The Wallace Problem
Part I Animal Cognition
For those who believe our general cognitive abilities are on a qualitatively different scale to that of say a bonobo or a chimp, the advent of this difference represents a significant enigma known as the Wallace Problem – after Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwin’s collaborator on the Theory of Evolution. He differed from Darwin in believing, as most people still do, that humans have qualitatively superior intellectual capacities and cognitive powers to any other species.
Why is this a problem? Well, with both Darwin and Wallace, we believe all our capacities have been arrived at by evolution and that evolution produces traits that are selected by giving enhanced reproductive survival chances. Species that are both predator and prey, who live in social groups, and for whom survival both within the group and of the group is evolutionary relevant, should, the theory suggests, be equipped by evolution with similarly relevant suites of cognitive skills. Most importantly, species that are both close in descent and face such similar life situations and problems should arrive at similar traits. Thus when it comes to closely related species facing similar life problems, evolution tends to produce a fairly continuously varying set of results, rather than a very disparate set. Indeed even when quite distantly related species end up facing similar problems, evolution tends to come up with similar solutions – in such cases we call it convergent evolution; for example this is why air breathing mammalian dolphins and whales have ended up looking very like water breathing, non- mammalian, fish.
But, despite facing similar problems and having pretty much identical brain structures to our nearest primate relatives, it was claimed by Wallace, and by countless others since, that the cognitive skills of the species Homo Sapiens are totally different from all others, even those of our close primate relatives. This does appear to be fairly self-evident when we compare the rich inner mental life we perceive humans to have to that of our animal brethren.
The Wallace problem is thus:- Why is there such a difference? How could evolution have produced a massive cognition difference between such closely related species?
We shall examine here the reasons for believing that, instead of what Wallace believed, the cognition of species forms pretty much a continuum, and that our nearest neighbours’ cognition is qualitatively similar to, rather than qualitatively different from, our own. If this is the case then the Wallace problem is one that is unlikely to exist in the broad form in which it has been traditionally conceived. I shall argue that it reduces down to a much more specific evolutionary question which I’ll attempt to address in Part II.
Does Clever Behaviour Imply Clever Learning?
We can break down what appear to be clever responses to situations as being accomplished by three broad methods – a) hard-wired information and responses, by which I basically mean clever but instinctual behaviour;
1 b) simple acquiring of information – e.g. clever behaviour produced by learning associations between behaviour and beneficial result through trial and error, or by copying observed behaviour; c) cognition – actually thinking something out by reflecting on the information available, pondering the problem until, via some degree of comprehension, one comes up with a solution. The success (or indeed failure) of this solution is then itself new information which will be used in the future – as can be seen in the fact that related problems subsequently encountered are much more quickly solved.
The assumption behind the Wallace Problem is that the third of these methods, cognition, requires a fully consciousness being to accomplish, and that full consciousness is confined to humans. So it is in the issue of cognition that the Wallace Problem arises, and to this we will address ourselves.
The Desire for Human Uniqueness in Cognition
It seems that most of modern humanity has long has a need to view itself as unique in its cognitive abilities. This need has produced a whole set of perceived differences that we have, at one time or another, elevated to the level of an important principle by which we can be isolated from the rest of the animal world. Let me refer to these as Human Uniqueness Indicators, HUIs for short.
Looking back on the last 100 years or so we can see a pattern emerging:-
A particular HUI is first decided upon by postulate or casual observation. It then grows in acceptance until reaching a state of accepted fact by philosophers, psychologists and scientists. It is challenged by findings of apparent presence in other species, but such challenges are initially simply dismissed out of hand. However the challengers defend and support their position with new findings. The new findings then grow in number until the HUI defenders are fighting what looks increasingly like a rear-guard action. Eventually, if the evidence of the possession of this ‘HUI’ by other species becomes too voluminous to dismiss, the defenders withdraw its HUI status, often with some of its supporters finding that, in retrospect, they never really saw it as an important HUI at all! Alternatively the HUI may be narrowed with additional constraints, not yet shown in other species, and the whole cycle repeats.
The ‘only humans can do’ status of cognitive HUIs is usually first breached with apes (chimps, bonobos, gorillas) – our nearest relatives and most like us, and therefore the species to whom the Wallace problem most applies. It is often only then that there are serious attempts to see if more distant species can also accomplish something along these lines. Our understanding then spreads like an outgoing wave – to dolphins, elephants, dogs, crows, & so on.
Despite this recurring pattern, the adherents of the Wallace Problem have remained in the majority in the philosophical and (though to a much lesser extent now) the scientific world for most of the 20th Century. The stubbornness of the postulate of human cognitive uniqueness has been supported by a number of people simply dismissing reports of animal cognition. The tendency of many pet owners, and people involved in caring for animals, to attribute mental and emotional states to their subjects has been dismissed as naive anthropomorphism. Philosophers in particular have been scathingly dismissive of any attempt to give the ‘inner world’ of any other species, no matter how closely related, most of the mental features we take for granted in ourselves. However they have been much less forthcoming as to how & why evolution might have created this huge difference.
Human Uniqueness Indicators (HUIs)
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Let me group the received wisdom of unique human cognition, or equivalently animal inabilities, into eight broad categories:-
1 Animals learning is not via true cognition but is only achieved in a simplistic response-reward manner. Human learning, by contrast, requires introspection and reflection until sufficient aspects of a problem are understood to enable solutions to be created.
2 Humans create and employ tools for anticipated future use. Where animals appear to do so it is simple manipulation of what is immediately to hand when faced with an immediate goal that is otherwise not achievable. Such uses may be seen as trial and error behaviour simply re-enforced by reward.
3 Animals have no self-awareness – the proof is taken to be that they do not recognise themselves when in front of a mirror
4 Animals have no “Theory of Mind”, an over-pretentious term philosophers use to mean that animals can’t see something from another animal’s perspective, and in turn are incapable of empathy, and hence have no sense of fairness – all these associated qualities are unique to humans.
5 Animals live only in the present – they can neither reflect upon the past nor contemplate the future. Hence what are highly advantageous evolutionary behaviours of humans, such as avoiding past mistakes, planning for the future, and deferring of gratification in order to obtain greater future rewards, are not possible for animals.
6 Animals groups cannot develop distinct cultural behaviours or politics (societal manipulation strategies) as all human groups do.
7 Humans are capable of meta-cognition by which is meant thinking about ones thinking, in particular evaluating the reliability of one’s knowledge and modifying one’s actions according to such reliability evaluation – no animals are capable of this.
8 If you forgive me I’ll leave naming the eighth until after we have dealt with the first seven.
The evidence for these HUI claims has not come from some uncanny ability to see inside the minds of other animals, but rather from the absence of any evidence in their external behaviour of their possessing these abilities. Thus absence of evidence is taken as evidence of absence. As we have discussed before in other topics, the validity of this conclusion is crucially dependent upon whether or not there are any barriers that might exclude is from seeing the presence of evidence; if these barriers are low or non-existent then it is reasonable to draw conclusions from its absence, however if the barriers to obtaining the evidence are high then their absence may have no significance and the conclusion that it’s absence constitutes evidence is unjustified.
There is no doubt that our inability to simply ask animals what they think represents a significant barrier to obtaining any evidence on the quality of their thought – thus we have to work a little harder to investigate the problem.
We can certainly agree that humans possess all of the above seven named qualities, but let’s see if detailed observation and experimentation supports the view that they really are absent in all other species:-
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1 Animal Learning
We are gradually realising that discovering what learning strategies are being used by another species requires significant knowledge of the needs, problems and lifestyle of that species. It was said that a dog learns to chase a ball because it has found that there is sometimes a reward for its retrieval; such learned behaviour that our pets and other animals acquire during their lifetime is really just a history of incentives causing responses. That there must be a little more to it than this is suggested by the fact that no amount of carrots will induce a rabbit to fetch you something. In fact we would now believe that many animals indulge in actual play – they will happily repeat many times some non-utilitarian actions even when no apparent reward is on offer. {You may have seen YouTube videos of wild crows sliding down snow slopes, flying back to the top and sliding down again: no reward-, sex-, or status-gained; hard to see any other reason than simple fun!}
The first to appear to refute the claim that animals cannot learn by reflection leading to some understanding of the problem were our closest relatives the apes. On presenting captive apes with problems – e.g. how to reach a desired food suspended well above them – the following behaviour pattern has now been often seen. After a number of futile attempts the ape retreats from the problem and sits quietly (they may even start scratching their heads!). After some time, a Eureka moment occurs – the ape springs up, goes to the site of the problem and instigates the solution immediately (sometimes the actual solution technique may not work initially but the ape fiddles around with its execution until it does). Thus, with a high suspended banana and a number of boxes lying around, none of which is high enough to allow the food to be reached by simply climbing on, a female ape initially fails to reach the banana. She then retreats, but eventually returns and immediately places one box on top of another {this problem has been solved to the point where in one case it took a tower of five boxes to be constructed before the food could be reached}. Another required one stick to be jammed into another to make it long enough to reach. Another group have implemented cooperative method of using logs to bridge over a protective electrified fence.
Some gorillas have learned to disable some mechanical traps in a manner that suggest they have figured out the basic mechanism of the trap.
In cases where the necessary ‘equipment’ required for solving the problem is not ‘on hand’ but somewhere out of sight of the basic problem, the solution is still arrived at. Such a solution requires multiple steps – envisage a solution, determine the items required to implement it, recall the location of the required items, travel to get to where they are and bring them back, and then use them to implement the solution. Undoubtedly a cognitive chain has been employed.
After observations of many such problem solving abilities exhibited by apes, we have then discovered much problem solving via apparent understanding in captive monkeys, in dolphins, and even in various species of the corvid (crow) family of birds.
As recently as 2010 animal psychologist David Premark expressed the common view that humans are the best at all general cognitive abilities – yet from 2007 chimps have far outshone us at number memory tests. When nine numbers are very briefly flashed up on a screen, Ayumu, a chimp at the Primate Research Institute, Tokyo, can remember them and point to their locations in numerical order – the best human achievement at the same test is, after some training, five numbers only.
