The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution

by Henry Gee

  Against a pearl of language such as this—

  To be, or not to be, that is the question:

  Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

  And by opposing, end them.

  —the bark of a dog seems no more than an involuntary exclamation. But the apparent meaning of words and the relationships between the words, and between their meanings, is just for starters. Human language conveys layer upon layer of implicit meaning that can only be understood by the context in which the speech is uttered, and with reference to shared cultural norms.

  Figures of speech such as similes and metaphors draw on cultural referents not directly encoded in the text but which will be apparent to the reader, without which the actual words used make no sense. So, when Hamlet talks of slings and arrows, he doesn’t mean actual weapons—more the effects of “outrageous fortune.”1 The depth to which cultural convention influences language is a source of much misunderstanding (and humor) when cultures clash. Jared Diamond recalled to me once how he’d got into trouble in New Guinea when he used the pidgin word “pushim” mistakenly to mean “to push” when in pidgin it actually means sexual intercourse. If this seems terribly exotic, think of our own euphemistic sense of the verb “sleep.” For example, when Patti LaBelle (in her song “Lady Marmalade”) purrs “voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?” she has something more earthy in mind than a slumber party for the kids.

  Examples of unintentionally funny translations in public speech and signage are legion—such as the notice in a hotel room inviting guests to “take advantage of the chambermaid”—and the possibly apocryphal tale of how Winston Churchill decided (against advice) to address an audience of Free French in their own language. “Quand je regard mon derrière,” boomed Britain’s great wartime leader, “je regarde qu’il est divisé en deux parts.”

  But one doesn’t have to look to losses in translation to find humor that takes advantage of the subtlety of language. One of my favorite examples2 is the newspaper headline from World War II that read

  EIGHTH ARMY PUSH BOTTLES UP GERMANS

  Indeed, there are words and phrases that, when their cultural referents are taken away, would seem no more meaningful than, say, the bark of a dog, or the clearing of one’s throat. Here is one:

  If.

  As an isolate, this could mean anything. It could be the first word in the eponymous poem by Rudyard Kipling:

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

  or the last one in a verse in Lewis Carroll’s whimsy, Humpty Dumpty’s recitation:

  He said “I’d go and wake them, if—”

  What I am thinking of is the single-word response of the king of Sparta to threats of invasion by Philip II of Macedon when, with all the other Greek city-states having submitted, Philip II advised the Spartans to surrender, having said words to the effect that if he invaded Spartan territory he’d kill all the men, violate all the women, enslave all the children, raze the city to the ground, plow salt into the fields so that nothing would ever grow there again, and so on and so forth in a similar bloodthirsty vein. The single-word rejoinder seems hardly more than a grunt, yet it was freighted with the reputation of Sparta, as fierce in battle as spare with words, such that Philip avoided it—as did his son, Alexander the Great. But the simple word “if,” when isolated, gives no clue whatsoever about the meaning and its interpretation in context.

  To go further, people sometimes say one thing when what they mean is quite different. Steven Pinker gives an excellent example in his book The Language Instinct. When asked by a prospective employer to supply a reference for a candidate, the previous employer can hardly say that the candidate is (in Pinker’s words) “as dumb as a tree.” On the face of it, the reference letter (you’ll have to read Pinker’s book for the whole example) seems very positive, but on close inspection, it is clear that it offers a very negative report by virtue of the fact that it discusses everything except the candidate’s suitability.

  In this context I might mention an Internet meme called “What Brits Say versus What They Mean,” which makes light of the British tendency for reserve, and to avoid embarrassment at all costs. For example, when Brits say that something is “very interesting,” they mean that it’s “clearly nonsense”; or when Brits say that “it’s my fault,” they mean that it’s your fault; and so on.

  The language we use is laden with subtlety. But does the fact that we humans use and misuse it without apparent effort make it special? It is not as if one can claim any extra human know-how to be able to use language. As Steven Pinker reminds us in The Language Instinct, no human society has ever been discovered that lacks language. The languages of “Stone Age” tribes are as complex, and sometimes much more so, as those of more “developed” societies. But wherever they’re from, and irrespective of the culture of the speakers, all language appears to obey the same underlying set of rules, the organization into verbs with tenses, nouns with cases, and so on. It’s elegant, it’s beautiful, and it’s hardwired—every bit as the instructions for making hand axes were in the brains of Homo erectus, or the instructions for making nests are hardwired into the brains of birds.

