The basic plot is that Chompsky and Gould as reigning intellectuals of their era, dodged the obvious question about how did humans and their psycho-social organization, culture and languages evolve from some prior animal society?
Their graduate students went back to these questions that had been previously off the table. That's the general plot, so far. Kenneally was interested in this question as a grad student. Where did language come from, but it was officially banned in linguistics.
Kenneally has her limits, but they are very common limits that many science and academic mentalities share. On the other hand, I had no idea that many sorts of questions about the origins of language, thought, culture, art I was interested as a student were pro-actively not discussed, and not studied. Answers to these kinds of questions were considered unknowable. There was in effect an intellectual ban on asking or answering them not just in the sciences, but humanities, philosophy, and art. This is why the structuralist like Levi-Strauss and Jean Piaget interested me so much. Right or wrong, at least they got started on some of these questions and provided some answers of their own.
As page 75, this is the basic summary. Animal studies from Savage-Rimbough indicated primates think and understand limited language. These elements indicate an evolutionary basis for the development of human languages. Child studies in language acquisition from Pinker and Bloom indicate adaptive changes as a result of natural selection. Liebermann through biophysical studies of the voice box and anatomy of the inner ear indicate a distinct physical basis for an adaptive regime by natural selection.
Countra these studies, Gould maintained a spandral or artifactual basis for lanugage development. Chompsky (as far as I understand it) basically considered it an unexplained development of an innate language faculty in the brain.
The Pinker-Bloom line was seen as compatible with Chompski's concept of a universal grammar. Liebermann on the other considers his ideas basically incompatible with UG.
``Lieberman was not arguing ... that there was no uniquely human specialization for syntax. Rather...that in the brain there was an overlap between the parts that control bodily movements and the parts that allow use to order thought and words in cognition and speech. This physical overlap had come about because of the way we move our bodies in space and then, overlaid upon that, developing the ability to move words in abstract patterns.''
Kenneally doesn't note that the last sentence is borrowed or influenced by parts of Piaget's work on concepts of space transformation. The French Structuralist had a big show down with Chompsky over the precise nature of his `tranformations' or linguistic operators, and their own set. I don't know the details, but essentially Chompsky won and US linguistics and allied fields in pysch, soc, and anthro followed suit. So far Kenneally hasn't covered this show down. I think it took place sometime in the early 70s.
At a deeper level the precise nature of these sets of transformations is going to have a profound effect on research, because the Piaget and possible Liebermann set are based on `space' thinking. Meanwhile the Chompskian set is based on some more serial-like or linear sort of analysis from the direct products of language. This potentially creates an opposition between space-thinking, and word-thinking. This is a distinction that a lot psychology studies and brain injury studies, cognitive sciences, and medicine note.
The most important part to consider is that space-thinking is quite old in the evolutionary graphs and goes back at least to sharks. The way to understand space-thinking is to figure out how animals orient and move themselves in space and then find food. It's important to note, that this may not qualify as thinking per se, since entrainment on environmental orderings and physical forces in space may not qualify as thinking in some technical way. However, I would dispute that, since there is systematic and learned behavior going on. At the snark level it isn't much like thought. On the other hand noting this entrainment complex is also present in humans, I think the next hypothesis is a valid one to consider. We can imagine the greater thalamic region plus its intermediary system of the basel ganglia forms the foundation or basis for both thought and language. This makes a certain sense, since it is currently thought that this same region is responsible for `conscieousness', or awarness, a unified sense of body-in-the-world.
Another interesting way to think about spatial thinking is consider the kind of learning and training it takes to do dance or play an instrument. After enough conscieous practice we achieve a motor skill set that needs very little to no mediating thought at all. This is also a kind of learning that we can find very far back in the evolution of animals.
``The fact that damage to a brain area that controlled motor skills also affected syntax was a smoking gun for a biological relationship between language and motor control. The basic idea, Lieberman argued, is that there is a dependent relationship `between the syntax of motor control and the syntax of language.' '' (Kenneally, 73p)
I want to point out a subtle problem. It is possible that `syntax' or structures or sets of transformation I am calling space-thinking may have no anatomical or physiological location at all. If you consider that sharks navigate entirely through a system of sense entrainment from the ordering in the their environment, we will never find a navigating organ as such in sharks. All we will find is the sensory motor guidance system without any program or instructions. The `syntax', or transformations of motion necessary to account for shark movements in space are not in the shark at all. These complex ordering systems of space are intrinsic to the space, not the shark. The shark has evolved to follow this complex system of environmental orderings and structures, that is to entrain on a pre-existing order in the environment.
By analogy, I suspect that neurobiology and linguistics will never account for either our space-thinking or its overlayed language structures because these are not properly speaking, `in' us. We are in effect looking in the wrong place. These transformations (of motion) exist in the dynamic interplay between how our bodies work and the space configuration we are adapted to. On the other hand that doesn't mean we are not aware of these transformations at some perhaps less than conscieous level and don't use them.
But that's my theory... back to Kenneallys story.
CG