Feral children and enculturated apes

Steve Long Salinas17 at AOL.COM
Wed Dec 4 23:20:24 UTC 2002


In a message dated 12/4/02 4:07:52 PM, dgolumbi at PANIX.COM writes:
<< Take a skill that is 90% biological, like walking. A child who is raised
without sufficient environmental stimuli will not learn to walk, or will
not learn to use the bipedal "endowment" as it can be fully used. Training
by adults is required at several steps. Experiments that isolate the
infant from this training seem to me to demonstrate very little about the
walking endowment. >>

I don't think this is true.  Aside from the survival needs of the infant, I
suspect there is no nuturing involved.  Walking among "normal" children will
come whether it is taught or not.  If walking truly needed to be taught (like
writing), it would hardly be 90% biological.  That would be like saying piano
playing is 90% biological.  It was just dormant for a million years waiting
for Chopin to show up.  Obviously, we couldn't play the piano if evolution
gave us the physical attributes of a carrot.  But we did not evolve to play
the piano.  We did evolve to walk -- and the shape of our bodies prove it.

<<Another variation: put a group of infants into a world that somehow
provides them everything they need *except language.* Leave them alone for 50
years. I guarantee you, something will have developed, and whatever it is
will be human language, and it will be just as hard to cleave analytically
between what-they-speak and what-humans-as-we-know-them-speak.>>

See Derek Bickerton (Roots of Language, Language and Species), particularly
as to the distinction between the non-structure of pidgins and structure of
creoles.  Bickerton -- a Chomskyian -- seems confident in identifying the
development of structure among the feral children of (if remember right)
Curacao.  However Martians speak, it is not that difficult to identify
structure in human speech, in all its variations.

But again if we were all born with a hand shaped like an axe to chop wood or
we if make axes to chop wood, physics demands that an axe be shaped like an
axe and not a feather duster if it is to be functional.  The same
environmental rules of survival and adaptation shape both genetic and
acquired axes.  There's no reason we should not expect the same with
languages.  (Of course, chainsaws will solve many of the same wood-chopping
problems, but as I mentioned evolution has not been a big user of the
free-moving wheel.  With chainsaws, we are on our own.)

But I want to point out again that you have set up a prerequisite to language
-- "put a group of infants into a world that somehow provides them everything
they need *except language.* Leave them alone for 50 years." -- note that you
did not say "one infant".  And note that you give them 50 years.  50 years of
what?  Being with one another?  Trying to communicate with one another? I
don't think any of us would expect this pot to boil without a good dose of
human culture.  Culture is integral to human language.  And there really is
good reason to think that culture gave rise to modern language capabilities,
especially many of the more complex biological parts.

(BTW, Einstein used thought experiments to come up with relativity.  We may
not be that good -- but that's no reason to fault the method.)

Steve Long



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