There are several paradoxes that cast doubt on whether
human language and the biology enabling it could have naturally originated through any type
of process yet imagined by anthropologists, linguists, or evolutionary
biologists.
The
“You Can't Start a Language Without a Language” Paradox
Under orthodox assumptions it is extremely difficult to imagine any plausible
scenario that might have begun human language. We might perhaps
imagine some extraordinary caveman determined to start teaching
language to some of his fellow caveman. But how could such an
individual ever have even had a thought such as, “I will now start
teaching some words to my cavemen pals” when no language yet
existed?
We can imagine such a caveman inventing some nouns
useful to himself and his other cave dwellers. But in order to get
anything like a real language started, you need some rules of
grammar. How could rules of grammar ever have been taught to anyone,
before a language had appeared? You can't explain a rule of grammar
to someone unless you already have a language for the explanation.
In order for a language to get started to any
significant extent, it would need to be established in some group
larger than some tiny little tribe of 10 or 12 people. If there was
any type of government or large social organization, even one
consisting of as few as 100 people, then such a government or
organization could force all of its members to standardize on some
particular language. But it seems that no such government or social
organization could ever get started in the first place unless there
was already a language existing.
We can summarize such difficulties with the
slogan, “You can't start a language without a language.”
The
Inferiority of Primitive Speech Paradox
Michael C. Corballis has argued that a hand gesture
language existed before human speech. It is indeed true that a very
wide variety of signals can be made with human hands. That is
demonstrated by the sign language used by the deaf. But the
possibility of a hand gesture language does nothing to explain the
origin of spoken language. To the contrary, there is a very strong
reason why such a possibility makes the origin of spoken language
much harder to explain.
The
possibility of a hand gesture language creates a large paradox that I
may call the IPS paradox. IPS is an acronym standing for Inferiority
of Primitive Speech. I can describe the paradox or difficulty as
follows:
- Before any spoken language, it would have been possible for humans to communicate fairly effectively and clearly using hand gestures, in which particular words are expressed by particular hand gestures.
- If humans first started speaking before developing all the specialized biology needed for clear speaking, they would only have been able to speak in a very unclear and garbled manner, like a modern person trying to speak while holding his tongue against the bottom of his mouth, or trying to speak with a mouth filled with rocks.
- Such a primitive mode of oral communication would have been greatly inferior to hand gestures as a mode of communication.
- It therefore seems that oral language never could have become established before organisms developed good speech biology like modern humans have, and that there would never have been any gradual progression from primitive, garbled speaking to the type of clear speaking like humans now have.
You
can get a better grasp of this difficulty by imagining some time in
which a hand gesture language had been established among cavemen.
Now, imagine that someone tries to introduce oral language. But it
wouldn't have been like someone trying to teach new words by pointing
to a rock and saying, “Sog,” or pointing to the sun and saying,
“Wof.” It would not have been nice, clear intelligible words
like that. Instead, given the non-existence of specialized speech
biology, it would have been like someone pointing to one object and
saying, “Aaaaa,” where “Aaaaa” is the sound you might make
trying to speak the word “rock” while holding your tongue to the
bottom of your mouth.
Trying
to establish a spoken language under such a limitation would have
been effectively impossible. People would not have switched from an
effective form of communication (nice, clear, easy-to-understand hand
gestures) to a very ineffective form of communication based on
garbled, barely intelligible vocalizations. It seems, therefore, that
there is no plausible way under orthodox assumptions to explain the natural origin of oral
language and the human biology needed for its clear articulation.
This is the IPS paradox.
Even
if you imagine some lucky individual who was blessed by some random
mutation making it easier for him to speak clearly, such a person
would have started out in a social group in which he was the only one
with such a mutation. You can't get spoken language started with only
person in the group being able to speak clearly.
In the
graphs below we see a visual representation of the IPS paradox. In
the first graph, we see that human speech starts out being much less
effective for communication than a hand-gesture language. The second
graph depicts a time many thousands of years later, after an
anatomical progression which has caused spoken language to become as
effective as a hand gesture language. The third graph depicts a time
many thousands of years later, after an anatomical progression which
has caused spoken language to become more effective than a hand
gesture language. The problem is that the tale told by this series of
graphs is an unbelievable story. If spoken language had started out
being much less effective than hand gestures, primitive humans or
their ancestors would never have started using such spoken language,
and would have instead kept communicating with hand gestures.