Testing animals’ learning capabilities turns out to require much more knowledge of the species and its lifestyle that was originally thought - after all it has proved difficult to find IQ tests that are not
4 influenced by the minor differences in human cultures, and when it comes to testing other species the problem is orders of magnitude harder and subject to all sorts of difficulties. One needs to be aware of what will inhibit solutions, hierarchy-rules within groups, what will make them nervous, etc. For example at one lab, capuchin monkeys were found to be much worse at learning on a particular day of the week – this was eventually found to be due to the fact that the tester on those days was a very fidgety person and this disturbed the capuchins significantly; mice perform less well with male testers than with female and here it is olfactory – the simple presence of a T-shirt worn by a man was sufficient to put them off.
2 Animal Tool Creation and Use
Tool use as a defining HUI {man was known as Homo Faber – ‘man the creator’} had, under the accumulation of animal observation, gradually retreated from the simple use of an object other than the animal’s body to obtain a goal, to the more deliberative endeavour involving planning and preparation of the item (preferably being obtained/made well away from the site of its ultimate use to demonstrate this). But even this more sophisticated HUI has itself been long breached.
For example, chimpanzees will prepare a ‘tool kit’ consisting of 2 or more tools for particular jobs they anticipate tackling. This tool use tends to differ in different chimp communities. West African chimps use a large flat stone as an anvil and a hand-held stone as a hammer when cracking nuts. The young watch this behaviour and try it themselves with typically no reward for several years – so much for this learning simply being a response-reward cycle! They will start to get some results around age 3, but only become fully accomplished around twice that age – a long apprenticeship.
Palm nuts are particularly hard and require a good heavy stone hammer and an even larger anvil against which to hammer them. A mother chimp was observed to set off carrying a large flat 15lb stone (whilst also carrying her child) to a source of palm nuts some way off, which she then gathered up and set off in a different direction to where a large in-situ rock was exposed. She placed the palm nuts on the rock and swung the 15lb hammer above her head to crash it down on the nuts to open them. At the end she left the hammer stone by the in-situ rock anvil.
In Gabon, when chimpanzees go hunting for honey they do so having prepared a five-piece tool kit for breaking into and abstracting honey from hives. This set typically consists of a pounder - a heavy stick for breaking up the tough entrance to the hive, a perforator - a sharper stick to perforate through to the honey chamber, an enlarger - to enlarge the opening through a sideways action, a collector - a stick with a frayed end to dip into the honey and slurp if off, and finally swabs - strips of bark to scoop up dripped honey. In all, each community may use between 15 and 25 different ‘tools’. Ok all these tools are only sticks and stones but it should be noted that the prime tool used by Kalahari Bushmen is just ‘the digging stick’ to break open anthills and dig up roots.
A young orang-utan in captivity was seen to sharpen three sticks to enable their insertion into two tubes to give him a five section pole long enough to knock down suspended food.
Macaque monkeys are more distant relatives than any ape yet they also are tool users, and appear to have some comprehension of their action. Thus when foraging for mussels they use small stones in the manner of axes to pry them loose, but then switch to much larger stones to get them open.
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Capuchin monkeys (organ grinder’s monkeys) are significantly more distant relatives than macaques and they are very manipulative and will also use tools, however here it does seem as if their success is more as a result of frenzied trial and error than of cognitive contemplation.
As well as tools for manipulation, Elephants have also been known to use tools as sensors – e.g. when wading through deepening water they may bring a long branch with which to probe the depth of water ahead of them and retreat if it indicates the water is getting too deep.
A substantial fraction of orang-utans and chimps solve the problem of a floating peanut at the bottom of a jar by bringing water in their mouths from a distant tap and filling the jar to raise the peanut to reachable level – here water itself is being used as a tool. Only a small fraction of 4-year old humans (~8%) manage to solve this task, though a comparable fraction of 8 year-olds do.
Crows have solved this same problem by placing stones in the water - here the stones are the tool by which the water level, and hence the reward, are made reachable. They have learnt to bend solder wire into hooks to grab floating items. Their cognition seems remarkable for such small brains, though the task as executed did not require the full preparation and planning exhibited by primates, the stones and solder were placed by the problem. Corvid studies are, however, at a much earlier stage than primate work, and more needs to be done to test for planning etc. However they have already shown ‘meta tool’ use – using tools to create or reach other tools. They will use a short stick to reach a long stick behind bars, and then use the long stick to reach food that was out of range of the short stick. Of seven crows tried out on this problem, all eventually solved it, but remarkably three solved it straightaway, i.e. they worked out what was needed and followed the right sequence:- fetch the short stick to reach the long stick - i.e. use the short stick tool on a non-food/reward object, then use the long stick to reach the food. Work is now testing them on longer sequences, and apparently they are still succeeding. Such immediate sequential problem solving is not successfully achieved by most monkeys.
We are gradually seeing tool use in other more distant species – in reptiles some crocodiles use branches and logs balanced on their snouts as lures for birds wanting a watery perch, and an Indonesian octopus uses coconut shells (which it gathers) to form a shield when in its lair.
3 Self-Awareness
This was an HUI for which it came to be deemed that the crunch behavioural test was the ability to recognise oneself in a mirror.
Early experiments with apes had marks put on them whilst they were asleep that, when they subsequently spotted them in a mirror, they began to feel, thereby indicating they knew the image was of themselves, were dismissed by many {arch-behaviourist BF Skinner mockingly trained some pigeons to peck at marks when they stood in front of a mirror and at that time everyone ‘knew’ that bird brains were incapable of self-awareness}. However subsequent experiments have shown that apes thoroughly understand both a mirror’s function and their presence as a reflection in it. One chimp who has taken to wearing lettuce leaves on her head will go over to a mirror and carefully adjust the leaf whilst gazing at her reflection. That they thoroughly understand that it is their reflection they are looking at is illustrated by the fact that they will use it to examine the inside of their mouths, their bottoms, to help manipulate a twig to get something out of their ear, etc. etc. That they also understand its basic operation is shown by
6 them using it to look around corners; lower status chimps will take liberties when they know high status chimps can’t see them – and can use a mirror to particularly good effect in such situations.
It was then thought that only apes could do it – not even large brained elephants seemed up to the task until it was realised that a small mirror is no use to an elephant – large mirrors are what they need. Following the usual HUI-demolishing trajectory we then found that dolphins and even magpies can do it.
Some other likely species seem to have some understanding of a mirror’s action without registering that they recognise themselves, e.g. a dog will turn around when it sees something it wants in a mirror; monkeys will not treat the monkey in the mirror as a stranger (as they will do a picture of a strange monkey when they will turn their backs and their clasp children close as they do when a real stranger approaches).
4 Theory of Mind, Empathy, Fairness
It has been an almost universal belief that animals are incapable of seeing things from another’s perspective (expressed in philosophy by the pompous phrase -‘Theory of Mind’), and of displaying empathy, and thence to having any concept of fairness. Here we are looking at a very core HUI. Behaviourism took a very ‘Positivist’ view – observable behaviour was all you could use to find out about animals and any discussion of an internal life such as Theory of Mind was completely unwarranted and unverifiable speculation that only the naive would indulge in. {There was an old joke about two Behaviourists: After making love one says to the other “Well that seemed pretty good for you, how was it for me?”}
The dominance of behaviourism through much of the 20th Century was such that if an animal psychologists saw a bonobo reacting to the screams of another by running over and giving them a tight embrace, they’d seriously wonder about the function of this behaviour, “Who benefits from it, the performer or the recipient, and how do they benefit?” You would expose your incurable anthropomorphism if you attempted to consider to what extent this showed that the first understood and evaluated the second’s needs. However there are now so many observed examples of these abilities that it has become hard to deny this ability in other species. This is hardly surprising when it seems clear that an appreciation of the perspective of others and their needs clearly has strong benefits for survival among social animals. To give just a sample from legions of examples:-
Old chimps struggling to get water can be helped by younger chimps who may go out of their way to fetch water in their own mouths from which to feed the elder. In one example an old female was trying to get at water in the bottom of a tyre hung up on a high bar, but she couldn’t reach the water, nor extract the tyre because of other empty tyres hung on the same bar. When she gave up and walked away, a younger chimp came and removed all the other tyres, lifted off the water-containing one, and carefully rolled it over to the old female without spilling its water so that she could drink. When one chimp saw a mother was painfully limping, she immediately carried her child to save some pressure on the limping mother’s foot.
When Frans de Waal asked to see the new baby of a chimp he had long known, she left her group, came over to him (separated by a wire fence) - the baby was facing his mothers tummy as is standard but she
7 crossed her hands before lifting the baby off her so that it got turned to show its face to him – implying that she knew that is what he wanted to see.
A trisomic rhesus monkey – effectively a rhesus monkey with a Downs-type syndrome – has been observed being looked after as if she were a child by the other monkeys. In adulthood she is allowed to get away with stuff no other adult could – such as taking the alpha male’s food – he can see it is inappropriate to whack her as he would any other adult; also she is cuddled and protected by other females who can see that it is appropriate to treat this adult as if she were still a child.
Even capuchin monkeys, much more distant from us in the family tree, will share food - if one is in a position to obtain food and their neighbour not, they will hand food through to the second. That the first actually understands the other’s need is demonstrated by the fact that this is much less likely to happen if the first has seen the second eating not too long before.
An adult seeing two young chimps fighting over a branch immediately breaks it in half and hands each a piece thereby demonstrating an understanding of what each required to stop the fight.
Two chimps are separated by bars in a situation where one can reach rewards but requires a particular tool chosen from a tool set supplied only to the other. The other will look at the task, select the best tool and hand it through to the first – demonstrating a complete analysis of the other’s needs.
Capuchins working in tandem to gain a reward, will, if the reward is only accessible to one of them, share it with the other (often in a 50:50 manner), thereby demonstrating a sense of fairness. Frans de Waal has done numerous experiments showing that monkeys also have a strong sense of what is not fair – you may have seen his video in which an irate capuchin strongly rejects a normally acceptable cucumber reward because this time his neighbour has received a more prized grape.
The breaking of these related HUIs of empathy and ‘theory of mind’, has run the usual arc from primates to elephants to dolphins to birds. For example when a dolphin was stunned by an explosion in the water nearby, two other dolphins came and supported the stricken one under its fins so its air hole was kept above the water – they did this until it revived despite it entailing them having to hold their own breaths for much longer than normal, their breathing holes being submerged in order to achieve the support for their fellow.
Elephants have been seen acting as a ‘seeing eye’ for an unrelated blind adult. The blind and sighted pair become nearly joined at the hip; if they lose contact then they will make rumbling and trumpeting noises until the sounds enable them to be re-united, with much signs of pleasure.
