Babel's Dawn. Edmund Blair Bolles
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Slaves may have been perfectly articulate when they were captured, but conditions changed. An African Ibo tribesman, for example, might have been dragged to a plantation in the West Indies where he was worked by people who spoke an incomprehensible white-man’s gibberish. The tribesman was surrounded by other slaves from different parts of West Africa who knew nothing of the Ibo language. He was forced to speak a pidgin—a hodgepodge of words without grammatical associations. The obvious solution was to come up with grammatical usages that let people express more complex ideas and relationships than pidgins can organize. A grammatical pidgin is called a Creole language, and they have emerged wherever communities were once forced to communicate only through pidgins. About thirty years ago, it was finally established that Creoles were created by the children of those pidgin-speaking adults.
A statue of a girl who looks about eight years old shows her making the sign for “water” in Nicaraguan Sign Language.
About twenty years ago, a linguist named Judy Kegl (now Judy Shepard-Kegl) happened to be on hand in a Nicaraguan school for deaf children where she was surprised to observe the children create a sign language. A centralized school for teaching deaf children was new to the country. Previously, deaf children tended to lead isolated existences, getting by with a few signs known as home signs, a kind of pidgin for deaf people. The children were brought together in the hope of teaching them proper Spanish, but instead they turned their home signs into a full-blown functioning sign language.
Dictionary Johnson was wrong. When grouped together into a community, human children have it within themselves to take random words from their environment and create a new language. That’s how Creole languages currently spoken in the Caribbean, South America, Hawaii, the Indian Ocean, and Africa began. It is decisive evidence that no miracle is required to produce a new language, and it suggests very strongly that there is some inborn tendency to express ourselves. As Kegl put it, we have a natural “hunger for language.” In other words, language has a biological (and therefore an evolutionary) side to it.
Side by side are statues of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, the co-discoverers of the theory of evolution through natural selection. Wallace hands Darwin an envelope, symbolizing the historical moment when Wallace mailed Darwin a paper setting forth his theory. After years of silence, Darwin was forced to report his ideas publicly.
Darwin had suspected that language was biological, but most people thought that languages were entirely cultural. As late as the 1950s, a commonplace of linguistics held that the fundamental fact of languages was how different they all were. Whenever a new language was discovered, experts assumed that it might be completely unlike any language previously known. They took it for granted that language had begun as a result of invention, a prehistoric event whose birth was lost to discovery and not to be inquired about.
The doctrine of language’s purely cultural nature and origins gave way because of theoretical work by Noam Chomsky, the dominant linguist of the last half of the twentieth century, and because of the fieldwork in Creole languages by another linguist, Derek Bickerton. In his zesty book Bastard Tongues, Bickerton tells how he traveled through the world studying Creoles and their histories until he had the proof that different Creoles had different origins. They are not simply varieties of one common language. He also showed that it was the children who transformed them from pidgins.
How do children accomplish such a feat? Even more fundamentally, how do ordinary children start speaking so effortlessly? No account of language origins is likely to be accepted unless it explains why it is that (with a few tragic exceptions) every human baby in the world starts using language without requiring special training. Meanwhile, no animal, even with extensive drilling, manages to use, at the absolute best, more than a few hundred words.
The most obvious answer to these basic questions is that humans have some kind of instinct for language. By the early 1990s, there was a widespread view that language was entirely instinctive and that no two languages really differed all that much. Chomsky still holds that opinion, but it has become a minority position among researchers into language evolution.
One much disputed point concerns the amount of biological change necessary to produce modern speech. The language-instinct proponents in particular have often favored a single genetic mutation that, in a sudden “big bang,” transformed our ancestors into symbol users. Others, particularly biologists, criticize that view as naive. There is much more to talking than getting the grammar straight, as this tour will show. We had to alter our windpipes, take subtle control of our tongues and lips, tune our ears to vocal sounds, alter our breathing patterns so we could speak for extended periods without becoming giddy, become willing to listen to what was on another’s mind, become willing to tell others what we knew, develop brains able to use thousands of words, master paying joint attention, and obtain a knowledge of grammar. And it was all done by the normal, ceaseless process of changing generations—perhaps almost 475 thousand generations between today and our last common ancestor with chimpanzees.
A picture on the opposite wall shows a chimpanzee dressed in magician’s costume pulling Shakespeare (whose head is visible) from a hat.
The wonder of evolution is that every link along the chain of generations is almost exactly like the one before it and the one after it, yet the start and end of the chain can be very different. In the case of language, we began with an ape and ended with us. All along the way there was a steady mixing of at least three generations—juveniles, parents, and grandparents—and the juveniles always looked pretty much like the grandparents. It was a very slow morphing through a long line of individuals.
There are two natural—and misleading—ways to tell the story of evolutionary change. One focuses on the abstract turning points and finds revolution. For speech origins, revolution means a gateway through which the human lineage passed. On one side were the non-talkers, on the other blabbermouths. Revolutionary speculations are full of references to hopeful monsters and big bangs (or, for the technically minded, saltations ), events that made a knife cut across history and sliced the connection between what came before from what came after. To justify their position, revolutionists point to the many obvious differences between apes and us, including our success at adapting to many eco-niches, our languages, and our moral codes.
Their rivals tell a slow story of continuity. Sure, we talk, but all animals communicate. True, we make machines, but chimpanzees and many other animals use tools as well. Yes, we love, but bonobos give one another reassuring hugs. Stories of continuity put the stress on modification and similarity. They point to logic to justify their claim. You cannot evolve something from nothing, so obviously we must be the result of what came before—tweaked and stretched, but nothing really new.
Both arguments make sense, and both are wrong for the same reason. They overlook evolution’s essential mechanism of change: variation combined with selection.
Variation without selection occurs all the time. Variation happens because the systems for biological reproduction are not exact. The windpipe between mouth and lungs, for example, will differ slightly in every Homo sapiens. Usually the differences average out and the typical windpipe remains stable over time. Occasionally, just by chance, the variations lean more one way than another and the shape of the average body’s breathing organs drift a little. The important truth about variation, with or without drift, is that it is random and tells us nothing about the larger world.
That larger world has its say when it comes to selection. Selection, by the way, is a poor name for what happens. It sounds like somebody or something actively makes a choice, but in fact nothing and nobody is in charge. The process is much like a sporting playoff in which competitors face off and one team ends up as champion. Nobody selected the champion; it just won. Natural success might be a more precise phrase, but at this late date in history Darwin’s term is here to stay.
Selection begins with variation. A variation in a windpipe might be rejected for millions of years, and then suddenly circumstances change and the variation is passed on to another generation as just the right thing. What makes a variation the right thing? Something about the environment must have changed, making what was once an unwelcome trait become a winner. Selection keeps generations of organisms in tune with