Much vaster and more complicated than any murder trial is the quest to understand the origin of humans and their languages. This effort requires a picture of the trajectory from the initial state of hominins to the current state, and is always going to be fraught with controversy and disagreement. Definitive knowledge is lacking even on such basic questions as the variability in the complexity of human reasoning across human species in the evolutionary record. There is not even consensus on the range of variation in the five ‘s’s: smarts, speed, size, sex and strength among modern humans.
So why are such problems regarding the limits of human capacity relevant to understanding the species’ evolution? Because specialists and laypeople alike fail to agree what new evidence means since they interpret any new discoveries or findings differently. Rather than naively anticipating agreement, one can hope instead for a weighing of alternative accounts. Most specialists are able to determine when one account has cast reasonable doubt upon another. But no one can tell someone which account to choose, nor can they predict which account someone will select. Scientific choices are intellectually, culturally and psychologically motivated.
Part of understanding human species surely must be to appreciate how humans came to achieve greater cognitive success than any other species. Humans are everywhere. Like cockroaches and rats, they are adaptable, multiply quickly and travel well. They are tough and resilient. They are clever. They can be territorial, diurnal, nocturnal, or crepuscular. They can be kind or vicious. Humans have become, for better or worse, lords of the planet. If the dinosaurs were still alive today, humans would kill them for trophies, or eat them, or put them in parks and zoos. They would be no match for sapiens. Humans, not they, are the apex predators of all time on this planet. This success has much to do with the fact that, though sapiens are small with soft skin, no claws or serious strength, they talk to each other. Because humans can talk they can plan, they can share knowledge, they can even leave knowledge for future generations. And therein lies the human advantage over all other terrestrial species.
So exactly what is this ability of humans – what is language? It isn’t possible to talk about how some characteristic, such as language, evolved without at least some idea about what this characteristic is.
Language is the interaction of meaning (semantics), conditions on usage (pragmatics), the physical properties of its inventory of sounds (phonetics), a grammar (syntax, or sentence structure), phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure), discourse conversational organisational principles, information and gestures. Language is a gestalt – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is to say, the whole is not understood merely by examining its individual components.
Indeed, there are entire communities of linguists who identify themselves by the different subareas. There are pragmaticians, conversational analysts, syntacticians, morphologists, phoneticians, semanticists and so on. But none of them is studying language as a whole, only the parts they are interested in professionally. A syntactician is to language as an ophthalmologist is to the body. Both are necessary, but each is (understandably) tackling a very small piece of the pie.
What is the full pie supposed to be like, then? It is a communication system. And this is what the evolutionary and contemporary evidence points to – namely that the ultimate purpose and accomplishment of language is the building of communities, cultures and societies. These are built through stories and conversations, written or oral, each of which helps to establish and justify shared value priorities for cultures or individuals. Language, in fact, builds the knowledge structures that are peculiar to a particular culture (such as the colours recognised, the types of professions considered most attractive, medical understanding, mathematics and all of the other things humans know as members of a society). And language also helps to interpret the different social roles, such as father, boss, employee, doctor, teacher and student, that a culture recognises.
Grammar is a tremendous aid to language and also helps in thinking. But it really is at best only a small part of any language, and its importance varies from one language to another. There are tongues that have very little grammar and others in which it is extremely complex.
The course followed by humans on the path to language was a progression through natural signs to human symbols. Signs and symbols are explained in reference to a theory of ‘semiotics’ in the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce. C. S. Peirce was perhaps the most brilliant American philosopher in history. He contributed to mathematics, to science, to the study of language and to philosophy. He is the founder of two separate fields of study: semiotics – the study of signs – and pragmatism – the only uniquely American school of philosophy. In spite of his brilliance, he was never able to secure long-term employment because he was cantankerous and rebellious against social mores. Peirce’s semiotics did not concern itself directly with the evolution of language. But it turns out to be the best model of the stages of linguistic evolution.
Peirce’s theory indirectly predicts a progression of signs from natural signs (indexes), to icons, to human-created symbols.* This progression moves to an increasing complexity of types of sign and the evolutionary progression of Homo species’ language abilities. A sign is any pairing of a form (such as a word, a smell, a sound, a street sign, or Morse code) with a meaning (what the sign refers to). An index, as the most primitive part of the progression, is a form that manifests an actual physical link to what it refers to. The footprint of a cat is an index: it indicates, makes us expect to see, a cat. The smell of a grilling steak brings the steak and the grill to mind. Smoke indexes fire. An icon is something that physically evokes what it refers to: a sculpture or portrait references its subject via a physical resemblance. An onomatopoeic word like ‘bam’ or ‘clang’ brings to mind those sounds.