When a bird buries a cache of food within sight of another bird, it will come back and re-bury it elsewhere, but won’t bother do this if no other bird is in sight during the first burial. A scrub jay will feed a potential mate as part of a courting strategy: if presented with two appetising choices the jay will mix what he presents to the female, but if he sees that the female has already been fed with one of the two, he will chose the other so that she gets something she is not sated with. Both of these behaviours show an ability to see that the other has a mind and desires that follow a pattern like their own. When a goose sees her partner engaged in a fight or squabble then her heart rate increases markedly even though she is not involved in the fight - just as would ours would do!
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5 Animals live only in the Present
It has long been felt that what is termed episodic memory, i.e. the memory of specific past events, is a crucial element of human consciousness, allowing us to learn from past mistakes, work social relationships by remembering past favours or slights, etc. etc. The ‘politics’ of animal social groups was supposed to be much cruder and a product purely of instinct or simple response-reward based shaping of actions in the present since episodic memory was deemed beyond them.
Proofs of ‘living just in the present’ were seemingly evident in a number of instances. It was long known that punishing a dog or a horse for some transgression had to be done immediately or with the transgression itself in full view. However experiments showed that when rats ate a food that produced nausea some hours later, they immediately learnt to avoid that food in the future. Thus we have a long gap between the action and the result, yet the rats instantly make the connection. However regularly giving them some other painful experience (e.g. small electric shocks) after the same time interval after consuming a food produced seemed to produce no learning of the association – it had to be digestive discomfort for the rats to learn to avoid the previously consumed food. This was an early realisation that much learning (including some of our own) is actually “biologically prepared”.
However examples of recall of the past being used to shape plans for the future are now commonplace in many animal studies. As seen in the discussion on tools, chimps will set off on honey hunting expeditions only after equipping themselves with the right tools needed for the contemplated task. Captive chimps will gather together straw, whilst still in their warm ‘house’, to take outside the next day for the provision of warmth when outside (provided they feel the weather has now got cold enough).
An ape who, from a window, saw food being hidden in a nearby but inaccessible area the previous night, will, now he is out but still unable to access the area, attract the attention of friendly humans and, realising their need for instruction on where the food is hidden, use gestures, or throw projectiles, etc, to direct their search, (thereby also demonstrating an inter-species theory of mind). Indeed we have instances of primates remembering unique events from years back in such a way as to modify their current behaviour when a similar situation to that single event arises again.
A chimp who had been party to a hiding-of-food deception just the once many years before, instantly recalled that deception when the same class of trick, though using a quite different object and hiding place, was played on a young chimp in his presence: he instantly went to the hiding place used 4 years before to check the same thing hadn’t been played on him again. There are many such examples of long-term episodic memory in apes and elephants, yet I was very disappointed to read respected psycholinguist James Hurford claim recently that, whereas episodic memory clearly is possessed by species other than ourselves, it only lasts for about a day in them!
Patience, rather than impulsive grabbing at the reward, is a vital tool to be deployed by animals hunting prey and of course this can only be achieved if the animal has a sense of future gain. Many experiments have verified that some animals are capable of delaying gratification when they can envisage a greater reward by so doing. Chimps are very good at this. When presented with sweets falling from a chute into a jar at a slow rate, but which stops when they take the jar, will patiently allow them to slowly accumulate before grabbing them. They tend to be able to hold out for almost 20 minutes – about as long as children ever manage in an equivalent experiment. Knowing that not grabbing will increase the reward they will gain, they will indulge in displacement activities such as scratching their heads, playing with the container, or best of all a toy, in order to distract themselves from the temptation of grabbing the sweets too early. This is just like the displacement behaviour children (to whom the 9 conditions have been fully explained) will exhibit. Many animals find this task too difficult – especially those for whom the wild environment teaches that grabbing instantly is strongly advised else the reward is highly likely be snatched away.
An elephant matriarch, if she finds that their normal route is drier than expected, will guide the herd to a water hole several days off their general course, showing she anticipates thirst in days to come.
In an experiment where crows and ravens were given beans – a routine food for them – but taught that these beans may be exchanged later for pieces of sausage, a much more desirable food, they would hang onto the beans for up to 10 minutes without eating them, in anticipation of a favourable beans-sausage exchange arising. A parrot called Griffin, who understood the instruction “Wait!”, managed even longer times and would distract himself by preening or playing with the cup holding the less preferred food (in one wait of 15 minutes he flung the cup out of his reach in order to relieve himself of the temptation).
Birds trained to associate one cage with hunger and one with plenty when allowed access to only one per day, will, when both cages are open at night, put food stores in the ‘hunger-cage’ rather than the feeding cage – so that if they are put in the hunger cage the next day, they will have provided it with food, in anticipation of this eventuality.
Crows will recognise humans who they do not like from some considerable time back (e.g. because that person was the one who regularly inflicted the indignities of weighing them daily the previous year); they will spot these particular humans in a crowd of others and single them out for mobbing! Could this remarkable mobbing show facial recognition – another one-time HUI – or could it just be smell or some other distinguishing feature they have learnt about that human? Experiments in which the handler always wore a President Ronnie Reagan mask when handling, would result in the wearer of that mask subsequently being ‘mobbed’ even if it wasn’t the same person wearing it – so it does seem to be facial recognition that causes them to mob the ‘offender’.
6 Animal Culture & ‘Politics’
Groups of social animals have a group culture that works for the good of the group and the individuals within it. In human groups there are certain basic elements that feature across the vast majority of groups. These features include a sense of hierarchy and order, disturbance of which regularly happens but not usually without strife and the need for some subsequent reconciliation to allow the re- establishment of harmony in the changed hierarchy. In Hunter-Gatherer groups it also involves a sense of equity especially in the distribution of resources; the distribution of the rewards of shared effort will be very equitable – but even that of individual effort will be shared - a successful hunter will gain the respect of the group and status within that activity but will often not be the one who distributes his spoils, thereby avoiding a less equitable distribution.
It appears that many of these elements also exist in other mammal social groups and especially in primate groups. We see a sense of the need to maintain order – much effort goes into breaking up fights within primate groups and forcing reconciliation between the combatants, and we have already discussed the presence of a sense of fairness within groups.
A vital component of this HUI was that only humans really understood the need for co-operation and how to productively handle competition and freeloading. All such apparent behaviour in other species 10 was put down to simple selfish gene control at work, not comprehensive social understanding. However studies soon indicated that the vast majority of mutual aid occurs between unrelated apes, so the ‘selfish gene’ explanation is invalidated.
We now know apes to be fully aware of the advantages of co-operation where the task calls for it – thus they can co-ordinate tasks requiring two chimps pulling in a coordinated and balanced way. They will also share rewards of such tasks. This has been extended to show tasks where three chimps need to pull in a coordinated manner. Freeloaders will be avoided and if necessary punished.
Experiments were performed where a multi-outlet feeding station was initially oversupplied, allowing all immediate access to food anytime they liked. The supply outlets were then gradually reduced to only one, so that the previous casual attitude to feeding became untenable. In this new situation, rather than squabbling over the reduced access, chimps will often just quietly ‘take turns’.
Co-operation is certainly required by group hunting species, from wolf packs to whale pods. We see elephants lifting heavy logs together, completely aware of the need for cooperation and synchronisation of effort. Teams of Harris Hawks show much co-ordinated effort in controlling the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.
Combining studies in the wild, (as done by people such as Jane Goodall), with those done in captive groups given ample space, good situations, and enough stability to develop socially (as done by people such as Frans de Waal), we now know that ape societies are very complex, with lots in the way of politicking going on. Thus in chimp groups the alpha male is often not the biggest and strongest, but a smaller, weaker one who is simply better at forming alliances. It is clear that they closely observe each other and are perfectly at home with tri-partite character and alliance reading - i.e. that A not only understands his relationship with B and with C, but also knows that of B and C with each other. Thus a budding alpha male looking to displace the current leader will need to keep not just his own friends sweet so that they will be prepared to come to his aid, but also will need to neutralise the important allies of the current leader – for this he needs to know just who is with whom, who to schmooze, and who he needn’t bother with. Once deposed, ex-alpha males will often attempt to establish neutrality with the new leader, but actively commence bonding with a younger male he perceives to be a future contender – the new alpha male will not see the need to be grateful to the deposed one, but a contender, too young and inexperienced to make it on his own, makes a grateful ally – the deposed alpha male thus tries to become king-maker rather than king.
It has been said if you want to best appreciate the schmoozing and scheming within a primate group you need to see it in the same sort of framework as Machiavelli described with human power struggles. One sees divide and rule, reciprocal ‘deals’, consolation of the distressed, and reconciliation and re-directed strategies (where the prime recipient is an enemy – who one is attempting to neutralise, or friend from whom one is needing to ensure support) occurring regularly. Usually such techniques are first observed in captive groups – it much easier to catch 100% of behaviour when they are in captivity. However such observations are open to the criticism that one is seeing human-influenced behaviour rather than completely natural occurrences. But once it is known how such things occur in captive groups, then the much more hands-off observers of wild groups can be primed on what and when to look out for in the way of similar occurrences in the wild, and thereafter they will usually be found.
Chimps in zoos sometimes even seem to be aware of status differences between their human carers and end up being much more wary of those they figure out (usually correctly) are the power wielders among the zoo’s human staff. 11
It was long assumed that humans were the only species to develop different cultures among different groups. Cultural differences are, at root, learned patterns of behaviour, usually started by individuals within a group that then go on to be eventually adopted by the group generally. Different groups will thereby acquire different cultures. Which particular behaviours get adopted as group cultures, depends upon a number of factors – for example the status of the inventor, or that of ‘early adopters’, and the utility and rewards from such adoption will also play a role. In a human social group a reward may offer no real utility other than the bonding that results from conformity to the group behaviour - in such cases we may refer to it as ‘fashionable’ behaviour.
In fact all such criteria are also met with in primates!
For example chimps in West Africa do much cracking of nuts, especially when other sources of food are in short supply, but this behaviour has never been seen in groups of the same chimpanzee species living in East Africa.
One cultural development among macaques on a Japanese island was observed from its inception:- A single junior individual took to washing sweet potatoes before eating them; being of low status it was initially only copied by her peers, but then it was taken up by her mother (possibly because of the actual benefit to the taste of the sweet potatoes), and then eventually it was adopted by the whole group. Now the large majority of all macaques on that island wash their sweet potatoes before eating them!
