So last night I attended a reading and book signing for William Calvin's new
book (with Derek Bickerton), "Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and
Chomsky with the Human Brain." Although Prof. Calvin's talk was lopsided
towards an unnecessary and somewhat self-regarding recapitulation of his
bibliographic resume, and consequently short on discussion of the book
itself, his talk was relaxed yet focussed, and straddled the academic and
non-academic worlds with admirable skill. If the rather short book--which I
am only just starting--maintains that achievement it should be a useful
addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in following the Chomskyan
Revolution (what Calvin refers to drolly as the "principal intellectual
spectator sport of the last 40 years").

The starting point of the book is not novel. In fact, it's the central
paradox of Chomsky's contribution to the understanding of language: if
Universal Grammar is an innate biological endowment of the human organism,
as it plainly is, where the hell did it come from? That is, how does one
explain it in evolutionary terms?

This is not a simple exercise. Under Darwinism, gradualism rules
evolutionary theory; random mutations do not spontaneously generate entirely
new, complex biological strutctures overnight. Rather, incremental changes
in DNA structure are retained because of their survival value, and if enough
of them occur over time, more complex, and sometimes biologically
unnecessary skills and abilities develop laterally; case in point, music.
Bird wings are also thought to have started out as appendages for keeping
their dinosaur ancestors warm, until they got long enough to serve their
present purpose. (To any bona fide evolutionary biologists or linguists
reading this, please forgive any terminological solecisms I commit in this
summary.) But Darwinism simply does not admit "macromutations" that skip
over intermediate developmental stages to highly complex structures such as
a "language organ" or a bird's wing. Not that unspecified and unexplained
"macromutations" have NOT been advanced to "explain" high-level language
ability in humans; apparently any number of such explanations have been. But
Calvin and Bickerton regard this as a form of deus ex machina--a cheat that
avoids the problem rather than explaining it. (I get the sense that they are
far from alone in this opinion.)

Calvin did not try to summarize their book, but instead gave a taste of
their approach. Like the Chomskyan Steven Pinker, whose books on cognitive
psychology delight in a colloquial approach to his subject, Calvin deployed
a number of ordinary analogies to get at their methodology. The principal
one was that of "curb cuts," the cutaways built into curbs some decades ago
to accommodate wheelchairs. Although curbcuts initially served one simple
purpose--to provide access for wheelchairs--they quickly came to serve other
purposes, such as strollers, which didn't have to "pay" for the development,
nor which would have justified them, and helped spur the development of
things like wheeled suitcases, that might never have become ubiquitous
without them.

So, what are the possible curbcuts that helped midwife (horribly mangled
metaphor here, sorry) the emergence of Universal Grammar in humans(as
distinct from the relatively easily explained, "proto-language" of single
words and phrases that lack a recursive syntax)?

Calvin only mentioned two.

One, which no doubt would find fertile soil on a list like this, is
cooperative behavior in early human society. That is, the development of a
complex language would exploit the manifold survival advantages of group
cooperation. The reason advanced by Calvin and Bickerton, however, is rather
less New Agey than this simple assertion might seem. The immediate objection
to any kind of evolutionary theory of complex cooperative social arrangement
is the Freeloader Problem. Simply put, if the individual can get something
out of the system without putting something in, it's in the individual's
survival interest to do so. Lacking any restraint on freeloading, therefore,
a form of social organization that relies on altruism alone from its members
is doomed to fail. (Pinker discusses the rather cynical strategies of
potlatch cultures and the like that have evolved for precisely this reason.
Adherents of "libertarian socialism," as as I can see, avoid the issue
entirely.)

High-level language would solve this problem, in an evolutionist's view, by
allowing members to keep accounts of who owed what to whom. Provocatively,
"who owes what to whom" is deep structure grammar at its simplest:
Subject-->Action-->Goal. Therefore, an evolutionary nudge to this stage
would have survival value while setting the stage for increasingly
sophisticated elaboration of syntactical structures, all without violating
Darwinist principles.

The second possible curbcut Calvin mentioned was Planning. That is, there is
survival value in being able to plan a complex action before carrying it
out, especially if it's a crucial, non-repeatable action such as throwing a
spear at your dinner. (Miss, and it runs away.) Language, to the extent that
it is synonymous with thought, would allow early man to plan such actions,
thus increasing their likelihood of success and thus possessing survival
value.

Unmentioned by Calvin was at least one more explanatory mechanism: war. In
"The Nurture Assumption" Judith Rich Harris cites research suggesting that
homo sapiens may have developed language (or at least, intelligence, which
I'm not sure are one and the same or not) as a weapon for enthusiastically
exterminating the peace-loving (and consequently extinct) Neanderthals.
Perhaps this explanation also falls under Planning, and so is redundant.
Then again, perhaps it's too unpleasant to think about (not the least of
which reasons being it turns Chomsky into a quasi-student of warfare).
Anyway, I thought it worth mentioning.

I have problems with both of Calvin's curbcuts--not that he offered them as
the only possible, self-evident explanations for the problem of Universal
Grammar. However, I would much rather save my objections until some kind of
real discussion develops (if I'm lucky).

Where does Chomsky stand on this problem? Answer: he's agnostic, at least if
you follow Calvin's characterization of Chomsky's position. That is, he
doesn't have an opinion on the subject, and he doesn't particularly care
about the answer. His interest lies in the question of "what?," not "why?"
That is, Chomsky studies the structure of spoken language to uncover the
underlying deep structure that generates it. No one seems to mind. Moroever,
as Bickerton writes, "one man can't do everything." Indeed. However, in
Pinker one gets the impression that Chomsky actively resists Darwinian
explanations for language, as if he prefers language's origins to remain
unknown and unknowable. If so, that seems like an unscientific attitude, one
worthy of some discusion.

That said, I end this little report from the trenches of the linguistics
wars. Anyone with any comments/observations, please contribute them. I look
forward to new directions in the list discussion.

PS The book is easily located on Amazon.com, and is the ninth and latest of
Calvin's books on the brain.