The
claim that a hand gesture language would have been much easier to get
started than a spoken language is supported by the fact that
scientists have succeeded in teaching a gorilla named Koko to communicate with
hand gestures, but no one has succeeded in teaching an ape or a
monkey anything like a spoken language.
Naturalistic
Attempts to Overcome the IPS Paradox
Let us
look at some ways you might try to resolve this paradox without straying
too much from Darwinian orthodoxy. One possible way out would be to
deny the claim that spoken language must have been much less
efficient than hand gestures as a communication tool. You might
claim that when the first words were spoken perhaps 80,000 years ago,
people were able to speak almost as well as we can speak today.
But
such a claim can only be made by ignoring the specialized biology
humans have that enables speech. This biology is mentioned on page
174 of the book How Language Began by Daniel L. Everett, who states the following:
The
creation of speech requires precise control of more than one hundred
muscles of the larynx, the respiratory muscles, the diaphragm, and
the muscles between the ribs – our “intercostal muscles”-- and
muscles of our mouth and face – our orofactal muscles. The muscle
movement required of all these parts during speech is mind-bogglingly
complex.
And
here Everett is not even mentioning specialized biology in the brain.
Stroke victims often lose much of their ability to speak. So there
is not only a good deal of the brain specialized to allow speech, but
also a good deal of speech-specialized biology in the area around the
mouth, throat and lungs. There is no natural reason why humans would
have had so much speech-specialized biology when humans first started
to speak.
Another
way to try to overcome the IPS paradox would be for someone to admit
that the first use of spoken language was very ineffective, but to
claim that only a tiny use was made of such language. For example, a
person might suggest a scenario like this:
80,000
B.C: 99% hand language, 1% spoken language
60,000
B.C: 98% hand language, 2% spoken language
40,000
B.C: 95% hand language, 5% spoken language
20,000
B.C: 50% hand language, 50% spoken language
10,000
B.C: 100% spoken language
The
problem with such a scenario is that the very small use of language
at the beginning would be insufficient to cause all the biological
specializations related to speech. If speech is the only method of
communication, there might be some natural selection reason that
might cause those who spoke better to survive much longer, resulting
in biological specializations over generations favoring speech. But
if speech were merely a minor effect completely overshadowed by hand
language, then there wouldn't be any major “survival of the
fittest” advantage that might be evoked to help explain the
appearance of many biological specializations favoring speech. So it
seems that a scenario like the one above would be insufficient to
explain how human vocalization abilities could ever progress to the
point that spoken language could become as effective as hand
language.
The
“Too Hard for a Language-Improvement Mutation Achieving Fixation”
Paradox
We should not at all reduce the origin of language
problem to the mere problem of explaining the origin of a
non-physical language. The broader problem includes two things: (1)
the origin of a nonphysical language; (b) the origin of physical
changes in human biology that made language possible.
As the previous quote by Everett shows, there are many
biological features below the brain that are specialized for
producing language. There also is a significant part of the brain
involved in interpreting or producing speech, as we can tell when a
stroke causes someone to lose his ability to speak, or damages his
ability to understand speech.
An evolutionary biologist would attempt to explain such
biological features by imagining random mutations that were blessed
by natural selection. But such features would require multiple
favorable mutations. One problem is that at the time such random
mutations supposedly occurred, the human population was very small –
supposedly no more than about 20,000. The smaller a population, the
less likely that any particular set of favorable mutations will occur
in it (just as the smaller the pool of poker players, the less likely
it will be that at least one of them will be dealt a royal flush in spades). So we must imagine some incredibly improbable luck for
all of these favorable speech-enhancing mutations to have occurred.
Here is the generic way in which evolutionary biologists
attempt to explain biological innovations:
- First, they imagine there was some lucky mutation that produced some benefit.
- Then they imagine that this benefit caused a survival benefit, leading to more offspring for the person who had this mutation.
- They then suppose that the genetic trait caused by the mutation became more and more common in the gene pool, because of the increased reproduction of those who had the trait.
- Finally, they suppose that after this “classic sweep” was completed, the trait became established in all of the population, and the mutation is said to have achieved a fixation.
