[lbo-talk] Chomsky on sociobiology

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Jun 7 16:04:20 PDT 2006


Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
> > Anthropology has long
> > established language as a defining characteristic of the human species. How
> > Chomsky could think that it did not arise in the course of the evolutionary
> > origin of humans is amazing (if that's what he thinks).
>
> Chomsky's thought is like this. It is a mistake to think of
> "language" as for communication between humans as opposed to an
> organization of the mind brain that may have facilitated thought.
> Thus it is possible that before the language organ was used as a means
> of communication it could have been simply an increased complexity of
> the brain that allowed for greater conceptualization. This might mean
> that a random mutation that allowed for the basic structure of
> language occurred before the physical ability to communicate evolved.
> This would make language an evolutionary spin-off of a certain
> complexity of the brain. He is suspicious of a strictly adaptationist
> explanation of language but he does think tht language was a
> biological development.

That language was a factor in human evolution _rather than_ an _invention_ of an already evolved "biologically modern human species" seems highly unlikely. (This may be what Ted means when he speaks of language as our "creature." See the work of Ian Tattersall. [I am familiar with two of his books: _Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness_ (Harcourt, 1998)and _The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human_ (Harcourt, 2002).] In one of his essays he speculates that _homo sapiens_ had been around for as long as 50,000 years before "inventing" language. He further speculates on the possibility that language had been invented _and lost_ several times, _by children_, before it became established.

Carrol

P.S. Someone made some wild statement about evolution being "all about survival," which is utter nonsense. Evolution is all about reproductive success, which may differ rather dramatically from what one would ordinarily call "survival."



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