Figure 1: The semiotic progression
Symbols are conventional links to what they refer to. They are more complicated than other signs because they need not bear any resemblance to nor any physical connection to what they refer to. They are agreed upon by society. The numeral ‘3’ refers to the cardinality of three objects just as ‘Dan’ refers to someone of that name, not because the word ‘three’ bears a physical connection or resemblance to cardinality, nor because all people named Dan have any physical characteristic in common. This arbitrary, conventional association of form and meaning is exactly what renders symbols the beginning of language and evidence for social norms. Symbols are the original social contract.
Figure 1 gives us a view of the relative order of language evolution, following Peirce’s ideas closely (though putting the index before the icon).
Once humans had symbols, certain portions of those symbols became more meaningful than other parts. If I randomly choose to write an S as Ŝ or a P as in English prose, native English readers will disregard the embellishments, recognising immediately that the additions are irrelevant. But if I write S as P, then this will cause confusion. This is because the meaningful parts of symbols cannot be changed without obscuring their identity, though non-meaningful parts may change with impunity. Symbols are, therefore, not simplex atoms but contain ‘junk’ portions (the parts that are non-essential to their meaning) alongside crucial information. For Peirce this information was crucial for the ‘interpretant’ or meaning of the sign.
From symbols and interpretants, it is a short step for language to progress to the phenomenon known as ‘duality of patterning’, which organises smaller units into larger items. Duality of patterning enables the transition to the three levels of complexity – G1, G2 and G3 – that distinguish the different types of grammars that human societies may choose to build their languages around, shown in Figure 1.
The hypothesis that language evolution followed the increasing level of complexity in Peirce’s signs is supported by the archaeological record. On the other hand, the jump from icon to symbol in this chart is ‘unnatural’. This step requires human invention. Evolution did not
create symbols or grammars. Human creativity and intelligence did. And that is why the story of how language began must also be about invention rather than about evolution alone. Evolution made our brains. And humans took over from there.
Still, it is necessary to discuss much more than language itself to understand what happened. For that, one must link language’s development to the species’ biological development. According to the available evidence, Homo sapiens, like every family, fits into a particular set of relationships, usually referred to as a phylogenetic tree or clade (Figure 2). This is highly speculative, but it does give us a reference point. The lower branches among Homo species may turn out to be quite different than those given here.
All animals communicate, hence the arrow at Animal Kingdom. Not all animals have language, which only seems to emerge through the evolution of the genus Homo.
Like anything complicated and controversial, there are a number of ideas about how life began on earth.† One prevalent proposal is that a supreme deity created life. Any discussion of a theistic account of life and language must acknowledge that the origin of both is an important line in the sand for theists. One frequent theistic answer to the question of how DNA and subsequent forms of life evolved is the ‘watchmaker’ theory. Watches were, at the time of this metaphor, the highest technology known. For many reasons, discussions of philosophers and theists often revolve around the most advanced technology of the day. In this case, watches are intricate, complicated, hierarchical in structure and obviously designed. So if someone found a watch on a distant planet, the presence of that watch would indicate that somewhere there was a designer who had a purpose in mind for it, designed it and fabricated it. William Paley put it this way in his Natural Theology in 1802:
Figure 2: The clade of humanity
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there … There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use … Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
Paley’s argument for an ‘artificer’ precedes the work of Wallace and Darwin on evolution by natural selection by more than half a century. There are modern theologians and theistic scientists who consider this argument sound, substituting a complex organ such as the eye in place of the watch. But philosopher David Hume pointed out three serious problems with the watch analogy. First, the materials of the watch are not found naturally – the watch is built from human-made materials. This makes the analogy artificial. As Hume said, it would make much more sense to use something composed exclusively of organic materials, such as a squash, instead of a watch because one can observe that squashes come forth on their own.
Hume’s second objection is that one may not use experiential knowledge to infer a conclusion about non-experiential knowledge. If you understand what a watch is, you also know that the watch was created. One could even observe a watch being made. Yet no one could have any direct experience with the creation of the world. Thus the conclusion that because a watch has a designer the universe also does is not only empirically unjustified but also illogical. Finally, Hume remarked that even if a watch did show that every complicated thing, the universe in particular, has a designer, this lesson would still have nothing to say about the nature of that designer. Such reasoning thus, even if it had not been shown to be invalid, supports no known religion or idea of a deity above any other.