Ape groups in captivity have been seen to invent many ‘games’ – e.g. one group took to all marching round and round a pole, stamping hard with one foot and lightly with the other, shaking their heads in rhythm. Another group began a craze for digging holes, filling them with water from a tap (gathered in their mouths and transported to the hole), then sitting around the hole poking sticks into it – sometimes having a number of such holes on the go at any one time. One group started putting long grass behind their ears after one high status individual had decided to walk around in this manner; another group placed leaves on their heads.
Such ‘fashions’ are more likely to start if a high status individual has the idea – copying David Beckham is not just a human trait!
Does this mean that primates living in social groups have a desire to conform within the group – so that they are then seen to ‘belong’ – another basic feature of all human groups?
Well, an experiment was performed in which feeding stations contained red and blue dyed food and the blue food was tainted with aloes, not affecting the nutritional value but making it unpleasant tasting. Obviously the group in which this experiment was performed immediately learned to avoid the blue food. After some time however the aloe adding was ceased, but by then the habit was engrained and no-one tried the blue food anymore – indeed the large majority of apes born to this group after this never tried the blue food once to find out for themselves – they simply followed what had now become effectively a fashion. One can argue that it is not a fashion if no one discovered the lack of aloe, and anyway the behaviour of the young is probably simply that of an in-built strategy, namely that of the young copying their mother’s eating habits. This is clearly a safe one to adopt, and hence is probably evolutionarily selected. However a few youngsters would try the blue occasionally (and no doubt find that it was just as good) but they’d still stick largely to the red. A more crucial experiment demonstrating it was fashion was performed when later on an adult was transferred from a different group, wherein the opposite colour scheme had been adopted. Within a few days this new adult had
12 reversed his learned eating habit of blue only, to one of eating red only - even though he was well aware that the blue was equally good: when in Rome... .
The development of culture requires the ability to imitate. When early controlled experiments appeared to show primates incapable of imitation, this was taken as an HUI (despite numerous ‘anecdotal tales’ of primate imitation). Then it was found that animals find imitation of their own species much easier than imitating humans; furthermore, like us they will preferentially only imitate those of high status or those close to them. This can extend to imitating humans, but usually only if they are close to that human (hence the ‘anecdotes’).
Thus, following the “defence by alteration” route, this HUI was changed from ‘imitation’ to ‘true imitation’! ‘True imitation’ meant that where the behaviour results in some reward, its purpose must be appreciated.
However when problems requiring imitative behaviour included non-productive actions, as well as productive ones - the latter only being be found out purely by trial and error; it turned out that chimps were much better than children at honing in on the subset of the actions that actually produced the reward. Thus the chimps mastered ‘selective true imitation’ quicker than human children! Obviously this was too great an insult to our own species and so the HUI was changed again! This time it was decided that the human behaviour, now described as over-imitation, was, despite initial appearance, superior since it could be taken to ultimately produce a more faithful reproduction and thereby ensure greater social bonding!
7 Animal Meta-cognition
We exhibit meta-cognition every time we think about our own thoughts, about how we think, and generally evaluate the reliability of our own knowledge; are animals capable of such evaluation? The first evidence that they are came from work on rats nearly one hundred years back. When presented with difficult maze tasks the rats would exhibit an uncertainty response in which, instead of going straight down a chosen route as they do in easier mazes or ones they already know, they would hesitate, running backwards and forwards between the choices and spending time looking at them before making a decision.
Experiments have been done with dolphins in which they press one of two paddles to indicate which of two tones is the higher in pitch – as the tones get very close we reach the limits of the dolphin’s pitch resolution and they make more mistakes. On being offered a third paddle which acts as to cancel that choice and offer a new one, then sure enough as the tones get very close the third paddle is pressed more and more.
Most remarkably, similar trials have even been successful with bumble bees! Efficient navigation is very important for a bumble bee – only 40 minutes flying time separates a replete nutritional state and starvation – so they will learn to follow signs at maze junctions; signing schemes have shown that they have an appreciation of shape, colour, and small numbers. As the signage gets more complex e.g. combining colour and shape or even colour, shape and number, they hesitate more and, if given an escape route – which means abandoning the search but being offered a new trial, they will take this third option more often. Furthermore it appears that their evaluation of their own certainty is good – when offered an opt-out the failure rate of those that do not opt out drops significantly, indicating that
13 when they think they understand the maze then they usually do. {Bee’s brains are so small that this meta-cognitive ability has suggested that their brains are rendered more powerful by using analogue methods – i.e. their neurons are not just operating as on-off digital switches in response to input level simply exceeding a firing threshold, as mammals do, but rather they are using the analogue information contained in actual magnitude of the inputs {in large complex brains the stability of such absolute signal levels are probably not good enough – hence they have developed a communication system relying only on digital, on-off information}.
Jays were allowed to watch through two peepholes into an area they would later be admitted to get food. Through one they could see an experimenter placing mealworms into one of four open cups and in the other there would also be four cups but three would be sealed so that the mealworms could only be placed in the fourth. The jays would spend far more time watching through the first peephole – i.e. they correctly assessed that the need for more information was where all 4 cups might be recipient rather than just the one.
Various more complex tests have of course been performed with monkeys and apes and, needless to say, they all seem to indicate that they have no problem with meta-cognition, using it very usefully to maximise their chances of rewards within the group.
So of the above seven categories of cognition in which human uniqueness has traditionally been claimed, all now seem to be present in other species, to a greater or lesser extent depending upon need and capacity. Does this mean that there simply is no Wallace problem? Let me put this question in another way:-
If there are no HUI’s, how is it that we have come to dominate the planet?
Well you will have noticed that I have still not named the eight HUI. It is one HUI that seems unlikely to be convincingly disproved and thus the Wallace problem reduces to explaining its evolution:-
Part II The Reduced Wallace Problem – How Did Human Language Evolve?
1 Is the Possession of Complex Language unique to Humanity?
Other animals can have quite sophisticated communication systems and a few can acquire something that resembles very simplified human language, but is the language capability of humans qualitatively different, and if so does this present a Wallace problem for evolution?
That communication is necessary for animal survival has long been realised, but many felt that much of it was in the nature of simple automatic signal-response mechanisms. For example, although various monkeys, meerkats, and others, will make different warning sounds for different approaching predators, it was felt that the emission of the call was instinctual and the response by the hearer was also instinctual . Thus when a monkey hears an alarm warning of an approaching leopard, it was considered naive to assume that it has a thought process along the lines “Oh dear me, a leopard is nearby, I’d better get to some place where the leopard can’t reach me, I know, I’ll scramble to the top of this tree’s canopy!” ; or on hearing an alarm call meaning eagle approaching “Oh an eagle is coming, I’d better crawl under this bush where it won’t see me!”. It was thought that the monkey almost certainly couldn’t
14 possess the concepts of ‘leopard’ and ‘eagle’ with all their differing properties and capabilities; concepts that would motivate us to take similar precautions. The philosophers would smile and shake their heads muttering the condemnatory “naive anthropomorphism” at the very idea of such beliefs - once again using their uncanny armchair abilities to see inside the minds of other species. Whereas our behaviour would be a result of our alarm at the conceptual content of the warning calls, the monkey’s would be simply hard-wired instinct: hear one alarm - run to the top of the tree, hear the other – crawl under a bush.
Once again unearthing actual evidence takes a little more thought and effort! In this instance such probing brought us at least some indirect evidence that other species do relate the alarm calls to the concepts. How was that done? A monkeys’ alarm calls for these two threats were recorded and also the sounds of the growl of a leopard and the screech of an eagle. In the first experiments the alarm call was played first and the amount of agitation noted; then ~ 20 seconds later the matching sound of the predator was also played – a certain amount of further agitation was certainly registered by the monkeys upon hearing the actual predator for themselves, but nothing like as much as from the warning call. The experiments were repeated, only this time the second sound was not that if the actual matching predator but rather of the other one – this second un-matching sound caused far more alarm and agitation than in the first experiment, showing that the monkeys were indeed expecting the predator which the alarm call had warned about, but were much more agitated when they then heard a different predator arrive – presumably because they took it as indicating that there were now two dangers, not just the one they’d been warned about.
Thus differentiated alarm calls do appear to have conceptual content as far as the receiving animals are concerned and are not just triggering pre-programmed instinctual responses.
For us to discover the conceptual content of animal communication is hard, but things are much easier if we can persuade them to use our methods of communication.
Although it always sounded as if we could get parrots to talk to us, we were long told that, no, parrots were just mindless imitators possessing no comprehension of what they were mimicking. However when we study their output of speech carefully, and put some effort in to actually educate them in it, we find that these clever birds can actually communicate with us and demonstrate some quite sophisticated comprehension. Alex, a talking African Gray parrot, via his ability to learn some communication we can understand, has shown us that he is perfectly capable of forming abstract generalisations, and that he can answer relational questions of both the 1st and 2nd kind; mental capabilities long thought to be exclusive to humans . What do I mean by that?
Well first Alex was taught the names of many different objects and also the names of their colours and of the materials they were made from. For example he would learn that objects of a variety of key shapes were ‘keys’, he would also learn to assign names to simple shapes e.g. triangles {he’d say “three-corners”}, squares {“four-corners”}. He would be shown a tray filled with various objects and allowed to examine them, feeling them with his beak and tongue, and then be asked questions on them. For example “What are the three-cornered objects made of?” to which he’d correctly reply “Wool” this is a 1st order relational concept applied to all of the triangular objects on the tray; it shows that he has grasped the general material category ‘wool’, and has successfully seen that all the different triangles had their material fall into this general class.
With a tray containing triangles and squares made of different materials but all coloured blue – when asked “What same?” he replies “Colour”. This demonstrates 2nd order relational understanding – first he 15 has to determine that they are not all the same shape, then that they are not all the same material but finally finds that they are all blue – but he does not answer “blue” – he further knows that blue is in the general class of features known as “colour”, and so this is the answer he gives.
He could also be asked what was different; also he would be asked to find something the same where none existed and most of the time Alex would correctly respond “None”.
