I'd highly recommend this book. Doss will love it. Miles will certainly appreciate it. Anyone interested in altruism and cooperativeness as related to evolution will def. appreciate it.
As for Munchers, you can read for yourself what I mean, and it will reassure you that Kenneally isn't trying to undermine Chomsky in a one-sided or meanspirited way. As she points out, it wasn't Chomsky's precise statements that stymied people from investigating the evolution of language; rather, it was his reputation. You can buy it -- or not. But given your tendency to snarl about everything and anything related to academia, it sure looks kind of funny that all of a sudden you think academics aren't capable of being so fans. (I mean, honestly, the most likely reason for so much of the drooling fandom is that, if it's like my experience of academia, the whole point is to pretend like you know what the fuck you are talking about, without ever reading what you claim to have such a firm opinion on. Meetings are nightmares in academia for exactly this reason. A bunch of hot air machines arguing about crap they haven't read.)
As for the boo, it is an excellent read, for another thing. For yet another, it is an excellent overview of the current state of the field, and it has insights that are highly relevant to some of the conversations here.
Recently, for example, you and Doss questioned Michael Pollak's claims about animal communication. This book fleshes out all the examples of why you, Doss, and others were correct. And, as you point out, how misguided it was to take to heart Chomsky's insistence (until recently, and it's apparently only a grudging concession now) that it was either too complicated or simply not worthwhile to study the evolution of language.
There's a great chapter on the claim that we wouldn't need language unless we had something to talk about and how so often people have often thought that not much goes on in the mind of animals. Not so fast, Kenneally says. And she proceeds to give us a superb chapter overview on all the research that shows that quite a lot is going on in the minds of all kinds of creatures, near and far from us on the evolutionary continuum.
In a chapter, You Have Gestures, she expands on this topic, by examining the claim that only humans point. Well, not quite so fast. Animals point, but they learn it by observing humans and, in turn, communicate with humans by pointing. (There's been one instance of a bonobo pointing in the wild.) They don't generally point to other of their own species.
I bring up this section because it highlights one of the things that might well be unique about human language: our altruistic, cooperative tendencies.
Apes don't point with other apes because, as Mike Tomasello argues, other apes don't understand what pointing means and don't respond. Humans do. What Tomasello and his colleagues are concluding is that, work on gestures, shows that there is a continuum between human and ape communication, but there are important differences. She writes:
"In our evolutionary history some individuals must have been born with a greater inclination and ability to collaborate than our common ancestor with chimpanzees. These individuals were more successful and bread more offspring with those characteristics, Tomasello said. What we have evolved into now is a species for whom an experience means little if it's not shared. Chimpanzees took a different path. In their communication, there is never just plain showing, where the goal is simply to share attention While they do share and collaborate ad understand different kinds of intentions, they don't have communicative intentions. We do... and it's in their shared space that the symbolic communication of language lies."
This is where I burst out laughing. Kenneally says that Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's works buttresses Tomasello's claims. The apes Savage-Rumbaugh worked with had learned many signed and used them successfully -- when they communicated with humans. When they communicated with one another, however, the result was "a sign-shouting match; neither ape was willing to listen" to the other one."
"At its most fundamental, language is a n act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally *human* willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work." (pp 128-9)
The section on animal tool use was also illuminating. I thought it was well-established that humans are not the only tool users and makes, but apparently folks have been slow to come around on that. The research here shows that plenty of other animals, including birds, are capable of crafting tools and communicating how to create them to other birds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Caledonian_Crow
" The New Caledonian Crow is the only non-human species with a record of inventing new tools by modifying existing ones, then passing these innovations to other individuals in the cultural group. Gavin R. Hunt and colleagues at the University of Auckland studied tools the crows make out of pandanus (or screw pine) leaves:
Crows snip into the leaf edges and then tear out neat strips of vegetation with which they can probe insect-harboring crevices. These tools have been observed to come in three types: narrow strips, wide strips and multi-stepped stripswhich are wide at one end and, via a manufacturing process that involves stepwise snips and tears, become narrow at the opposite end.[2]
Observations of the distribution of 5,500 leaf counterparts or stencils left behind by the cutting process suggest that the narrow and the stepped tools are more advanced versions of the wide tool type. "The geographical distribution of each tool type on the island suggests a unique origin, rather than multiple independent inventions". This implies that the inventions, which involve a delicate change in the manufacturing process, were being passed from one individual to another.[3]
The New Caledonian Crow also spontaneously makes tools from materials it does not encounter in the wild, the only non-human species known to do so. In 2002, researcher Kacelnik and colleagues at the University of Oxford observed of a couple of New Caledonian Crows called Betty and Abel:
Betty's toolmaking abilities came to light by accident during an experiment in which she and Abel had to choose between a hooked and a straight wire for retrieving small pieces of pig heart, their favorite food. When Abel made off with the hooked wire, Betty bent the straight wire into a hook and used the tool to lift a small bucket of food from a vertical pipe. This experiment was the first time the crows had been presented with wire.[4]
Subsequently, this ability was tested through a series of systematic experiments. Out of ten successful retrievals, Betty bent the wire into a hook nine times. Abel retrieved the food once, without bending the wire.[5] The process would usually start with Betty trying to get the food bucket with the straight wire, but then she would make a hook from it bending it in different ways, usually by snagging one end of the wire under something, and then using the bent hook to pick up the tray.
Clearly, Betty's creation of hooks cannot be attributed to the shaping or reinforcement of randomly generated behavior. In 2004, Gavin Hunt observed the crows in the wild also making hooks, but the adaptation to the new material of the wire was clearly novel, and also purposeful. This type of intentional tool-making, even if it is generalizing a prior experience to a completely new context, is almost unknown in the animal world. Chimpanzees have great difficulty in similar innovative tasks."
"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws