It might be imagined that social conditions are irrelevant to how language evolved, since humans everywhere use language independently of social complexity or political system. Yet despite cultural differences, all human societies have certain underlying features in common. Below a certain threshold level of cooperation and trust, not even the simplest form of language could evolve.

Language has sometimes been described as a ‘mirror of mind’. Chomsky attributes this idea to ‘the first cognitive revolution’ inspired by Descartes among others in the seventeenth century. ‘The second cognitive revolution’ – triggered in large measure by Chomsky’s own work – is taken to have been a twentieth century rediscovery of these earlier insights into the nature of language and mind.

Only by misconstruing the term performative are the authors able to argue that males surpass females in “performative applications” of language. Linguistic performatives are not costly displays of quality, and syntax cannot be explained as an outcome of behavioural competition between pubertal males. However, there is room for a model in which language co-evolves with the unique human life-history stage of adolescence.

As a feature of life on earth, language is one of science’s great remaining mysteries. A central difficulty is that it appears so radically incommensurate with nonhuman systems of communication as to cast doubt on standard neo-Darwinian accounts of its evolution by natural selection. Yet scientific (as opposed to religious or philosophical) arguments for a discontinuity between human and animal communication have come into prominence only over the past 40 years. As long as behaviourism dominated anglophone psychology and linguistics, the transition from animal calls to human speech seemed to offer no particular difficulty (see, for example, Mowrer 1960; Skinner 1957). But the generative revolution in linguistics, begun with the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957 and developed in many subsequent works (e.g. Chomsky 1965, 1966, 1972, 1975, 1986; Chomsky and Halle 1968) radically altered our conception of language, and posed a challenge to evolutionary theory that we are still striving to meet.

Language has been described as a ‘mirror of mind’. Chomsky attributes this idea to ‘the first cognitive revolution’ inspired by Descartes amongothers in the seventeenth century. ‘The second cognitive revolution’ — triggered in large measure by Chomsky’s own work — is taken to have been a twentieth century rediscovery of these earlier insights into the nature of language and mind.

‘Selfish gene’ Darwinism differs from earlier versions of evolutionary theory in its focus on one key question: Why cooperate? The faculty of speech which distinguishes Homo sapiens from other species is an aspect of human social competence. By inference, it evolved in the context of uniquely human strategies of social cooperation. In these chapters, therefore, Darwinism in its modern, socially aware form provides our theoretical point of departure.

Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of palaeoanthropology, evolutionary psychology and theoretical linguistics (Dunbar 1993; Hurford 1989, 1992; Pinker & Bloom 1990; Steele & Shennan 1996). It is now widely accepted that no other theoretical framework has equivalent potential to solve the major outstanding problems in human origins research. Rival paradigms from the human and social sciences — Freudian, Piagetian, Chomskyan, Lévi-Straussian — cannot explain evolved human mentality because they already assume this as a basic premise. Tried and tested as a methodology applicable to the social behaviour of all living organisms (Dawkins 1976; Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1985), Darwinism makes no such assumptions, thereby avoiding circularity.

The neanderthals were probably displaced, according to Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1988: 6006), because they were “biologically provided with speech of more modest quality than modern humans.” Bickerton (1990; cf. Mellars 1991) extensively elaborates this theme, postulating “a single genetic event” which gave modern Homo sapiens the competitive edge, launching the human revolution by turning “protolanguage” into “syntacticized language”.

Thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, December 5th 1975.

Responding to Chomsky’s interview in Radical Anthropology in Issue 2, Chris Knight explores the paradoxical relationship between his activism and his science.

From a Darwinian standpoint, ‘symbolic culture’ is an unsettling notion. Modern science became established in opposition to the idea that culturally accepted fictions can be equated with facts. Yet the concept of symbolic culture requires us to grasp just that paradoxical possibility. Long before the late twentieth century invention of the Internet, evolution allowed humans to flit between two realms: reality on the one hand, virtual reality on the other. Symbolic culture is an environment of objective facts—whose existence depends entirely on collective belief. To use language is to navigate within that imagined world.