His skill at mental arithmetic was evidenced by being able to answer questions like “Keys – how many?” and could even do this after the tray was removed from sight again. Alex was able to correctly answer very many questions of this type in virtually any combination for so many different trays with lots of different objects (usually 16-20), in this way all possibilities of rote learning were removed. He didn’t need the presence of his owner - body languages of owners/keepers have been known to give away clues in past trials of animal comprehension. {He also showed further feats of mental arithmetic concerning various different objects placed under 3 cups as in the magicians trick, including the total under all three!}
Parrots’ vocabulary in this regard helps greatly in seeing their cognitive processes at work and, of itself, is astonishing when compared to what we used to think about their speech. Indeed at times it can feel almost as if he is using human language to the full – when Alex’s keeper came slamming into the lab after a frustrating meeting he called out to her “Calm down!” Ok, he may well have heard this phrase said in response to such bustle, and simply repeated it, but nonetheless his skills are extremely impressive compared to our original views of ‘parrotting’.
Alex’s ability to learn some rudiments of human speech has significantly lowered the barriers to our obtaining some evidence of his cognitive capabilities – and lo – a whole bunch of evidence instantly becomes visible – invalidating at a stroke the conclusion that in animal cognition the absence of evidence was evidence of absence.
The chimp Washoe learned ~350 signs in American Sign Language (ASL), and went on to teach some ASL signs to her adopted son Loulis. She would combine these to describe things she had not been given a word for – for example for a thermos flask she signed “metal cup drink”. One of the most telling signs of how even primitive sign communication can give a window into the mind of a member of another species was recounted by Roger Fouts {Director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute CHCI in Washington} of an incident that happened after one of Washoe’s caretakers had been absent for a while following a miscarriage:-
People who should be there for her and aren't, are often given the cold shoulder—Washoe’s way of informing them that she's miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat [the caretaker] in just this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her apologies to Washoe, but then decided to tell her the truth, signing "MY BABY DIED". Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat's eyes again and carefully signed "CRY", touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human (chimpanzees don't shed tears). Kat later remarked that that one sign told her more about Washoe and her mental capabilities than all her longer, grammatically perfect sentences.
{Washoe gave other clear examples of having a ‘theory of mind’ – for example she would slow down her signing for people she could see were new to ASL.}
When we look at the skills that can be developed by chimps and bonobos who have been taught to communicate by signs or icons, and by parrots such as Alex, then it is probable that the ‘usual suspects’
16 species all possess cognitive capabilities for learning many nouns, putting them together with another quality, and for counting.
However when one objectively examines the sophistication of all natural human languages it is clear that there is a qualitative difference between this and that of all other species. The use of a range of tenses; the description of non-sensed situations so that we may communicate “displaced reference” events i.e. events or situations that lie elsewhere out of immediate perceptual range of the ‘speakers’; the use of subordinate clauses with quite a range of embedding; the ability to describe non-factual events. All these and others are capacities that do not seem to be readily achieved in our attempts to bring language to other clever species.
Thus the feature that has made it so difficult for us to see how clever other species are, may be the same feature that gives us a ‘Wallace Problem’ – why do we have a so much more powerful communication system than our relatives – do we need to invoke something other than evolution?
2 Do Humans possess some sort of In-Built Grammar Module?
How this human capacity developed we do not know, and the exact nature and full complexity of human languages is still a matter of much study {despite the caricature of complete understanding promulgated by ‘grammarians’}, but we do know that it seems to have created much more purposeful groups operating very coherently and adventurously – what we might term a super-co-operative, or in biological jargon a ‘eusocial’, group. {Finally after nearly 200,000 years of existence our species experienced an almost discontinuous leap in our rate of progress when we started making permanent records of our language. This meant, among other things, that accumulating wisdom acquired over many generations required much less effort than throughout most of human existence – it was from then that our species numbers and technical abilities went into unprecedented overdrive.}
It used to be claimed that language was the only HUI needed to give us the full Wallace problem - it was felt that language was necessary to actually create and order consciousness. However we know that a rich conscious life can exist completely without language (see for example the rich inner life of the deaf, dumb and blind childhood of Helen Keller) and the results discussed in Part I suggest that this is also the case with other species. Some people thought that language was simply another product of our superior human cognition; rather than something that was itself a direct product of our evolution, it was just a by-product of the Wallace Problem rather than the problem itself. On this view it was by using our superior intelligence that we gradually worked out how to develop complex languages, teaching our expanding facility to each new generation.
With the discoveries that not only did all human groups possess language, and that those of the ‘more primitive’ Hunter-Gatherer groups had languages that were at least as efficient as that of the ‘modern’ languages of many developed societies, people began to ask if it was more proper to view language as a human instinct rather than simply a skill like writing which one learned in childhood purely via the tuition of adults. Yes, we do need to learn the language of our parents, but do we have innate cognitive modules that assist us in so doing, much as we have innate bodily facility to learn to walk upright, or a digestive system designed to cope with a fairly omnivorous diet once it has been adequately prepared?
The question of the exact nature of human languages and how they might have arisen is a wide ranging and quite crowded field of study that at times seems to generate more disputation than illumination.
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Most of the talks I have given to the Everyday Science & Technology Group have introduced you to aspects of generally agreed science, but they have not usually reached the cutting edge of research – in most instances this cannot be achieved in any degree of explanatory (rather than solely descriptive) manner in the course of a few hours – but in discussing the nature and origin of language that is where we are – an active, thriving, very busy and to some extent disputatious field. To introduce this in any sort of explanatory manner I think it is simplest if I prune the task to a brief overview of what I see as the most hopeful strands – thus what follows is not the normal well-accepted fare of most of our talks, but very much a Johnny Wykes’ take on what I see as the most plausible directions.
Out of many prominent figures in what I might call the bio-linguistic field, I propose to concentrate on the work of just two major ones: one whose work set the tone of the debate over the last 60 years, and the other whose theories it seems to me have, more than many, produced evidence-backed science and suggested routes that seem accessible to evolutionary mechanisms.
The first of these figures you will probably be well aware of – Noam Chomsky – whose 1957 paper ‘Syntactic Structures’ changed the nature of the debate on the innateness of language {and after whom Nim Chimpsky – a chimp who, like Washoe, also learned some elements of ASL – was named}. Chomsky formulated a proposal for an in-built cognitive module that could generate an infinite set of sentences from a finite number of rules – a ‘universal transformational generative grammar’, which mouthful I’ll denote by UG for short.
Linguists had long known that the actual structures of real human languages were very subtle and appeared to operate using a vast plethora of subtle rules; far more than the average grammar book contains – one can obey every rule in such Grammar Books and still end up with sentences that no native speaker would ever utter. When he looked at how children picked up such a host of subtleties in just a few years of listening to adult speech, he concluded that there was not enough teaching information provided to produce the fluency and complexity which they achieved - what he termed ‘the poverty of input’ problem. So he reasoned that there must be some form of ‘biological’ assistance at work, which he postulated as being the in-built existence of the UG. Thus all the children had to do to learn their parents’ language was to work out how their UG needed to be tailored to match, and to learn the vocabulary.
By analysing the nature of very different human languages such as English and Japanese, Chomsky concluded that they could be produced according to a relatively small number of rules. These were of two types. The first was a hierarchical set which analysed (parsed) a sentence into a tree-like phrase structure – thus a sentence, S, could be broken down into a noun phrase, NP, and a verb phrase VP. The NP and VP could themselves be broken down, and, importantly, this could be recursive, thus the VP might be built from a verb V and, say, another noun phrase NP. These rules yield a structure looking like an upside down tree with each word forming the leaves at the ends of the branches at the bottom, and the words were ‘merged’ upwards to produce the NP and VP, which merged finally create the single trunk that is the sentence S. Such a tree-like parsing of any syntactically-allowed sentence in a natural language would still require a large number of rules, but these could be reduced somewhat using a second set of transformational rules that would govern whether the resulting sentence was, for example, a statement or a question, was set in a passive or active voice, etc. A full description of this and all the developments thereon that have since then been achieved by Chomsky himself and many others to yield what is now called ‘the minimalist program’, is way beyond the scope of this discussion, but hopefully you get the general idea.
18
The big question is does a Chomsky UG explain how a species with the cognitive power of apes could be moved, by evolutionary processes, to produce the languages that we do?
3 The Creation of Creole Languages
The second figure is Derek Bickerton whose main work has been in the study of how Creole languages are created. This area seems to me to provide the strongest evidence for an innate, instinctual, in-built cognitive ability that we humans possess to facilitate the construction of language. The general situation seems to be as follows:-
A Creole is a new language that takes many of its words – its lexicon – from an existing natural language, but uses them in a syntactical manner (the grammar) that differs significantly from the existing one. Creoles can arise in a number of ways but all involve people having to learn a foreign language (let’s call it the target language) that is either forcibly imposed, such as in slave plantations, or has become economically and militarily dominant over a short period of time, in a location in which it was previously unknown, such as sometimes happens during the creation of Empires.
What appears to occur is that adults quickly learn a much simpler and cruder version of the target language – a version that we call a Pidgin. Pidgins do not have the full expressive power of the target language; they would never match any natural language in their power, but rather are a little like a much superior version of what the best chimps and bonobos occasionally reach when they acquire some hundreds of ASL signs, or some icon-based communication. Pidgins are good enough to serve as a primitive lingua franca in interchange with the target language speakers for the purposes of trade or work but they do not give us anything like the full expressive power of the target language.
We long knew that Creoles could arise in places where pidgins had been in place for a number of years. Once linguists realised that, despite having very significant grammatical differences from the target language, Creoles were in fact capable of fully expressing everything that could be expressed in the target language, and so they could be classed as new, complete, natural languages - the questions arose as to how these new languages were created and how so quickly? The first theories were simply that several generations of adults gradually improved their pidgins but there were problems with all of these; finally a very different one arose that seemed to fit all that could be found out about their creation. This was that ‘creolisation’ of a pidgin was not achieved by adult pidgin speakers looking to improve it, but rather by young children learning their first language by listening and talking to pidgin speakers.
On this model the youngest learners – infants – were those who would be most responsible for producing the sophisticated Creole as they grew; those encountering the pidgin for the first time after about the age of puberty tended to simply reproduce the pidgin, unless they were exposed to the more sophisticated grammar of their younger brethren. The evidence was dominated by historical analysis and what was really needed to test the theory was to have linguist observers present when a pidgin was first becoming creolised.