Perhaps the most effective argument against the watchmaker analogy, however, comes from culture. No person can make a watch or its component materials by themselves. A watch is the output of a culture, not a designer. If the universe was designed, this design would have required a society, not a god, unless that god were far different than it is described in the major religions. More to the point, however, the theistic design argument for the universe fails because the science says so. There is a solid scientific foundation to evolutionary theory that is lacking in theistic accounts.
Evolution is a well-established fact. Only the explanations of how evolution happens or looks – natural selection, genetic processes and family trees – can be called theories. But evolution itself is not a theory. In order to understand the origin of language, the origin of life more generally must be considered in order to frame the discussion. And that requires evolution.
The earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old and probably began as a whirling cloud, cooling and solidifying, its waters gradually ending their cycle of rain and evaporation, reducing the surface temperature of our red planet enough to accumulate in turbulent, lifeless, hot oceans inhospitable to all life, in the Precambrian period’s Archaean Eon. But phosphates, sugars, nitrogen were about in the oceanic stew, and from these the first carbohydrates and other building blocks of life were formed. At least, that is one possible explanation.
Another account offered by scientists is that replicating DNA wholly originated in space and was brought to earth by a meteorite or asteroid. This proposal for the origin of DNA is known as ‘panspermia’. According to the proponents of this view, nucleotides are more easily formed in the cold and ice of comets. Our planet was like a giant ovum floating in space, fertilised by space dust, meteors and asteroids, the spermatozoa of the universe, which brought DNA to us. There is even some convincing evidence for this view. Meteorites regularly enter earth’s atmosphere. Some of these might have brought DNA to earth from another part of the universe or solar system. Or perhaps meteors brought not DNA but nucleotides from other parts of space.
Whatever happened, nucleotides eventually joined together in the seas. Later, membranes began to form around them. Within those membranes nucleic acids, along with ribonucleic acid (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) formed. At some point these acids took on the property responsible for all life – replication. From the formation of the earth until molecular life began to form took roughly 500 million years. Within another 500–800 million years, life forms large enough to be visible as fossils were produced.‡
From the beginning of this nucleotide soup, earth transitioned to the Proterozoic ‘early life’ period of the Precambrian. The foundation of life, DNA, again formed from sugars, phosphates and nitrogen.
Because of an understanding of DNA, it is known that a human and a dog are distinguished at the molecular level by the composition of their DNA and the ways in which their DNA is sequenced to form their genome. Genomes are thus the sum of the various DNA and RNA and their combinations. Fine-tuning a bit, canines and humans are not merely distinguished by the components of their DNA but by the syntax of their DNA. The hierarchy of DNA and units relevant to it is:
Chromosomes (carriers of DNA)
↓
DNA + histones§
↓
Genes (segments of DNA)
If one considers the earth from its beginning until today, 99.997 per cent of the planet’s history had passed before the Pleistocene (2.8 million years ago), when Homo habilis (or Homo erectus, depending on classification) the first species of the genus Homo, emerged. Species such as sapiens arose even later. The period in which the earliest hominins gave rise to modern humans, began from the late Miocene (23–5.3 million years ago), through the Pliocene (5.3–2.8 million years ago) and the Pleistocene, up until the current age, the Holocene (11,000 years ago).
Humans enjoy
a privilege unique among all other life forms that enables them to contemplate their origin. And yet, all human perspectives are culturally shaped. Therefore, along with superior mental powers, cultures not only guide humans’ understanding of the world but also define what is worth looking at. Culture constrains how humans justify their reasoning. Science emerges from and is shaped by the values of culture, different social roles and the knowledge structures that have been sanctioned by society (that is, what knowledge is and how different components of our knowledge are related to one another).
Culture is one reason that different scientists take different views on the fossil evidence. It is not merely disagreement about the facts, though that too is important. Richard Feynman was one of the first to notice that results of physics experiments tended to be closer to published expectations than one would have otherwise expected. This points to one cultural effect in science known as ‘confirmation bias’. Even though consideration is given only to science, there is no escaping from the shadow of cultural influences. Interpretations of much of the fossil record change regularly. My conclusions here are no different, although this difference makes them no better or worse than other conclusions until more data is brought to bear.
The accumulated scientific record built by Homo sapiens, through language and Western culture, concludes that humans are primates and that the roots of their genus are to be found in the origins of the primates. So, what are primates? And where did they come from?
The primate order, of which Homo sapiens is one species, arose more than 56 million years ago. Because evolution is gradual and continuous there are ‘protoprimates’ that precede the ‘proper primates’. The earliest known protoprimate transitional fossil is Plesiadapis tricuspidens, which existed some 58 million years ago in North America.
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