  But don’t we depend on a learning environment in order to translate that hardwired potential into jabbering reality? Isn’t the special thing about humans that they learn, rather than operating on instinct? Don’t human infants learn to use language only if they are raised in the milieu of older, language-using humans? Yes—but the same is true for other animals that communicate. Humans all have the innate capability of using language, but can only exercise that capability by being raised among speakers of language. Humpback whales can all sing, but they learn their repertoire from other whales.3 Young male songbirds learn vocal tips from their more experienced elders.4 So it is that human babies learn from other humans in a similar way, and with the same unconscious, undirected ease. It is perhaps significant that if human children aren’t exposed to language during a particular phase of development, they find it very hard to learn later. We all know how hard it is to learn a new language when we’re adults. By the same token, dogs that aren’t “socialized” through exposure to people and other dogs during a brief “window” of development as pups, may develop as morose, ill-adjusted, and violent.

  As a phenomenon, then, language is just one facet of the social behavior of a sociable species. Learning language, like learning to be a sociable member of society, is something we see as human, but the same kind of learning is seen in many social animals that communicate.

  That doesn’t answer the question, though, of whether human language is either quantitatively or qualitatively more subtle and complex than the systems of communication used by other creatures, such that its possession and use elevates us above all creation. This is a concept with which we all instinctively agree. One of the first things that Adam does in the Bible is give names to the freshly minted animals and plants—this is even before Eve appears (Genesis 2:19–20). Having read this far, however, you’ll no doubt appreciate that any assumption of human superiority in this regard will be as suspect as it is in any other.

  This assumption—of the superiority of human language, as regards its complexity—relies on an additional, implicit assumption. That is, that it is possible to compare different modes of communication between species and assess them for complexity. The problem with this is that whereas it is possible to measure the raw information content of any signal, such an analysis will not tell us what that signal actually means. Moreover, if human language is a trait of humans that is distinctively and uniquely human, it follows that features of communication unique to any given species cannot, by definition, be compared with those of any other, simply because different animals experience the world in different ways. Looked at in this way, it’s plain that whale communication is un
iquely whale: it probably cannot be rendered simply into human language, and will perhaps be unintelligible to us. There will be aspects of it that we, as humans, will not be able to grasp, simply because of the inherent “whaleness” of its context.

  The songs of larks could well mean very much more to other larks than we could ever understand. When you see a male skylark flying high in the sky, the tiny bird producing song of such volume and quantity that you’re amazed he doesn’t burst, you are sure that he is communicating something, else he wouldn’t go to all that effort. Your presumption—entirely fair, because it is borne out by the evidence—is that he is singing to attract mates. But that says nothing about precisely what, if anything, he’s singing about. If he’s singing about love and sex, then one could say the same for most human popular music, and quite a lot of unpopular music. If the songs of skylarks have no inherent meaning, in the sense of words and grammar and syntax—one might say the same of much instrumental music, or scat singing in jazz. That the lyrics of “Lady Marmalade” are sexually explicit is undeniable, but music exerts an emotional power even if we can’t understand the words, or if there are no words at all. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony—the Pastoral—can move me to tears. As a young driver, in my twenties, I would avoid playing heavy rock on the car stereo. Not because I didn’t like heavy rock, because I adored it and still do, but because it made me drive more aggressively.5

  And that’s just for species that communicate by sound, as we do. I have not mentioned the subtleties of pheromonal communication in ants, or the waggle dances of bees, or the scent trails of voles. We can get a good idea of what these modes of communications do, in terms of raw function, but of implicit meanings, if any, we will be blind.

  So, if the loading of social and cultural context makes the translation of phrases between one human language and another so difficult, imagine how hard it must be to translate languages precisely between different species. To us, the caw of a crow is just that, a caw—but to a crow, that proverbially laconic “if” would seem equally meaningless.

  All right then, you might say: even if we concede that there’s no qualitative difference between the language of humans and the various modes of communication between social animals, don’t we humans talk about more elevated things than the matters that (we assume) preoccupy the rest of creation?

  No, not really. We do not, as a rule, make idle chat about the tides of politics, or the great unanswered questions of philosophy. Go back to that crowd of gossiping parents in a schoolyard, and listen to what they are talking about. It’ll be chat about themselves, their children, their friends, and their everyday social interactions. Many—perhaps most—of the things we talk about can be boiled down to what anthropologists call “social grooming.” In his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that language is really about the affirmation of relative social standing. If this seems somewhat harsh, just ask yourself this question. Why, when meeting another person, is it considered polite to inquire about that person’s health? “How are you?” we ask. Why that, when the world is full of potentially interesting topics of conversation? After all, we could kick off a conversation with a complete stranger on practically anything we liked—science policy in Mexico under the government of Carlos Salinas, for example; the problems of rendering the rhyming structure of the Middle English poem Pearl into satisfying Modern English stanzas; or the disquieting excess (for the Standard Model of physics) of gamma-ray photons produced in the decay of the purported Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider—anything.

  But if we did, we’d probably be thought somewhat unhinged and therefore avoided. People who come up to you and start talking about trains are usually regarded as occupying a station on the autism spectrum—a personality trait in which people have trouble responding to social norms.

