Times piece on Language Evolution

[Tom Givon]

I guess I'll have to agree with Steve on this one. The article (and 
presumably the book it summarized) was a rather lame exemplar of how not 
to treat evolution--not only of language, but also of anything--in a 
responsible, illuminating way. Not to mention the rather controversial 
nature of associating that "gene" with language to begin with (there was 
a heated discussion on FUNKNET at the time, as I recall). Seems one more 
attempt to score a quickie & scoop the competition, which is not much of 
a strategy in science (tho it does happen), but is alas all too 
prevalent in linguistics. TG

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Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:

>The full article is at 
>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/science/11comm.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
>Subscription is required, but it is free.
>
>(Note that the article is about language mechanisms, not language itself.  
>So, as is usual in new genomania literature, there is no real mention of the 
>environmental contingencies that drove natural selection or of survival value -- 
>i.e., there is no real mention of how any specific advantage of language along 
>the way could have kept favoring the development of this long string of 
>genetic changes -- and why the same causes did not favor the same development of 
>language in other species.)
>
>>>From Squeak to Syntax: Language's Incremental Evolution 
>By GARY MARCUS
>Published: April 11, 2006
>
>The origin of human language has always been a puzzle. No animal 
>communication system comes close to human language in its power, and by most accounts 
>language has been on the planet less than half a million years, a mere blink of 
>the eye in geological time. 
>
>How could this be, if language evolved like any other biological trait? Where 
>is the trail of natural selection? Until recently, there was little direct 
>evidence of language's evolution. Languages don't leave fossils, and while there 
>has never been any dearth of theories explaining why language might have 
>evolved (be it for grooming, gossip or seduction), empirical evidence has been 
>hard to come by. 
>
>All that is finally starting to change. The booming science of comparative 
>genomics is allowing researchers to investigate the origins of language in an 
>entirely new way: by asking how the genes that underwrite human language relate 
>to genes found in other species. And these new data provide a fresh example of 
>the power of natural selection. 
>
>If language had been built on a completely unprecedented set of genes, Darwin 
>(and his successors) would have a lot of explaining to do. With no more than 
>a few hundred thousand years to play with, a linguistic system that depended 
>on thousands of evolutionarily unprecedented genes would seem impossible. But 
>evolution is about random processes that tinker with old parts, not about 
>engineering new ones. 
>
>Most of the genes involved in language have some sort of close and ancient 
>counterpart in other species. As a case in point, consider the first gene to be 
>unambiguously tied to language, known as FOXP2, discovered by Simon Fisher and 
>Anthony Monaco, Oxford geneticists. 
>
>Rather than emerging from scratch in the course of human evolution, FOXP2 has 
>been evolving for several hundred million years — in a way that placed it 
>perfectly for evolving a critical role in language acquisition....
>
>This is what Darwin called "descent with modification." An intelligent 
>engineer faced with a brand new problem might start from scratch, but evolution 
>instead rejiggers old parts for new functions. 
>
>>>From the perspective of function, human language is without evolutionary 
>precedent. But from the perspective of biology, human language appears simply to 
>be one more remarkable variation on an ancient set of ancestral themes. 
>  
>