There’s no shortage of Darwinian just so stories that attempt to explain the origin and evolution of human language. However, in a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology
a team of well-known researchers including Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky
and Richard C. Lewontin acknowledge that they don’t have a clue as to
how humans accrued the ability to use words and put them into sentences.
Hauser et al. write:
“Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding
origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there
has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense
that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the
richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with
essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations
and representations evolved. We show that, to date, (1) studies of
nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human
linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological
capacity; (2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our
understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest
ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved;
(3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished
that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes
any time soon; (4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded
assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any
insights into language's origins unverifiable. Based on the current
state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about
the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as
mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of
either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the
many open hypotheses.”
They contrast animal and human communication, saying:
“Talking birds and signing apes rank among the most fantastic claims
in the literature on language evolution, but examination of the evidence
shows fundamental differences between child language acquisition and
nonhuman species' use of language and language-like systems. For
instance, dogs can respond to a few hundred words, but only after
thousands of hours of training; children acquire words rapidly and
spontaneously generalize their usage in a wide ranges of contexts
(Kaminski et al., 2004; Pilley and Reid, 2011). Similarly, Nim Chimpsky,
the chimpanzee that produced the only public corpus of data in all
animal language studies, produced signs considerably below the expected
degree of combinatorial diversity seen in two-year old children (Yang,
2013), and with no understanding of syntactic structure or semantic
interpretation.”
They also discuss mutations in the FOXP2 gene that some have associated
with language evolution and conclude that this is not a viable
explanation.
Concluding their paper, they state: “These are all big IFs about the
nature and possibility of future evidence. Until such evidence is
brought forward, understanding of language evolution will remain one of
the great mysteries of our species.”
Unlike animals, humans seem to be programmed to learn language. For those who take Genesis seriously, this would not be a big surprise, as Adam was able to communicate with God from day one.
Source:
Hauser, Marc, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J.
Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin. 2014. The
mystery of language evolution. Frontiers in Psychology, 5 (401).