The opportunity for this came about after the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorial dynasty in Nicaragua in 1979. One of the policies of Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government was to create schools for deaf children – there had been none under the Somozas. Some of the children had picked up a variety of crude ‘home-signing’ techniques, and at the start the teachers in these Deaf Schools were hearing adults with a somewhat rudimentary grasp of ASL. Within a short time the children had
19 produced a fully powerful sign language which, although using many ASL signs – i.e. ASL served as the target lexicon – possessed its own quite distinctive grammar. It became quickly known as the totally new Nicaraguan Sign Language, NSL (it took about 20 years in all to stabilise intoits current form, the first infants producing a simplified version which infants coming in over subsequent years then refined and honed to reach the full NSL). The age dependence of the pattern of acquisition and improvement followed just that predicted by the historical evidence – children who were over the age of 12 on entering the deaf schools developed a pidgin rather than NSL, the latter only being acquired by them after great effort; those starting under the age of 5 grew into having NSL without any seeming effort at all.
The evidence suggests that children do have instinctive, i.e. inbuilt, cognitive abilities to construct sophisticated natural language grammars, and like many of our instinctive abilities, there are particular time windows within which the brain must be stimulated to exercise that ability, else it doesn’t happen. {We found to our cost that bandaging a baby’s eyes in the first few weeks of life – say after some corrective operation – bypasses the time window within which the brain exercises its ability to process visual images}. If you miss the ‘language construction window’ then a much harder straight learning exercise is necessary to acquire a language – it is then simply learned rather than ‘constructed’.
Which language, or languages, an infant will learn is provided by listening to the speech of its adult carers. Thus by listening to both the phonetics and the syntax (grammar) of their carers’ language, the infants ‘adjust’ or ‘tune’ their in-built phonetic and syntactic modules to what they perceive is the adult language and they copy its vocabulary into these frameworks. Thus at nine months the curious phonetics of !Kung (the African ‘click’ language) are just as readily acquired as those of Mandarin or English, but beyond puberty a speaker will not find it at all easy to learn the pronunciation of words in any one of these if they have been raised only on one of the others. Furthermore infant learners will be able to say if a word that is totally new and meaningless to them could be a word in their own language that they have simply never met, or is definitely not a word that would ever occur in their language – thus they have acquired the ‘phonotactics’ of their language. The syntax of their own language will also come completely naturally to them, without the need for any formal teaching by adults – it appears instinctively without any apparent effort. However by adulthood the syntax of other languages, especially where they differ greatly from their own, will appear strange and difficult, and most adult learners never acquire their full phonology.
In looking at the order in which children acquire the language we can see them at the babbling stage showing a preference for consonant-vowel (CV) combinations; when they start to speak this is what they use. Indeed this is the most common syllable form in all languages. Parents seem to naturally realise that CV and indeed repetitions thereof – CVCV - are more readily grasped than, say the apparently simpler CVC. Thus they employ these preferred forms in their ‘baby talk’ – e.g. parents will say ‘doggie’ (CVCV) rather than ‘dog’ (CVC). Here we may be seeing insights into the form the earliest ‘protolanguages’ may have taken.
So why do children struggle with school ‘grammar’ you may ask? What comes naturally to children is their own dialect which is often a highly local language – what schools attempt to teach is usually a non-geographically rooted ‘standard’ dialect. This tends to be one that is not fully naturally generated; parts of it are historical compromises between the dialects of different regions and parts are ‘Rules’ that, in the example of the ‘Received Southern English’ dialect adopted by the BBC in the 1930s, were first deduced by late 18th century ‘grammarians’ attempting to put some order into a system they were a long way from understanding. One often finds that the Rules that children have the most difficulty with are 20 ones that probably don’t make that much sense in terms of the rules they honed in on during their biologically promoted acquisition.
This all suggests that language propagates from generation to generation by an instinctual recreation of the language by the children of each generation from a lexical and syntactic target provided by the previous generation. The recreation will differ each time, this being one of the causes of language change – there is no ‘correct’ version of any human language – least of all the standard dialects. However, I argue in the Appendix, that the actual changes are almost certainly driven by a host of post- infancy exchanges taking place within each generation; these are then ‘enshrined’ by the next generation of accurate infant learners. All dialects have acquired ‘compromises’ during continual use over the years and those we learn in infancy are readily accepted as the norm, but when coming to learn another dialect (especially post-infancy), those compromises are less readily accepted and acquired. Thus we can see roles for both adults and children in language change – adults innovate through continued use, children legitimise in their skilled recreation.
4 The Language ‘Instinct’.
For many people the idea that such a sophisticated structure as the English language is actually instinctually recreated by infants without much struggle seems counter-intuitive. Yet this conclusion is supported by the fact that all human societies possess languages of equal overall expressive power (though differing in where, through their compromises etc., their strengths and weaknesses lie), and it is supported by the fact that children will, unaided, creolise a much less powerful pidgin into a full power language.
Indeed it is claimed that creoles all show certain commonalities, even though the circumstances of their creation may differ markedly, suggesting an underlying common language creation mechanism. Here there is an interesting analogy with the instinctive calls of songbirds. If you bring up young songbirds so that they never hear any adults, then, although they will whistle instinctively their whistling remains not very coherent – when they reach adulthood it will not be recognisable as any of the types of song normally produced by others of their own species, and so other adults don’t recognise or respond to it. If, however, you then allow these adults, who are only capable of the equivalent of ‘pidgin’ birdsong, to bring up their own young, whilst ensuring that said young can only listen to the song of their parents (rather than the complete absence of adult song their parents experienced) then this 2nd generation produces something much more coherent. Within six such generations the singing becomes fully coherent and the birds will be fully responded to by other members of their species. Thus subsequent generations of young gradually re-establish the coherence lacking in the first parents.
When we are talking, our thoughts inform what we say but the detailed creation of the sentences we utter, and the production processes involved in voicing them, are not really much more under our conscious control than is the digestion of our food once we have swallowed it. {Writing is not like this and is clearly not instinctual.}
Once we have acquired our sophisticated human language, are all our thoughts the product of this language instinct as some earlier linguists believed? It seems not. As we saw in Part 1, many species appear to have thoughts much like our own and yet do not appear to have our instinct for language, but rather have a struggle that is even more difficult than the task we have when we try and learn after puberty when our instinctual window of learning has passed.
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Once we have mastered a language our thought processes do seem to be influenced by it to some extent, but this is more in the way of an additional tool that we can employ beneficially at times rather as than the main medium in which we build our thoughts. Consider, for example, you are to do a little last minute shopping; you may well be going over a check list somewhat verbally in your head, possibly having remembered that there were definitely 6 items that you and your partner back at home had agreed you should get before you set out. However counting out those you can remember, you find that you can now only come up with 5 (say) – this will almost certainly be a very verbal, i.e. linguistic, exercise that usefully causes you to rack your brains for the missing item. However, as you approach the shops you must cross a busy road: I can pretty much guarantee that your assessment of when it is safe to cross will not be a linguistic exercise – you will not be verbalising the necessary information processing you are going through – i.e. you will not be saying to yourself:-
“This red Mondeo is travelling too quickly and is too close, I must let it pass; but the gap to the grey van behind it is larger and the van seems to be travelling slower, so there is at least a window on this side, between the Mondeo and the van. Will this window be matched by a sufficiently long gap arriving on the other side at the time I’m likely to reach the middle? Yes, there are two lorries coming on that far side but they’ll pass before that time, and then there’s a long gap to a VW, so it looks as if, after the red Mondeo, I’ll be able to safely cross both sides of the road and not get stuck dangerously in the middle."
To successfully cross you must be processing thoughts with all this semantic content, but almost certainly at a pace that is far faster than you can verbalise them, even to yourself. Thus the relatively simple linguistic conversation you were having with yourself concerning the shopping list will give way to complex non-verbal thinking as you attempt to cross the road safely - that the linguistic expression is an 'add-on' is revealed by the fact that if you tried to internally verbalise it, it would take a lot longer. Non-linguistic thought tends to be much faster than linguistic thought.
It has however been shown that 9-month old babies can have their thought processes influenced by associating sounds with objects. In tests of their appreciation of the conservation of identity, two objects are shown and then hidden by a screen - when the screen is removed it is revealed that one of the objects has vanished; the extent of the baby's surprise is measured by the length of time they gaze at the space where the missing object had been. If each object, when emplaced, had been referred to by the same noun - say "toy" - their surprise is not so great as if each had been accompanied by a different name - e.g. "rabbit" and "train". Thus we appear to be cognitively prepared for associating words with the world, long before we start uttering any!
5 How Has Human Language Evolved
When we accept that some extra linguistic ability seems to be inherent in us at infancy then several questions arise; in particular why has this enhanced facility evolved in us and not in our close relatives such as chimps and bonobos, and what is the nature of the difference in our cognition that has produced such sophisticated linguistic processes?
These two questions have been the subject of many Just-so stories, {they would often acquire snappy little titles like the bow-wow theory, the ding-dong theory, the yo-he-ho theory} and for a long time reputable scientists stayed well away from the field, arguing that the data was too sparse to admit of any serious science. It is however now the subject of more significant scientific study and debate and, although there are still too many theories which are probably not much better than plausible Just-So
22 stories, I feel we are beginning to make some progress, albeit with some considerable way to go before generally agreed conclusions can be reached.
Thus we do not know when enhanced linguistic use started to develop, whether it was with the Australopithecenes 3-4 million years back, or with Homos Habilis or Erectus 1-2 million years back, or with Neanderthals in the last few hundred thousand years, or just with ourselves, possibly in the last 100,000 years. We do not know if it developed in a fairly discontinuous manner, aided by one or two specific yet sophisticated helpful mutations, as people like Chomsky believe, or in a more continuous manner starting with some sort of protolanguage. Reading the various speculative theories I find that some that look linguistically quite plausible but the necessary evolutionary scenario less so; some rely on very much an internal cognitive learning process requiring little evolutionary pressure, and others utilise more standard evolutionary scenarios. The problem for science is that the data is so sparse that speculation is relatively unconstrained by it and we can easily construct ‘explanations’ that fit both with what little data there is and with with our own particular favourite linguistic and evolutionary themes.
Attempting to cover the whole area of debate in a short talk would be superficial to the point of confusion, so what I propose to do - more by way of example rather than claiming it as the best current answer - is to give a brief overview of proposals being promoted by Derek Bickerton {I find Chomsky’s view that UG was initiated purely for our own internal dialogue unsustainable given how deeply our linguistic structures are adapted for ease of reception as well as construction}.
