Ebook Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (The MIT Press)
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Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (The MIT Press)
Ebook Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (The MIT Press)
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Review
Why Only Us: Language and Evolution is a loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language.―New York Review of Books
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Review
Explaining the origins of the unique is famously difficult. Through elegantly showing the simplicity of the underlying mechanism, Berwick and Chomsky adroitly surmount this problem in the case of that most remarkable of all human uniquenesses, our possession of language.―Ian Tattersall, author of The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack: And Other Cautionary Tales from Human EvolutionNothing talks like humans do. Nothing even comes close. This sets up an interesting evolutionary problem: how did this unique capacity arise in the species? Unfortunately, approaching this question intelligently requires combining skills that seldom travel in tandem. Linguists know a lot about the principal features of human language but little about how evolution works, and biologists know a lot about how evolution works but little about the distinctive properties of human language. Enter Berwick and Chomsky's marvelous little book. In a mere four lucid and easily accessible chapters they educate linguists about the central mechanisms driving evolution and bring biologists up to date on the key distinctive features of natural language. Anyone interested in this topic must read this book.―Norbert Hornstein, Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of MarylandBerwick and Chomsky, masters of language and computer science, make a daring proposition: the phenomenon 'human language' arose when the brain evolved to instantiate the simple operation 'Merge.' At this crucial moment the complex trait, which led to a new mode of evolution, fell into place. The book is captivating and a must for everyone interested in evolution and humans. It is a landmark that will define future research.―Martin Nowak, Professor of Mathematics and Biology, Harvard UniversityThis book totally redefines the debate on the evolution of language. By judiciously incorporating recent advances in the theory of evolution and in linguistic theory, Berwick and Chomsky present a decisive case for the rapid emergence of language in the species. A witty and engaging introduction to language from a biological perspective, this is science writing at its best.―Stephen Crain, Distinguished Professor, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, and Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders
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Product details
Series: The MIT Press
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press; Reprint edition (May 12, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0262533499
ISBN-13: 978-0262533492
Product Dimensions:
5.4 x 0.6 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.7 out of 5 stars
16 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#140,874 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Ever since I read Chomsky's SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES soon after it first appeared, I thought he should team up with a bird expert. It has happened: Robert Berwick studies bird song (among other linguistic-related things). The results are as interesting as I predicted. The reason is that if you want to understand language evolution, you need to look at sophisticated nonhuman systems, and primates are astonishingly simple about communicating: they give basically instinctive noises in simple contexts. Even chimps can learn only simple two-word combinations in sign language (though this book understates what they can do). Birds are different: the most sophisticated songbirds not only learn their songs, they often incorporate other birds' songs and other noises in their own songs, creatively reworking the learned sounds to fit their own song models. My garden has a family of mockingbirds, so I am exposed almost daily to a potentially infinite amount of creativity as the male creates his own new phrases and often works learned noises into these. No mammal does anything like this; it's parallel evolution between birds and humans. Birds also manage duality of patterning, clear separation of learned songs from simple instinctive calls, and possibly even displacement (does my mockingbird think of killdeer when he imitates one and none are around?). So, if birds are skilled at infinitely productive learned symbolic communication, what do humans do that is special? Berwick and Chomsky nail it: on pp 141-144, they point out the two key didferences. First, birds don't say anything new. My mockingbird says he's on territory, welcomes his friends and neighbors, impresses and reinforces his bond with his mate, provides dire warnings to cats, hawks, and rival male mockingbirds, and doesn't do much else (see books by D. Kroodsma, Peter Marler and Hans Slabbekoorn, etc., on what bird songs say). Second, and more important, mockingbirds and other songbirds organize their songs as simple phrases--one to four part sequences of notes with no higher order. Humans can cheerfully do as Marcel Proust did and write a 4000-page, 7-volume novel with sentences up to four pages long. This requires several levels of hierarchy (recursion). This in turn requires what Berwick and Chomsky call Merge: the ability to combine concepts in new ways, at stacked hierarchic levels, as in a complex sentence with nested relative clauses. My mockingbird does Merge, but only at the most elementary level--planning how to string disparate notes and sounds into a well-turned phrase. So, how did