  Comments to strangers that veer away from the conventional how-are-you tactic, yet that are deemed socially acceptable, might be based on a shared sense of identity. For example, if I walk around the streets of the fine city of Norwich while wearing my beanie and scarf emblazoned with the noble emblem and colors of Norwich City Football Club, I am likely to be accosted by another fan, and we’d start a conversation about the ups and downs of our favorite soccer team—and this is a complete stranger, a person with whom I might not have had any other interaction whatsoever. A shared sense of identity sometimes transcends individual recognition. If I wore the same garb in Ipswich, however, I might get beaten up.

  Going back to the how-are-you gambit, one might ask in addition why it is considered rude, or at the very least eccentric, if we receive any answer more complicated than a simple affirmation that yes, we’re just fine, thank you. In which case, one might ask, why ask the how-are-you question in the first place? Because the question has nothing to do with speech or language at all—its function is to engender social grooming.

  Most of the time we don’t stop to think about how conventional and ritualized the bulk of human social interaction really is. Language serves to punctuate that interaction, rather than to inform it. That’s why it’s slightly shocking (and funny) to learn of the habit of a former colleague who, when exhorted by staff in a restaurant or hotel to “have a nice day,” would reply, with commanding hauteur—“I have other plans.” The polite, formalized inquiries we make after peoples’ health (or, if in England, to pass some comment about the weather) are no different from the occasions in which dogs stop to sniff each other’s bottoms, or baboons stop to pick lice out of each other’s fur. Each in its way gathers information about the health of the (for want of a better word) interlocutor.

  Most of the rest of what people talk about is gossip about things that happened to themselves and other people: about what she said to him, what he said to her, who did what to whom, what happened next and what it all cost, with many pauses to appreciate the social ups and downs involved: the shame and the schadenfreude. Not that some people don’t want to talk about other things: C. S. Lewis, the longtime friend and colleague of the philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien, once (rather cruelly) remarked that the friends of the relatively uneducated Mrs. Tolkien were the kind of people whose general conversation was “almost wholly narrative.”6 Oh, the irony—this from the doyen of Icelandic sagas. Gossip is, on the face of it, banal. So why do we find it so compelling? As Mozart remarked to his patrons (at least according to playwright Peter Shaffer, in his play Amadeus), who wouldn’t rather talk with their hairdresser than Hercules? Who, when they should really be doing their homework, or writing this book, wouldn’t rather log into Facebook to see what their friends are chatting about? Getting interested in abstract, nonnarrative matters requires a special degree of effort. Gossip, on the other hand, is something we can just fall into and instinctively enjoy.

  I think it’s fair to say that our love for gossip goes beyond face-to-face interaction, chats on the telephone, and social networks. Most of what people read or hear about in the news or in popular dramas and soap operas (all of which are functionally interchangeable) is social grooming, although at one remove. Think about the human element in any news story you might hear, or read about, or watch on TV, particularly if aimed at a popular audience. Such tales are often about the minor doings of “celebrities”—that is, people who are familiar to us from other contexts, and with whom we identify although we do not know them personally. News grades into “reality” TV, which grades into soap opera. It’s all about catastrophe, disaster, human tolls, shock, disgrace, or humiliation—the Shame, and the Schadenfreude. Stories that help one recalibrate one’s own position in society. The only thing worse than being talked about, said Oscar Wilde, is not being talked about.

  How very crow-like we all are.

  Does human gossip differ qualitatively, in terms of its elaboration of structure, from that of other animals? To be sure, humans can compose, relate, and understand stories of highly elaborate construction. By this I mean that human stories contain many la
yers of meaning and action and still remain intelligible to the listener. One can just about follow a sentence such as “Alice thought Bob had told Carol about Donald’s invoice to Erica for the work that Fred had done for George,” for example, even though it contains four nested stories.

  1. Alice thought

  2. Bob had told Carol about

  3. Donald’s invoice to Erica for

  4. the work that Fred had done for George.

  This nesting is related to what Robin Dunbar calls “intentionality.” This relies on our ability to conceive of the mental states of others, but we rely on language to organize it. The sentence above contains four “orders” of intentionality, and Dunbar suggests that human beings are capable of understanding at most six levels of intentionality without having to write everything down or having it explained.

  The problem we run into, once again, is that of comparison between species that have very different outlooks on life. Although Dunbar discusses research suggesting that some apes might be capable of third-order intentionality, results can only ever remain that—suggestive. It is hard enough getting into the mind of another animal without having to find reliable ways of discerning whether it is thinking of what another animal is thinking about a third animal, and so on. The question, then, remains open—it is possible that many animals are capable of thinking in this way. And given that most people will not be called upon to understand sentences as complex as this in most situations, one could easily say that there is no functional, real-world difference between the complexities of discourse between animals and between humans.