5.1 Protolanguage for “Displaced Reference” Communications?
Species descending from a common ancestor diverge when faced with new challenges for which different adaptations evolve. Some members of the immediate ancestor species find themselves in a new ecological niche for which mutations that were previously neutral in their impact on the survivability of offspring, become advantageous therein. This means that subsequent generations with these mutations will thereon be favoured. When enough of these favoured mutations are established within the generality of the population occupying that niche, breeding with those not exploiting that niche can become unviable, and hence a new species is established. So to see why we may have favoured mutations that promoted greater linguistic abilities than our more arboreal relatives, we need to look at what the particular niche that we might have been operating in, might have encouraged.
Bickerton has suggested that the genus Homo entered an ecological niche in which we gained by becoming ‘super-scavengers’ of mega fauna (large animals). He postulates scenarios in which searchers roaming far and wide in the savannah would have to return to the main group to tell of a find and persuade them to accompany the searcher in enough numbers to drive off any packs of jackals or hyenas that might also turn up. Given the group would have a number of such searches going on, the decision as to which find the group should pursue would be more successful if the searchers could describe details of the type of find, its state and its location. He sees this need for ‘displaced reference’ communications as driving the development of a protolanguage.
This would not be the full language that Homo Sapiens eventually arrives at, but a simpler system not way beyond the level which modern apes are currently able to learn from us. Its delivery may well have started as a signed language – the vital linking of the sign to the meaning it conveys is more readily accomplished for many objects and activities, than is that same semantic linkage in sounds. Indeed modern sign languages still have significant iconic content, whereas the equivalent in sound (onomatopoeia) is rare in spoken language – so virtually all sound words are totally arbitrary. It may have been (or progressed to) a combination of signed and voiced communications. Eventually this gets 23 honed to purely a voiced communication since this has some significant practical advantages – for example you can communicate whilst performing some other task with your hands, and it’s especially advantageous at night! {Silent signing might still retain significant advantages when hunting.}
The evidence so far suggests that other primate species can certainly conceptualise situations that are not currently perceivable - think of the chimp planning to take palm nuts and a heavy hammer stone to the site of a good anvil rock for example. However we lack evidence of public communication abilities for such concepts. However there is clear evidence that other eusocial animals such as ants do use some form of this type of communication. In particular honey bees convey precisely such information to the rest of the hive when they return and perform their waggle dance – and their brains are very much smaller than any primate’s!
Many linguists have felt that communication that is of a purely informative nature, i.e. not arising from (and hence a reflection of) some felt emotion, but which nonetheless requires action on the part of others, requires a great deal of trust. Much animal communication is naturally ‘reliable’ as it stems directly from emotions, which themselves are not readily faked. Warning calls, challenges, bonding communications are all reliable since they are accompaniments to emotional states; but simple directions to some specific scavenging find are much more decoupled from strong emotion and ‘words are cheap’, so there must be trust for such communications to be acted upon and therefore be of utility – hence their use only by eusocial groups (in which trust is endemic).
Being able to indicate what animal’s corpse is lying where, to a group currently some considerable distance from the site, is probably much the most useful type of displaced reference information in the environment faced by our ancestors. Information on live prey or predators is vital only when the distances are short, and this very quickly becomes self-evident or obsolete. A dead wildebeest however stays where it is and all that matters is that the group arrives there before other scavengers find it. Furthermore in the African savannah they need to arrive both quickly and in sufficient numbers to drive off the other scavenging packs when those packs also find it. Use of such displaced reference information makes for a super-scavenging group since it allows individual members to perform searches and then communicate to the group as a whole, whereon the group can then decide which of its scouts’ finds is the most important to get to first.
What might be the content of such a protolanguage be? As mentioned previously it’s possible that the development of language is to some extent recapitulated by an infant’s acquisition process. In this, infants initially acquire nouns in preference to anything – there might be 95 nouns in their first hundred words. Grammatical structure first appears as a two-component sentence and so we may assume that this is likely to have been sufficient for our protolanguage – and would probably be within the scope of present day apes if they entered such an ecological niche.
5.2 From Protolanguage to Full Language
To serve the needs of a super-scavenging group of hominids the protolanguage does not have to have anything like the grammatical complexity of a Chomsky-like UG. So the question then becomes how and why do more sophisticated grammars get created and selected for?
Once again there are many competing theories but, sticking with Bickerton, we have the proposal that it is built from a simple two component system that basically amounts to attaching modifiers to a noun to
24 produce noun phrases – clearly useful in describing a route, e.g. “the tree with the broken trunk” - and also attaching modifiers to a verb to produce a verb clause e.g. “climb up high”, and then attaching the phrase and the clause together.
Bickerton sees many developments from this base as simple consequences of the brain responding to continual profitable use. Our primate brains will hone the efficiency of any thought process it is required to do often, and over time this can produce orders of magnitude improvements in task performance. It will also always be attempting to reach an optimum. Simply maximising the efficiency of production is likely to minimise the efficiency of reception – what is easiest for the speaker may be hardest for the listener, but since every brain is involved in both, then an optimum will be reached wherein sufficient information is transmitted in a manner that is readily decipherable by the receiver {we see the detail of these optima being reached in different ways in different languages}.
We know that the brain modifies its structure and connections in response to use during life. Furthermore if mutations (or indeed epigenetic processes) help automate and increase the efficiency of protolanguage capabilities, and if these result in increased reproductive survival, then evolution ensures their propagation. We already know of a number of instances in which changes to our behavioural culture has resulted in the propagation of genetic mutations that physically aid or exploit the cultural change: our teeth have reduced significantly in size since we started using fire to cook (which also produced a reduction in the size and energy needs of our gut – which may in turn have helped us supply the saved energy to our power hungry brains), and once some Hunter-Gather Groups took to pastoralism ~15,000 years ago, those herding cattle soon had a mutation to prolong lactose tolerance. Thus the ‘ecological niche’ to which a species finds itself genetically adapting can be a cultural one.
So Bickerton assumes that we improve from generation to generation by the development over time of a suite of heritable brain traits he terms the Language Bioprogram (LB). He postulates that the LB allows us to readily attach modifiers to nouns and verbs to create phrases and clauses and then to attach them to each other to create sentences. {It may advantageously also contain a T-M-A capability – this allows us to vary the Tense, the Modality (whether the thing we are talking about is real, actually happening, or being imagined as a possibility to be considered), and the Aspect (distinguishing the degree of completion of an action i.e. the ability to mark if it is ongoing or repeating etc); there can be some redundancy among these three T-M-A concepts but all languages cover them in some way.} The Bickerton LB looks simpler than a full Chomsky UG and has the advantage of working from the bottom up rather than the top down in sentence production – which has long been seen as a difficulty with UG.
When children create a creole from a pidgin we may be witnessing something like the gradual shift that might have occurred in going from protolanguage to full language. If they are applying something like an LB to a sparse protolanguage-like lexical set, or indeed a lexical set from more than one language (the adults own and the target), then we may be seeing an accelerated progress of how languages change when they interact with each other, folded in with the basic nature of the LB. Given the universal nature of his postulated LB, this would suggest that creoles might all have similar structures that are relatively independent of the syntactic structure existing in the particular target language, it being not very evident in the pidgin.
There are some common aspects to Creoles especially when we consider an individual class, such as plantation creoles. Their approaches to the T-M-A feature Bickerton assumes the LB must have are all similar, and they are also mostly ‘isolationist’ in their grammatical form rather than ‘inflected’, i.e. they use strict word order for syntax rather than altering the word forms according to their grammatical role,
25 this is in line with the language change mechanisms outlined in the Appendix. The word order they tend to adopt is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) as in “Dog bites Man” in English. In the Appendix I attempt a very brief bird’s-eye view of full language development and change once something like Bickerton’s LB is in place.
{The majority of modern languages adopt SOV (Dog man bites) and work on linguistic phylogeny by the Nobel Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann and his co-workers suggests, that there probably was a single ancestor language and the word order in that was SOV. Indeed we have records of languages changing from SOV to other forms, but none going the other way. NSL adopts SOV.}
Although it is not my intention to talk here about the actual sound production of human language {since although this is a fascinating study with much being learnt, I don’t think it presents so much of a Wallace problem}, it is interesting to note that crucial in this is the descent of the larynx below that where it is in chimps and bonobos; it doesn’t occur at birth but only after around a year – the descended larynx increases the danger of choking whilst suckling and breathing, so we seem to have only gone for mutations that allows it to happen later and we can see this as possibly an instance in which children have their ‘ontogeny recapitulating their phylogeny’ linguistically.
If the use of richer and richer protolanguage is to be aided by selection of favourable mutations in brain organisation leading to the development of an LB, these must have produced reproductive benefit. What might these benefits be?
Well clearly there are the practical ones described above as far as the location and convergence of the group in strength to scavenge mega fauna more efficiently than other pack mammals. But very important could also be the tightening of the social bonds of the group so that we become more ‘eusocial’. The ability to re-tell an event renders episodic memory a group tool, not just an individual one. Recounting transgressions of group norms that may have happened out of sight of others (covert transgressions being much the more common transgressions in primate groups) has very significant advantages in maintaining the norms of a group: grievances are readily expressed in factual detail rather than just indicated in general terms by emotional displays. Human hunter-gatherers will reinforce a sharing of hunting spoils ethic by telling of transgressions that might only have been witnessed by one other member, thereby punishing the transgressor and using the tale as a warning to others. Such accounts provide an additional powerful tool in group bonding, cohesion and behaviour. Indeed given the need for trust to act upon non-emotion driven communication it could well be that the language and trust created a feedback loop – the more one acted on linguistic information, the more one trusted, and the more one trusted, the more ready one was to act on information! The group thus becomes more coherent, loyal and co-operative – qualities that improve their efficiency, particular when dealing with mega fauna. To some who have been brought up with a Hobbesian view of human nature, it may comes as a surprise to learn that we are actually far more co-operative and altruistic than any other mammalian species and indeed we qualify as more of a eusocial species than any other mammal. Thus far from there being “no such thing as society”, the success of humanity is almost certainly down to its extremely social nature.
Furthermore any resulting improvements in scavenging and social techniques are more readily accumulated by linguistic transmission from generation to generation. Knowledge learnt from dealing with rare extreme events will tend to evaporate when only held in the memory of the actual witnesses, but once the detail can be told and retold, the avoidance of the same calamity by future generations becomes much more likely.
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Inter-group negotiations can also become more detailed and reliable so that accommodations satisfactory to both groups can be arrived at, thereby reducing barriers to multi-group co-existence and co-operation – “jaw-jaw is much better than war-war”.