Language evolved in no species other than humans, suggesting a deep-going obstacle to its evolution. Could it be that language simply cannot evolve in a Darwinian world? Reviewing the insights of Noam Chomsky, Amotz Zahavi and Dan Sperber, this article shows how and why each apparently depicts language’s emergence as theoretically impossible. Chomsky shuns evolutionary arguments, asserting simply that language was instantaneously installed. Zahavi argues that language entails reliance on low cost conventional signals whose evolutionary emergence would contradict basic Darwinian theory. Sperber argues that a symbolic expression is, literally, a falsehood, adding to the difficulty of explaining how–in a Darwinan world–systematic reliance on language could ever have evolved. It is concluded that language exists, but for reasons which no currently accepted theoretical paradigm can explain.

Why is it that, out of 220 primate species, we are the only one that talks? The relative inflexibility of primate vocal signaling reflects audience pressure for reliability. Where interests conflict, listeners’ resistance to being deceived drives signalers to limit their vocal repertoire to signals that cannot be faked. This constraint was lifted in the human case, we argue, because the original victims of our species’ first deceptive vocalizations were nonhuman animals. When our ancestors were vulnerable hominins equipped with limited weaponry, they kept predators away by increasing the range and diversity of their vocal calls. This led to choral singing, primarily by females, and deceptive mimicry of animal calls, primarily by scavenging and hunting males. A critical feature of our model is the core principle of reversal, whereby deceptive signals aimedoriginally by a coalition against an external target are subsequently redeployed for honest communicative purposes within the group. We argue that this dynamic culminated ultimately in gestural, vocal, and ritual metaphor, opening the way to word formation and the rapid emergence of grammar.

Mark Fischer spoke to Chris Knight, a scientist specialising in human origins. His main current interest lies in working out how human language may have evolved. This has led him to clash with Noam Chomsky

An interview with ICC and Chris Knight.

Replying to his many critics, Chomsky (1979: 57) once accused them of not understanding science. To do science, Chomsky explained, ‘you must abstract some object of study, you must eliminate those factors which are not pertinent…’ The linguist — according to Chomsky — cannot study humans articulating their thoughts under concrete social conditions. Instead, you must replace reality with an abstract model. To deny this is to reject science altogether.

NOAM CHOMSKY ranks among the leading intellectual figures of modern times. He has changed the way we think about what it means to be human, gaining a position in the history of ideas – at least according to his supporters – comparable with that of Darwin or Descartes. Since launching his intellectual assault against the academic orthodoxies of the 1950s, he has succeeded – almost single-handedly – in revolutionising linguistics and establishing it as a modern science.

Occupying a pivotal position in postwar thought, Noam Chomsky is both the founder of modern linguistics and the world’s most prominent political dissident. Chris Knight adopts an anthropologist’s perspective on the twin output of this intellectual giant, acclaimed as much for his denunciations of US foreign policy as for his theories about language and mind. Knight explores the social and institutional context of Chomsky’s thinking, showing how the tension between military funding and his role as linchpin of the political left pressured him to establish a disconnect between science on the one hand and politics on the other, deepening a split between mind and body characteristic of Western philosophy since the Enlightenment. Provocative, fearless, and engaging, this remarkable study explains the enigma of one of the greatest intellectuals of our time.

The chief value of the study of human origins is that it nails the myth that ‘no revolution can ever change human nature’. It shows, on the contrary, that everything distinctively human about our nature – our ability to speak, to see ourselves as others see us, to aspire to act on moral principle – has come to prevail in our species thanks precisely to the greatest revolution in history, ‘the revolution which worked’.

Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of palaeoanthropology, evolutionary psychology and theoretical linguistics (Dunbar 1993; Hurford 1989, 1992; Pinker & Bloom 1990; Steele & Shennan 1996). It is now widely accepted that no other theoretical framework has equivalent potential to solve the major outstanding problems in human origins research. Rival paradigms from the human and social sciences — Freudian, Piagetian, Chomskyan, Lévi-Straussian — cannot explain evolved human mentality because they already assume this as a basic premise. Tried and tested as a methodology applicable to the social behaviour of all living organisms (Dawkins 1976; Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1985), Darwinism makes no such assumptions, thereby avoiding circularity.