Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'

[Tom Givon]

Dear FUNKnetters (and Charles Li),

I have held off from responding to the various notes on the subject of
language, culture, biology and evolution, hoping against all hope to
hear from others what I thought needed to be said. But the more I hear,
the more I am inclined to tear my hairs--the few still remaining--in
utter despair. So, in the interest of  refocusing the discussion more
explicitly towards the interface between biology, I would like to
interject the following:

The anthropocentric impulse to draw an absolute boundary between
biological evolution ('the animal') and cultural evolution ('history',
'the human') goes back to antiquity, and has been the subject of
repeated  (and repetitious) bitter skirmishes ever since. Both Plato and
Aristotle posited this absolute boundary, the latter in terms of the
exclusively-human spirit of rationality (as distinct from the metabolic
and perceptual spirits, which were conceded to all animate beings).

The bitter Darwin-Wallace debate about evolution was about whether to
draw that self-same rigid line between the evolution of the body and
that of the mind/brain/soul. Wallace wanted to draw the line right where
Plato, Aristotle, the Church, Descartes, and all traditional humanist
had drawn it. Darwin insisted on a unitary system--what's good for the
body is good for the soul. Chomsky's and Bickerton's insistence that the
'rise' of language is not governed by the same adaptive constraints that
govern the evolution of all other biological sub-systems (including
'mere cognition') follows in the very same dualist tradition. And
likewise, the idea that somehow cullture and history are wholly
liberated from adaptive ('functional') constrants, that they are--to
paraphrase Charles Li (and, for that matter, Bill Labov)--matters of
only society and culture, falls squarely on the
Plato-Aristotle-Descartes-Wallace-Chomsky side of the debate.

The funny thing is, in biology itself there have been strong recent
trends to obliterate this rigid --artificial, ideological--boundary
between mind/language/culture/behavior and 'plain' structural biology.
Thus, a great evolutionary-biology theorist, Ernst Mayr, as noted that
(loosely paraphrased) 'soft' adaptive behavior is the pacemaker, of
'hard' genetic evolution. And the work of great figures in etology (von
Frisch, Marler, J.T. Bonner, E.O. Wilson, D. Griffin, F. deWaal, to
mention only a few) has been predicated on the interpermeability of
biology and culture.

It therefore boggles my (admittedly simple) mind to see self-declared
functionalists, who believe that language is adapted to its main tasks
of representation and communication of information, come up with the
idea that the main process that shapes both phonology and
grammar--diachronic development--is somehow only 'culturally' and
'socially' constrained (and pray, what does it mean exactly? Total lack
of constraints?) This certainly flies in the face of all detailed,
fine-grained studies of the process of diachronic change in both
phonology and grammar.

"But", the defenders of the strict boundary retort, "what about
cross-language typological variation and the great freedom from adaptive
constraints that it entails?" In response, I would like to remind
everybody of a few things about variation and how it comes about:

First, typological variation is highly constrained. Relatively few
'types' of any linguistic structure are actually attested in
languages--as compared with the plethora of mathematically (or
biologically) possible structures. The fact that more than one type of
structure can perform the same communicative funtion is not unique to
language and culture. It is a cardinal fact in biology, and of the main
process of functional extension (homoplasy), by which a structure takes
over the coding of similar but not-wholely-identical functions (and may
eventually diverge beyond recognition). Evolutionary biology, while
adaptively guided (via selection) is hardly 100% deterministic, or we
would have had only one extant species.

Second, the diachronic pathways that give rise to variable synchronic
structure are just as constrained and largely uni-directional. In both,
they closely resemble biological evolution. And the most common
explanation to such constrained evolution are adaptive.

Third, in language diachrony as in biological evolution, the universal
constrains that govern synchronic structure--the eplanatory principles,
the theory--operate largely through the developmental process. They are
to be found in the mechanisms of emergence (be they ontogenetic,
phylogenetic of behavioral-historial, not in the catalogue of extant
synchronic ('typological') structures.

Fourth, variation is the very soul of both synchronic biology and
evolution, where species are defined by their variability curves (of
both 'hard' genotype and 'soft', 'behavioral' phenotype); where today's
intra-species population variation is simply the current inventory of
tomorrow's potential evolutionary changes--and thus cross-species
variation. This is exactly what one finds in the relation between
synchronic variation and diachronic change, an observation often
attributed to Bill Labove (tho I cannot find an exact citation...).

Lastly, variation is not only a methodological phenomenon (cf. Labov
again); it is a highly theoretical entity in both biology and language,
and has highly adaptive ('funtional') motivations. The reservoir of
synchronic variants within a population is guarantor of survival, just
in case the context should require alternative adaptive solutions.