Thus mutations in brain organisation that are helpful to acquisition and improvement of the protolanguage, and which gradually facilitate something akin to Bickerton’s postulated Language Bioprogram, are likely to propagate. Continual development and employment of the LB thereby produces the first full language.
{Please remember my health-warnings at the start of this part of the discussion – here I am not reporting universally agreed science but just one strand that I see as reasonably well argued, has experimental support, and looks ‘do-able’ by evolutionary and brain processes rather than just ‘plausible’ by the same. There are many respected workers in the field who differ with Bickerton – and they may be right. {For those interested in a further selection of views, some of which find an overlap at least here, the works of, among many others, Terrence Deacon, Robin Dunbar, Dean Falk, Tecumseh Fitch, Jerry Fodor, Jim Hurford, Stephen Pinker, Roy Rappaport, Ib Ulbaek.}
6 Conclusion
The story we would get from the work of Bickerton is that our human ancestors took a crucial ‘path less travelled’ by other primates when, on finding themselves in more open savannah, they adopted the strategy of becoming the major scavengers of African mega fauna. This required the development of Displaced Reference communication which effectively meant building a protolanguage capable of producing nouns and a few verbs and linking them. From this simple beginning, brains that are tuned to create a Language Bioprogram become advantageous and hence are selected for; this LB conditioning enabled us to readily attach modifiers which allow noun phrases and verb clauses to become more informative and flexibly tailored to specific situations. The routine use of this automatically yields optimisation of production and comprehension, utilising many parts of the brain, and so we arrive at fully fluent linguistic communication.
As a result of all the animal studies we have been discussing, a growing number of animal ethnologists believe that the general Wallace Problem doesn’t exist; de Waal calls the continued holding of such beliefs, despite the many evidences to the contrary, a ‘neo-creationist position’. If this is the case then human language itself, as the above linguistic findings suggest, must originate in capacities that are possessed in large part by our nearest relatives, something that seems to be borne out by the presence of similar neural substrates to those we believe to be important in our language productions and comprehension, and also of certain crucial genes. However some ‘tipping point’ was crossed when it came to hominids, coming to fruition with Homo Sapiens Sapiens, possibly justifying a suggested renaming - Homo Sapiens Loquens: the wise linguistic hominid.
That language is undoubtedly a tipping point as far as species achievement is concerned there can surely be little doubt. The bonding within the group is made very much more secure by the ability to share detailed accounts of each other’s actions & the shared language is itself a marker of identity. By combinations of stories of our past we are eventually able to reach new conclusions unavailable to species lacking the easy inter-generational transmission of complex thoughts and information. We have seen that a number of other species can pass on to subsequent generations their achievements of practical skills and knowledge of useful techniques, but this is only by direct demonstration and simple
27 communication. The transmission depends upon the continual application of the knowledge – lessons that may have been costly to one generation from rare extremes of situation cannot be so passed on if complete generations pass before such a thing recurs unless there is linguistic transmission. The lack of accumulation of the detailed ponderings of countless previous generations, through the re-telling of tales of such extremes, and the sharing of speculative ideas on causes and effects, means that these intellectual species cannot reach the tipping points of analyses and syntheses that humanity reached some time back. {Of course that does not mean that they won’t in the future, if and when the appropriate ecological niche presents itself to them.}
If the thesis presented in both parts of this discussion is basically correct, then we must see the large majority of our cognitive abilities as not being exclusive to humanity but simply part of a continuum with that of other complex brained species, whose mental inner world of cognition and empathy has a richness we are only just beginning to appreciate. Thus there is no Wallace problem as far as those traits are concerned. The outstanding sole exception in our traits is our ability to construct and use languages of such power that they enable us to exchange with each other almost the full richness of our experiences and inner feelings and thoughts. This ability is an undoubted breakthrough for the quality of our pooling of knowledge, experience, feelings and sentiments. It would seem that it is our linguistic ability that has turned us into what may be described as the first super-social species. A species whose ability to learn from past mistakes of previous generations and re-enforce useful group norms to a greater degree, and which facilitates much greater inter-group co-operation, is able to produce concerted actions which are far more powerful than any that have gone before.
The study of how our language actually works is thus one of our great intellectual quests. This may then tell us more about how the complex linguistic skills actually evolved and tell us more about the nature of what makes us special than we can currently understand. The absence of this linguistic HUI in other species is what has led us to exaggerate the magnitude of the Wallace problem.
This brings us remarkably right back to Darwin – in his debate with Wallace Problem he felt that the development and continued use of language would account for much of our intellectual development beyond that of our fellow primates.
J S Wykes 4/3/2017
Appendix Grammatical Growth and Change In Languages
As NSL was being created it attracted much linguistic study. Did its grammatical development support anything like Bickerton’s {noun phrase + verb clause} Language Bioprogram? When just a year or so into its development children were shown a comic video of a man pushing over a women and were asked to sign what they’d seen. They just used basic two word ‘sentences’, e.g. “Man push.” and then, after a pause, “Woman fall.” Later we see these becoming more adjacent “Man push.Woman fall” - thus the act of being simply adjacent to one another forms a grammatical function.
This grammatical function of adjacency can be readily achieved by the invention of a new type of word whose sole purpose is to perform a grammatical function – in this case the function word “and” does the job of combining these two single participant sentences into a single two-participant sentence “Man push and woman fall.” Modern languages are continually inventing new nouns and verbs, but words 28 whose sole purpose is to perform a grammatical function tend to stay fixed at a small number (and usually a small size) – we don’t need that many of them and they all tend to be small e.g. “or”, “but”, “by”, “on”, “also” etc. We also find that very common verbs such as “to be”, to have” and “to do” can get roped in to perform grammatical functions as well as their normal meaning – when used in a purely functional role they are termed “auxiliary” verbs.
If we look at the panoply of the approximately 7000 languages still extant (a rapidly reducing number) we see a large spectrum of grammatical structures. Probably the most significant variation between the way different languages perform the grammatical jobs is the extent to which they are tackled by increasing the morphological (shape) complexity of the words themselves – the so-called inflected languages, or where the grammar is indicated purely by the position of the word in the sentence – so- called isolating languages.
It seems that in languages that have been allowed to develop in small communities – as would have been the norm for most of our 200,000 years of existence – we find that individual nouns and verbs accumulate additions performing a purely grammatical function – these inflexions can be prefixes, suffixes, or internal vowel change. For example in English we inflect the verb “drive” with a suffix to give us “driven”, or with an internal vowel change to give us “drove”.
However modern English has only a small number of inflexions compared to many languages. It is much nearer the isolating end of the spectrum – so “Brutus killed Caesar” has its meaning totally changed by simply reversing the word order to “Caesar killed Brutus”. Conversely in a language near the inflected end, such as Latin, the first meaning is given by the sentence “Brutus Caesarem occisit” and this sentence retains that meaning no matter in what order the three words are placed.
Why are these two very different routes adopted?
When we look at the distribution of language types we find that, in languages that have remained being used by only by self-contained linguistic groups, inflexion is preferred to positional isolation. We can probably see this as a natural development of continual adult speech – separate words that helped define the grammar are spoken so often that they get contracted and stuck onto the word to which you want that grammar to apply – thus our regular past tense inflection in English verbs taking us from “I jump” to “I jumped” arose from a process of continued contraction of the grammatical task performed originally by the auxiliary verb “to do” to indicate the past tense. So we went from “I jump did”, to “I jumpdid”, to “I jumped”, and this is on its way to “I jumpt”; indeed phonologically it has pretty much reached the last form, but our spelling has not yet caught up with events (as it has with say ‘dwelt’, and no doubt there will be much outcry from Grammarians concerning “falling standards” when it finally does).
Highly inflected languages are more compact so sentences can be uttered more rapidly. Many languages spoken by small Hunter-Gatherer groups are much more highly inflected than a language such as Latin; comparing the morphological complexity of some H-G languages to Latin has been said to be like comparing the complexity of chess with that of draughts.
So why the change to isolating language?
Possibly for the following reason:- When two different linguistic groups come into contact and they both use a high degree of their own historically developed inflexions, the basic vocabulary that each must learn from the other appears much larger than the basic lexicon that underlies it. Thus mutual
29 comprehension is aided by first just learning the basic roots of the nouns and the verbs, rather than trying to master their myriad inflexions. Thus if we have two such groups interacting greatly then many of each other’s arcane inflections will not be learned, but their grammatical role continues to be needed. It is relatively easy to establish a mutually agreed grammatical word-order for this reduced lexical set. Thus rather than learning the full panoply of each other’s inflected words – the move to more word-order grammar is straightforward and so languages which experience much interaction with other linguistic communities become more isolating languages.
When the language of a very small area of central Italy spread out over all of Europe by force of arms, only to be overwhelmed by great migratory waves of non-Latin speakers from the east, the migrants pruned Latin of lots of its inflexions and we ultimately got French, Spanish, Italian, etc – which, whilst still retaining more inflections than modern English, have far less than the Latin they came from. When the Normans suppressed Old English and then lost control in France and decided to try and learn the local language after all, the language went from being highly inflected to being highly isolationist. {Later this was much to the displeasure of 18th Century Grammarians anxious for a ‘high-status’ grammar who saw inflected Latin & Greek as linguistic perfection & have tried ever since to enforce rules that only make sense in inflected languages - such as not splitting infinitives – to our modern English isolationist grammar}.
The languages that arose from the construction of the multilingual empire that became China, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, are highly isolationist in their grammar. In general there does indeed seem to be a correlation between size and past diversity of a given linguistic groups and where its language lies on the inflexion – isolation spectrum. {Note that Chinese languages are also ‘tonal’ - which means that they use relative pitch profile when saying the word to convey semantic information. Thus in Mandarin a word that we would write alphabetically as “ma” means “mother” if said at a steady pitch; “hemp” if said with a rising pitch; “horse” if said with a pitch that dips in the middle; and “scold” if said with a falling pitch. Of course in Chinese characters there is no confusion in the writing – they are all different. Pitch ‘inflexion’ here is being used semantically, not as a grammar indicator – in Mandarin that is still just given by word-order.}
We can now see why I said that language change is probably driven by post-infant discourse rather than by the infants themselves, but each generation’s alterations are faithfully installed in the next generation by accurate recreation that infants perform.
JSW4/3/2017
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