Speech/Ritual Co-evolution: A Selfish Gene Solution to the Problem of Deception
Knight, C. (1998) Speech/ritual co-evolution: A selfish gene solution to the problem of deception. In J. Hurford, M. Studdert-Kennedy and C. Knight (eds), Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, pp. 68-91.
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.
Modern Darwinism seeks to harmonize research into human life with the rest of scientific knowledge. This project depends, however, on accounting for the emergence of symbolic culture, including speech, a system of communication unparalleled elsewhere in biology. While Darwinians confidently expect an explanation (Pinker & Bloom 1990), it has to be admitted that, to date, no compelling account has been advanced.
In this chapter, I treat speech as a revolutionary development made possible by the establishment of novel levels of social co-operation. In this, I follow Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995), who provide a Darwinian game-theoretic perspective on the origins of human social cooperation, including speech. They view the momentous process as one of a limited number of ‘major transitions’ during life’s evolution on Earth. Each such transition is revolutionary in that it involves a relatively sudden and dramatic restructuring, like the breaking of a log-jam. The preceding barrier to the new level of complexity, discernible with hindsight, arises because, despite any emergent potential for self organization on the higher level (that of the multicellular organism, for example, or the speech-based co-operative community), the necessary cooperative strategies repeatedly lose out to more stable strategies of ‘selfish’ gene-replication on the lower level.