Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'

[Steve Long]

In a message dated 12/10/02 3:45:55 AM, dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK writes:
<< Interestingly, though, Pinker's attempts to provide an evolutionary
underpinning for Chomskyan syntax in his articles on evolutionary psychology
and in his debates with Gould in the NYR, rest explicitly on functional
motivations for formal constraints. Small wonder that this aspect of Pinker's
work has had negligible impact in Chomsky's

writings.>>

The Pinker-Gould exchange is also interesting for how Gould managed to paint
Pinker into the "Ultra-Darwinist" corner, the more extreme position that
every aspect of language is not just functionally shaped but biologically
adaptively shaped.

Gould maintained that other forces were at work beside the strict natural
selection>survival "algorithm" -- e.g., the concept of "spandrels",
architectural adjuncts that would eventually become adaptive.  For some
reason, Pinker chose to argue with Gould on that point, which didn't work out
too good and also probably put him about as far from the Chomskyian position
as he could get.

The difference between the broader concept of functionalism versus strict
biological "Ultra-Darwinian" adaptation is very important to the application
of evolution theory to language, I'd suggest.

Obviously, one can get into a pretty pickle trying to find Spencerian
biological adaption in the specific intricacies of human language.  And I'd
suggest one reason is that language does not really function with regard to
strict biological adaptation.  The main function of language is
communication, not survival of an individual or a species.  In fact, at any
particular time and place, the culture that is nested in language might
produce a very non-adaptive result.

(A striking example of culture overruling the values of the biological
survival of the individual or the species is described by Borges in
chronicling the history of the idea that the end of the world is a good
thing, because it will usher in what-comes-after, and that this mass suicide
should be rushed to completion as quickly as possible.  These kinds of ideas
mark the points where strict biological adaptation no longer constrain what
humans do as individuals or as a species -- and apparently without regard to
"superior" survival traits being passed along with particular genes. Belief
in an after-life may be unique to humans, so other animals apparently never
had to worry about any supposed "belief-in-an-after-life gene" conflicting
with their raw survival instincts.  So, what would the function of such a
gene be?)

Now, one might argue that communication is biologically adaptive, which is
locally true and no doubt shaped language organs like our vocal cords.  But
it seems that at some point, communication disjointed itself from the
biological adaptive values it had among primates and birds, and started to be
a value of its own.  And I think this value -- communication -- has a life of
its own when it comes to both language and the culture nested in language.

Awhile ago I caught a glimpse of the Westminster Dog Show (a short glimpse
admittedly)  on tv and viewing this example of the human effect on the
evolution of the dog, I'd have to say that biological adaptation ("in the
wild") took a real black-eye that day.  If this sort of thing is parallel to
what happens to language in certain elite quarters, we might expect the work
of adaptation to be not a "constraint", but rather something to be actively
avoided, worked-around and just plain penalized in the final voting.

Also T Givon recently wrote: "This gives both evolution & diachrony the
unmistakable "tinkered" (as opposed to "engineered") flavor. And the
resulting synchronic structures in both reveal, paradoxical, many
counter-adaptive features (a la Rube Goldberg...)."

What's interesting is the phylogenic tree a friend did of automobiles.  An
individual car might look very "engineered", but a tree that traces the
"directed" history of car engineering is as haywired as any biological
evolution tree.  There is an apparent gap -- in accidental evolution and
directed evolution -- between what might work and what eventually does turn
out to work.

Synchronic structure often gives us a snapshot of a process, not a state.
And the process is always in the process of taking wrong turns and proceeding
a long way before the driver asks for directions.

For example, the new name we come up with for something we never saw before
may not be as communicative as we thought.  Yet we are stuck with it (just as
we are with inefficient grammar) because of listener conservatism.  Columbus
couldn't stop the ball he sent rolling when he called Native Americans,
"Indians".

Steve Long