Why Only Us by Robert C. Berwick

Author:Robert C. Berwick [MIT Digital Book Services]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262034241
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2016-01-08T16:58:32+00:00

4

Triangles in the Brain

Beyond the Reach of Natural Selection?

Alfred Russel Wallace, codiscoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, believed heart and soul in a strict adaptationist principle of “necessary utility”: every part of an organism had to be of some use. Yet he could not make out how the supreme abilities of the human mind—language, music, and the arts—could have been of any use to our ancestors. How could a Shakespeare sonnet or a Mozart sonata contribute to reproductive success? “Natural Selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies” (Wallace 1869, 392). His sweeping panadaptationism out-Darwined Darwin (1859, 6), who had famously written in Origin, “I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.”

So Wallace turned to crime—the crime of moving selection beyond the reach of “natural” selection: “We must therefore admit the possibility, that in the development of the human race, a Higher Intelligence has guided the same laws [of variation, multiplication, and survival] for nobler ends” (1869, 394). Darwin was aghast. He wrote to Wallace, “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child” (Marchant 1916, 240).

We think that Wallace’s “crime” was not, in the end, a grievous sin. He had merely pointed out the truth: Darwinism demanded strict gradual continuity with the past—“numerous, successive, slight modifications” between our ancestors and us. Yet there is a yawning chasm between what we can do and what other animals cannot—language. And there lies a mystery. As with any good mystery, we have to figure out “whodunit”— what, who, where, when, how, and why.

In the rest of this chapter we will try our best to answer each of these questions. Briefly, our own answers to the language questions run as follows:

“What” boils down to the Basic Property of human language—the ability to construct a digitally infinite array of hierarchically structured expressions with determinate interpretations at the interfaces with other organic systems.1

“Who” is us—anatomically modern humans—neither chimpanzees nor gorillas nor songbirds.

“Where” and “When” point to sometime between the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in southern Africa roughly 200,000 years ago, but prior to the last African exodus approximately 60,000 years ago (Pagani 2015).

“How” is the neural implementation of the Basic Property—little understood, but recent empirical evidence suggests that this could be compatible with some “slight rewiring of the brain,” as we have put it elsewhere.

“Why” is language’s use for internal thought, as the cognitive glue that binds together other perceptual and information-processing cognitive systems.

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