what we now know to be words…Darwin said that?…Birdsong?…It was not a very convincing notion, and a year later the seventy-seven-year blackout began. When it ended after World War II, linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and even paleontologists began chundering out a vast Cloud of theories of the evolution of language as if to make up for lost time.

Scientificalization was the intellectual spirit of the age, and nobody filled that bill better than Noam Chomsky. The origin of language, he theorized, was a chance mutation that occurred in a single individual and evolved into its finished and entirely physical form in less than two hundred thousand years…a mere blink in the conventional chronology of Darwinian evolution.

Michael Tomasello put forward his gestural theory. It held that once man evolved to standing on two legs, his hands were free to transmit signals…until eventually the signals, the gestures, evolved into speech.

Both W. Tecumseh Fitch and Kenneth Kaye believed that the sounds mothers cooed, crooned…or growled…to their babies, the “motherese,” had evolved into words.

Erich Jarvis of Duke University formed a team that picked up where Darwin left off. They isolated forty-eight bird genomes, made a digital slew of studies of birds' vocal learning, had a “computational biologist” crunch the numbers—and found that “the same genes that give humans the ability to speak give birds the ability to sing.”
157
Ryuji Suzuki of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and MIT led a team that developed a computer algorithm to analyze the moans, cries, and chirps in sixteen different love songs, from six to thirty minutes each, that male humpback whales croon during the mating season. These great blubbery beasts use a hierarchical syntax similar to man's, although the gigabytten Suzuki was the first to admit that he hadn't the faintest notion what they were singing.

Johan J. Bolhuis headed a team of five neuroscientists who studied a musical bird, the zebra finch, by playing adult zebra finches tapes of songs they had listened to as little birds in the wild…and now that they were mature, analyzing their sexual arousal (somehow) when they heard them again.

Three Japanese psychologists plus one American, Robert C. Berwick, came up with the Integration Hypothesis…which says that human language has two components: E for “expressive,” as in birdsong, and L for “lexical,” as in monkey cries. In man, E and L come together to create human language. Why were they eager to have Berwick on the team? Because he was an MIT “computational linguistics” star who knew how to parameterize—that's the word, pa
ram
eterize—any linguistic theory into modules and press a button and run them through his Prolog system and
just like that
determine how the theory works for any or all of several dozen languages in terms of “psycholinguistic fidelity” and “logical adequacy.”

The math-lang specialists at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, Martin Nowak and David Krakauer, wrote, or, rather, mathed up, an article for
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
entitled “The Evolution of Language”—in terms of so-called evolutionary game theory. Game theory produces articles in which equations bear such heavy loads of calculus that the linguists who come along as their divan carriers buckle under the weight—and Nowak and Krakauer were heavyweights. Their equations made Swadesh's glottolingo back in the late 1940s and 1950s look absolutely limpid by comparison. At one point, they calculate the effect that “errors in perception” must have had early in the evolution of language. “Signals are likely to have been noisy and can therefore be mistaken for each other. We denote the probability of interpreting sound
i
as sound
j
by
u
_ij
. The payoff for
L
communicating with
L
′ is now given by

It was the greatest array—yes!
array!
—of mathematical high fliers ever assembled to go where no man has gone before…up into the digital Cloud to solve the mystery of language—

—and all ran smack into a firewall and came no closer to finding the answer to
Language—what is it?
than the rest. It was a long, dreary stretch of failure. Linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists had been trying on and off forever to figure out exactly what language was and were no closer to solving the mystery than Darwin had been with his songbirds. A century and a half…and
nothing
to show for it. In May of 2014, Chomsky, Tattersall, Berwick the data cruncher, Marc Hauser of the 2002 Recursion Three, plus four other eminenti—making eight in all—published a historic ten-thousand-word revelation entitled “The Mystery of Language Evolution.” Historic it was, but not in any triumphant sense. In fact, there had never been a scholarly paper quite like it. Here you had a delegation of some of the biggest names in the study of language, above all, Chomsky, running up a white flag of abject defeat and surrender…after forty straight years of failure.

“In the last 40 years,” this eight-man jeremiad began—as we first heard on the opening pages of this book—“there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.”
158
There is nothing whatsoever like it in animal life, the Eight continued. Fossils and archaeology tell us nothing. No one has been able to find any genetic roots of language. There are no empirical tests of any hypotheses. “The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of [language] remain as mysterious as ever,” and we don't know if we will ever be able to find a way to answer them. The Eight were neo-Darwinists to a man, hard-core Evolutionists who still believed in Dobzhansky's maxim from the 1930s: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Did their capitulation lead them to turn to Everett and his idea that language just might be an artifact in and of itself, every bit as much as a lightbulb or a Buick is? Not for a moment. Linguists who had begun to forsake Chomsky's notion of a language organ—and Chomsky had as much as forsaken it himself—did not care to go in that direction. Everett was still the flycatcher non grata. Those who admitted that well, yes, language did not evolve in the usual way tended to depict language as one of Evolution's fellow travelers. The favorite new phrase was “biological niche construction.” The niche was hollowed out into Evolution's flanks for the long march. It never seemed to dawn on them that they were indulging in sheer metaphor.

In 2015 a leading niche man, Chris Sinha of China's Hunan University, wrote that “niche construction theory is a relatively new approach in evolutionary biology that seeks to integrate an ecological dimension into the Darwinian Theory of Evolution by natural selection.”
159
In this case “ecological” meant something picked up in the course of Evolution's interaction with the environment. This and compromise theories like it left only a scattering of subscribers to the idea that language is an out-and-out artifact…notably, Edward Sapir back in the 1920s, before his theory was trampled in the rush toward Chomskyism…Andy Clark, then of Washington University in Saint Louis, a philosopher who in 1997 called language “the ultimate artifact”
160
…and Everett. Everett's decades-long experience with the Pirahã cast the first light on the answer to Chomsky's question after sixty years of studying language:
What is it?

Everett didn't know philosopher Andy Clark or his work. He arrived at Clark's insight on his own: language is the great “cultural tool,” as Everett called it. Everett never showed any sign of doubting the Theory of Evolution. Why should he? Speech, language, was something that existed quite apart from Evolution. It had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Man, man unaided, created language. Everett's leap over the wall Darwin had built around Evolution—namely, Darwin's conviction that the Theory of Evolution was also a Theory of Everything—Everett's leap over
that
wall was one that next to no Evolutionist had even contemplated.

By now, 2014, Evolution was more than a theory. It had become embedded in the very anatomy, the very central nervous system, of all
modern
people. Every part, every tendency, of every living creature had evolved from some earlier form—even if you had to go all the way back to Darwin's “four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere” to find it. A title like “The Mystery of Language Evolution” was instinctive. It went without saying that any “trait” as important as speech had
evolved
…from
something
. Everett's notion that speech had not evolved from
anything
—it was a “cultural tool” man had made for himself—was unthinkable to the vast majority of
modern
people. They had all been so deep-steeped in the Theory that anyone casting doubt upon it obviously had the mentality of a Flat Earther or a Methodist. With the very title of his book itself—
Language: The Cultural Tool
—Everett was drawing the same line Max Müller had drawn in 1861: “Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it.”

Whether it was Darwin alone at his desk in 1870 thinking, between bouts of vomiting, of ways to get around Alfred Wallace's objections that he couldn't account for speech…or Chomsky plus the truth squad with Berwick at the keyboard chundering out fantastical arrays of calculus ∑ sigma ∑ blades…or any of the scores of hypotheses in the 150 years in between…all were based on the same “uncontroversial” assumption. That was Chomsky's and his MIT colleagues' very word in their August 2014 article in
PLoS Biology
entitled “How Could Language Have Evolved?” That it had evolved was a given. Rare was the linguist, the psychologist, the anthropologist who could entertain the notion that something as fundamental to human life as language might be an artifact.