this evolve? A key insight is that brain wiring is different between songbirds and humans on the one hand, and nonsinging birds (like chickens) and nonhuman primates on the other. We (birds and humans) have a circuit connecting memory, higher-order planning, and vocal production. They don't. (The neurology is complex but well described in this book.) So we can deploy our higher-order planning function, raid our verbal memory for words and other symbols, and put it all together in a highly planned manner--then produce it as speech, or we can write it out, or gesture it, or sing it, or make posters of it with emojis and other nonverbal symbols. Interesting, that.So how did all this evolve? Berwick and Chomsky think the critical step--the liberation of the Merge function to allow literally infinite sentence-making--was quite recent, coming with modern humans, i.e. from about 150,000 years ago (possibly slowly evolving from 200,000 to 80,000). They must remain agnostic about how much speech earlier hominins had, since we have no idea, but they imply Neanderthals and earlier humans had nothing much beyond what chimps do. This is unlikely. Neanderthals' brains were as big as ours, and even if used more for physical issues and less for thinking (as Berwick and Chomsky hypothesize) they must have had a fairly sophisticated communicating and thinking mechanism. The most obvious proof is the stone tools. My colleagues Philip Wilke and Leslie Quintero are among the dozen or so leading experts on stone tools, and they state flatly that you can't teach stone tool making, even at the more advanced Homo erectus level, let alone the far more sophisticated Neanderthal one, without verbal instruction. Maybe it was simple, but it was there. Meanwhile, Robin Dunbar has long pointed out that people use language--when talking--mainly to talk about social relationships--much more than they do about tools. Surely Neanderthals were the same. So I assume that language developed slowly from Homo erectus through later forms to ourselves. On the other hand, as Berwick, Chomsky, and countless others have pointed out, there is no known art or other purely communicative stuff from premodern humans! So fancy communication like language is indeed probably late. I assume that earlier people did something like what my mockingbirds do--that the Merge function developed not all at once but through one-step, then two-step, then a-few-step, then with modern people potentially infinite recursion. Note that Merge is not obviously different from planning in general--we can plan very complex, hierarchic schemes in advance, whereas birds can only manage simple plans added to instinctive capacities.Berwick and Chomsky think language evolved for thinking--i.e. talking to yourself. I doubt it. I have to agree with the majority, that it evolved for communication, no doubt about social relationships, hunting and foraging, toolmaking, and the other things people have to do. But, since it is available for talking to yourself about your plans, it must have been liberated for that purpose as it developed, so evidently both functions were always present.One annoying error comes right at the start of the book: the authors refract Alfred Wallace's claim that language seems wildly overadequate for what "savages" have to talk about. (This claim is echoed by other recent writers, e.g. D. Bickerton.) Wallace can be excused for not knowing about traditional societies, but from the days of Boas, Kroeber, Lowie, Sapir and others we have had access to monumental collections of linguistic materials recorded from small-scale, technologically "simple" societies all over the world. Their linguistic productions include extremely sophisticated poetry, tales, religious texts, social lore, rules, moral and philosophical musings, and so on--not at all inferior to modern writings. (They are less extensive, but the combined total across many societies is still enormous.) So all modern humans for the last 80,000 years have used the full extent of their linguistic skills, Wallace or no. Berwick and Chomsky, who adore formalizations, would no doubt object that those guys don't do advanced math or formal analysis. Well, neither do most moderns, and that is a very specialized function of language. When it comes to everything else, from great poetry to great rhetoric (I have heard some in Indigenous languages), we are not notably better off than the speakers of the other 6800 or so languages in the world. We just produce more, because we have printing presses. So there were plenty of reasons to want a sophisticated, infinitely productive mechanism for both internal speech and social communication--in fact language makes sense only if you have a speech community of a few hundred (at least). It is indeed overadequate for a family or small band. I assume it evolved along with the growth of group size among humans--which also took off especially in the last 200,000 years.
Apparently unique to our species, it seems to have evolved relatively recently in evolutionary time. How such a significant change could have come about in such a short period contradicts the gradualist view of evolution, but the authors convincingly argue that large phenotypic changes may result from small genetic changes. The explanation that stochastic factors besides natural selection play a large part in evolutionary change is fascinating. I found the argument that our language capacity is qualitatively different from anything existing in other species convincing, namely our ability to use the Basic Property of Merge to recursively generate a digitally infinite array of possible sentences and the idea of language as primarily an instrument for thought rather than communication. Parts of the book get a bit technical, especially the discussions of specific genes that may be related to language, but overall it’s an engaging and fascinating book.