True enough, diachrony ('history') in both language and culture is
'soft' and presumably reversible. But so is animal behavior, which is
never 100% constrained by genetics (cf. Mayr's "open program"). Still,
this neither exempts language and cultrure from adaptive constraints,
nor sets them apart from 'plain' biological evolution.

It is perhaps time that we quit erecting and re-erecting those
artificial barriers--human vs. animal, body vs. soul/mind, biology vs.
culture, language vs. cognition--and instead re-group to take care of
the urgent task at hand: Investigating and explaining language as and
integral part of this incredibly complex miracle of striving, behaving,
adaptive, evolving life. There is no shame but only strength in being
part of the grand coalition of 'plain' biology.

Have a happy holliday season,   TG

=================================

Charles Li wrote:

>  Using the expression, "the evolution of language", to refer to the
> evolution of hominid communicative behavior prior to the
> crystallization of language implies that language was the
> communicative tool of all hominids. Yet no one would assume that
> Orrorin tugenensis, Kenyanthropus, the various species of
> Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and Paranthropus had language. Indeed,
> most of the species in the genus of Homo probably did not have
> language if 'language' designates the casual, spoken language of
> anatomically modern humans. The investigation of the origin of
> language is an enterprise concerned with the evolution of the
> communicative behavior of our hominid ancestors, NOT the evolution of
> language. Chronologically the study of the evolution of language
> begins from the time when language crystallized, whereas the study of
> the origin of language ends at the crystallization of language. This
> distinction does not belittle the significance of the research probing
> into older and older layers of human language. Nor does it dismiss the
> importance of the proto-human language if and when its features can be
> inferred. One of the most important reasons for making this
> distinction is the fundamental difference between the ways language
> changes and the ways hominid communicative behavior changes. The
> latter, like animal communicative behavior, is subject to the
> constraint of Darwinian evolution. The evolution of our hominid
> ancestors' communicative behavior involves natural selection and
> genetic mutation. A change of their communicative behavior in the
> direction toward the emergence of language was adaptive in the sense
> that it enhanced their life expectancy and reproductive success. Those
> hominids who made the change achieved a higher level of fitness than
> those hominids who failed to make the change. A change moving the
> hominids' communicative behavior one step closer to human language
> would imply greater communicative efficiency. Greater communicative
> efficiency would, in turn, entail greater ease with which valuable
> knowledge and experience could be passed from one individual to
> another and from one generation to another.  Rapid and efficient
> transmission of knowledge conferred an immense competitive advantage
> to the hominids for securing resources and possibly vanquishing
> others, including other species of hominids whose communicative
> behavior was less developed in the direction toward language
> crystallization.
>
> Given that hominids within the genus of Homo and possibly some gracile
> species of the Australopithecine are generalists who did not
> specialize in any specific ecological niche, the competitive advantage
> conferred by a more effective communicative behavior may explain why
> there is only one surviving species within the taxonomic family of
> hominids. When two hominid species happened to co-exist as generalists
> and the communicative behavior of one species was more effective than
> that of the other, there would be a good possibility that the
> communicatively more advanced species would eliminate the other
> through competition, especially when natural resources dwindled as
> they did periodically in a dramatic fashion during the past three
> million years because of global temperature fluctuations.
>
> The evolution of language, i.e. language change after its
> crystallization, is by an large driven by social and cultural factors.
> It has nothing to do with genetic mutation, natural selection, life
> expectancy or reproductive success. Confusing the evolution of
> language with the origin of language may  result in attributing
> features of language to the communicative behavior of early hominids
> before the emergence of language.
>
> For details, see attached paper.
>
> Charles Li
>
>
>
> At 09:36 AM 12/2/2002 +0200, Tahir Wood wrote:
>
>
>
>> >>> Bill Croft <w.croft at MAN.AC.UK> 11/29/02 06:56PM >>>
>>       One must distinguish between the evolution of language
>> and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution
>> of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the
>> rise of modern human language. This is of course an
>> instance of biological evolution, of human beings. The
>> latter is the process by which linguistic elements change
>> over time. This is an evolutionary process, that is it
>> involves change by replication; but it is not the same
>> evolutionary process as biological evolution.
>>
>> I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as
>> history. Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that
>> the social aspect of language change is absent in favour of some
>> kind of biological determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed
>> languages' because they are racially/biologically 'less developed'.
>> Tahir
>
> ___________________________________________________
> Charles Li
> Professor of Linguistics, Dean of Graduate Division
> University of California, Santa Barbara
> Santa Barbara, CA 93106
> Tel: 805-893-2013Fax: 805-893-8259
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