Social Conditions for the Evolutionary Emergence of Language
Knight, C. and C. Power (2011). Social conditions for the evolutionary emergence of language. In M. Tallerman and K. Gibson (eds), Handbook of Language Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 346-349.
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 emerged in no other species than humans, suggesting a profound obstacle to its evolution. What could this be? If we view language as an aspect of cognition, we might expect limitations in terms of computational capacity. If we see it as essentially for communication, we would anticipate problems in terms of social relationships.
To determine whether the constraints are fundamentally computational or social, let’s begin with the simple activity of pointing. From a human standpoint, it seems surprising that wild-living apes don’t use intentional gestures to point things out to one another. Why not? Possibly they lack the necessary mental machinery. Yet it turns out that an ape is quite capable of using a gesture analogous to pointing—the so-called ‘directed scratch’—to indicate where it wishes to be groomed (Pika and Mitani 2009). If an ape can point for its own benefit, what stops it from doing so for others? The explanation is clearly social. Apes are not motivated to coordinate their purposes in pursuit of a shared future goal (Tomasello 2006). And if this obstructs so simple an activity as pointing, the chances of language evolving are slim to say the least.
The term ‘mindreading’ refers to the ability to infer others’ mental states on the basis of direction of gaze, facial expression, and so forth. While all primates have significant abilities of this kind, in humans they have undergone extraordinary development. The differences can be attributed to contrasting levels of cooperation. Take two individuals, each seeking to reconstruct the other’s thoughts. Either they compete or they cooperate. If they compete, each will seek to block the other’s mindreading efforts while promoting its own. Only where both sides cooperate simultaneously will Darwinian selection favour what psychologists term ‘intersubjectivity’—the mutual interpenetration of minds.