This
explanation does not work to explain complex biological innovations
requiring multiple mutations, but it might explain some simple cases
of a biological improvement. For example, we might explain an
increase in fur in an animal through such a technique, if we can
imagine that there was one mutation that caused an animal to have more
fur, and that such a mutation caused an immediate survival benefit.
But
the general type of explanation given above would seem to be
worthless for explaining a biological improvement in speaking
ability. Let's consider an example. Imagine there are only about
20,000 humans, all but one of which lack the ability to speak
clearly. Now suppose one of these humans is blessed by some extremely
unlikely mutation that causes him to be able to speak more clearly.
Would this result in an improved survival for this individual, with a
higher likelihood of reproduction? Not at all. The reason is that
successful use of language (in a way that results in some increased chance of survival or reproduction) always requires at least two people.
So the
individual who had this lucky mutation would not see any survival
benefit during his peak reproductive years. Although this individual
might be better capable of speech, he would be living in some little
tribe in which speech wasn't common. So he would very probably get no
survival benefit at all.
It is
true we can imagine some highly improbable scenario in which a
language-improving mutation might lead to a survival that would not
have occurred otherwise. For example, if you were a caveman 80,000
years ago blessed by a language-improving mutation, you might be not
able to speak to anyone until your son grew up, but your son might
inherit that mutation. And perhaps your son might save your life by
saying, “Look out Dad, there's a bear behind you.” But the chance
of this seems very slim, about the chance that a randomly chosen
person today will have saved his father's life by saying something
like, “Look out Dad, there's a car coming.” We can also just as
easily imagine reasons why language ability might cause someone to
die early. For example, if one caveman could speak to another, they
might get into a verbal fight leading to a physical fight in which
one of them might die. Or if there is some chatting going on in a
caveman hunting expedition, it might be a distraction that reduces
the chance of success. Or maybe the chatting will alert some lion
hiding in the grass to the presence of the hunting party, increasing
the chance that some of its members will be devoured by predators.
In
short, we have the problems that (1) given the very small human
population about 100,000 years ago, it would have been extremely
unlikely that there would have occurred the mutations necessary for
clear spoken language; (2) if a particular individual happened to get
such a mutation, it would be very likely that the mutation would be
wasted, and would not achieve fixation in the gene pool, because it
failed to produce a survival benefit for the individual who got it.
So it is very hard to explain the origin of both the first language
(a non-physical thing), and also the physical biological improvements
that would have made language possible.
Unorthodox
Attempts to Overcome These Paradoxes
Now
let us look at some ways you might try to resolve these paradoxes
paradox through radical ideas. Below are some possibilities:
Possibility
1: Speech may have originated after visiting extraterrestrials established
human language (such extraterrestrials may also have endowed humans
with modifications supporting speech).
Possibility
2: Speech may have originated because of some action of some higher
divine power (such a divine power may also have endowed humans with
modifications supporting speech).
Possibility
3: The origin of spoken language may have been facilitated by
reincarnation. The first speaking humans may have been using language
they learned in a previous lifetime, which might have occurred either
on our planet or in some other dimension or realm of existence.
Possibility
4: In the distant past humans may have had telepathy much
stronger than anyone experiences today. So even though the first
spoken language was garbled speech, people may have been able to clearly
understand it because they read the minds of the person trying to
speak.
Possibility
5: We may be living in some kind of simulated reality, possibly a
computer simulation created by extraterrestrials. The simulation
may have actually began at some point in which language already existed (such
as 3000 B.C.), so there may have been no real origin of language occurring at
some time such as 60,000 years ago.
Possibility
6: There may be some kind of life force or driving force of
biological organization (perhaps impersonal), something far beyond
natural selection, that might be responsible for biological
innovations that are poorly explained by natural selection; and such
a force may have had a hand in the appearance of language and
language-enabling biology in humans.
Such possibilities will probably be ignored by the next few professors writing books on the origin of language, who will continue to write accounts that ignore the main difficulties in explaining the origin of language and the origin of language-enabling biology, such as the three paradoxes I have mentioned here.
Such possibilities will probably be ignored by the next few professors writing books on the origin of language, who will continue to write accounts that ignore the main difficulties in explaining the origin of language and the origin of language-enabling biology, such as the three paradoxes I have mentioned here.
No comments:
Post a Comment