I have many criticisms of this work:1. The title of the book suggests that it is written for the general educated public. I estimate that one would need a degree in linguistics to properly comprehend the contents. The book teems with references to advanced concepts in language. My own self-education in linguistics comes from reading perhaps 30 books on the subject, and I found the book to be heavy sledding. The title should have communicated its highly technical content, e.g., "An Analysis of Evolutionary Considerations and Cognitive Development in the Rise of Language".2. The writing is ghastly. Here's a sample: "We also have an explanation for the apparent fact that the diversity, complexity, and malleability of language is mostly, maybe entirely, localized in an external system ancillary to the core internal processes of language structure and semantic interpretation." Does this mean that an earlier conclusion provides the "explanation"? Where is that conclusion described? The author relies heavily relative pronouns (this, that) whose referents are seldom apparent. The author also refers to previous concepts with confusing terminology. At one point the author criticizes an "article". Working backwards, the only possible referent I could find was a mention of a scientific paper two paragraphs earlier. I have never before seen the word "article" used to refer to a published scientific paper.3. The vocabulary is simultaneously polysyllabic and vague. In another example, the author discusses "the Basic Property of human language -- the ability to construct a digitally infinite array of hierarchically structured expressions with determinate interpretations at the interfaces with other organic systems". What does "digital" mean here? The brain is not a digital device. Language is not a digital system. Why does the author tack on all that extra baggage about 'determinate interpretations' and 'interfaces with other organic systems'. Are there interfaces with inorganic systems that language doesn't apply to?In several other places, the author writes that language is not analyzed "left to right". Language in its primary form is spoken and has no left hand or right hand. The author is thinking about written languages -- not all of which proceed from left to right. Some are in right to left order; some are top to bottom; some switch directions with each line. My plaint is trivial, but it serves as an example of sloppy wording on the part of the author.4. The author treats other ideas and authors with disdain. He mischaracterizes their arguments in straw man style. He doesn't merely disagree with them; they are "wrong", "incorrect", "misled", etc. My warning sirens sound when I encounter this kind of writing in a scientific context.5. The sentence that the author frequently relies on to exemplify his analysis is "Instinctively birds that fly swim." This sentence doesn't make sense. The author provides a lengthy explanation of its meaning -- but I challenge any reader to ask a normal English speaker to interpret the sentence. The confusion elicited by the request blows the author's reasoning out of the water.6. I reject the central thesis of the book, as expressed in this sentence: "...language evolved for thought and interpretation: it is fundamentally a system of meaning." The author rejects the notion that language evolved for purposes of communication. I find this thesis preposterous. The author entirely dismisses the notion that language is fundamentally spoken; he maintains that speaking and hearing language are mere external "interfaces" to the 'real' language capacity, which he claims is a computational system. This would necessitate that the ability to speak language developed as an afterthought to the rise of language. That is, first humans experienced some mighty leap in cognitive power, and then had to invent speaking and listening in order to communicate their new-found brilliant thoughts to each other. All those anatomic changes required for speaking (the descent of the larynx, the greatly improved control of musculature in the tongue and lips, improved breath control) followed in quick succession.I find it far more likely that a capability as powerful as language developed in a long series of small steps, each of which provided some small adaptive benefit. The author explicitly rejects this notion, relying on what seemed to me to be a "hand is quicker than the eye" argument about Darwinism. By piling up a mountain of dense verbiage, the author somehow manages to suggest that evolution by small increments is not the only possible mechanism, yet never quite explains what the alternative is. At one point, he denigrates an author's suggestion that language "popped up" in one fortuitous jump -- but later seems to offer the same explanation. Of course, his writing is too vague to be certain of anything.All in all, this book is a disaster. I can see it having some utility to serious students of linguistics as a stimulating contrarian expression. That's the only positive assessment I can offer.
A lovely read. Great for a general audience (like yours truly). Technical but never beyond lay comprehension. Enjoyed it tremendously.
The concept is amazing. The style seems to be for someone from this field. It is like very long scientific article.
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