by Peter Watson
Family or Language Forms Meaning
Nilo-Saharan tok-tek-dik one
Caucasian titi, tito finger, single
Uralic ik-odik-itik one
Indo-European dik-deik to indicate/point
Japanese te hand
Eskimo tik index finger
Sino-Tibetan tik one
Austroasiatic ti hand, arm
Indo-Pacific tong-tang-ten finger, hand, arm
Na-dene tek-tiki-tak one
Amerind tik finger39
For the Indo-European languages, those stretching from western Europe to India, Greenberg’s approach has been taken further by Colin Renfrew, the Cambridge archaeologist who rationalised the effects of the carbon-14 revolution on dating. Renfrew’s aim, in Archaeology and Language (1987), was not simply to examine language origins but to compare those findings with others from archaeology, to see if a consistent picture could be arrived at and, most controversially, to identify the earliest homeland of the Indo-European peoples, to see what light this threw on human development overall. After introducing the idea of regular sound shifts, according to nation–
‘milk’: French lait Italian latte Spanish leche
‘fact’: French fait Italian fatto Spanish hecho
Renfrew went on to study the rates of change of language and to consider what the earliest vocabulary might have been. Comparing variations in the use of key words (like eye, rain, and dry), together with an analysis of early pottery and a knowledge of farming methods, Renfrew examined the spread of farming through Europe and adjacent areas. He concluded that the central homeland for the Indo-Europeans, the place where the mother tongue, ‘proto-Indo-European,’ was located, was in central and eastern Anatolia about 6500 BC and that the distribution of this language was associated with the spread of farming.40
The surprising thing about all this is the measure of agreement between archaeology, linguistics and genetics. The spread of peoples around the globe, the demise of the Neanderthals, the arrival of humanity in the Americas, the rise of language, its spread associated with art and with agriculture, its link to pottery, and the different tongues we see about us today all fall into a particular order, the beginnings of the last chapter in the evolutionary synthesis.
Against such a strong research/empirical background, it is not surprising that theoretical work on evolution should flourish. What is perhaps surprising is that writing about biology in the 1980s and 1990s became a literary phenomenon. A clutch of authors – biologists, palaeontologists, philosophers – wrote dozens of books that became best-sellers and filled the shelves of good bookshops, marking a definite change in taste, matched only by an equivalent development in physics and mathematics, which we shall come to in a later chapter. In alphabetical order the main authors in this renaissance of Darwinian studies were: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Niles Eldredge, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Pinker, Steven Rose, John Maynard Smith, and E. O. Wilson. The group was known collectively as the neo-Darwinists, and they aroused enthusiasm and hostility in equal measure: their books sold well, but Dawkins at one point, in 1998, was described as ‘the most dangerous man in Britain.’41 The message of the neo-Darwinists was twofold. One view was represented by Wilson, Dawkins, Smith and Dennett, the other by Eldredge, Gould, Lewontin and Rose. Wilson himself produced two kinds of books. There was first, as we have seen, Sociobiology, published in 1975, On Human Nature (1978), and Consilience (1998). These books all had in common a somewhat stern neo-Darwinism, centred around Wilson’s conviction that ‘the genes hold culture on a leash.’42 Wilson wanted above all to bridge C. P. Snow’s two cultures, which he believed existed, and to show how science could penetrate human nature so as to explain culture: ‘The essence of the argument, then, is that the brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly.’43 Wilson believed that biology will eventually be able to explain anthropology, psychology, sociology, and economics, that all these disciplines will become blended in ever closer ways. In On Human Nature he expanded on Sociobiology, with more aspects of human experience that could be explained in adaptive terms. He described, for example, the notion of hypergamy, the practice of females marrying men of equal or greater wealth and status; he pointed to the ways in which the great civilisations around the world, although they were not in touch with each other, developed similar features often in much the same order; he believes that chronic meat shortages may have determined the great religions, in that as early man moved away from game-rich areas, the elites invented religious rules to confine meat-eating to a religious caste; and he quotes the example of inmates in the Federal Reformatory for Women, Alderson, West Virginia, where it has been observed that the females form themselves into family-like units centred on a sexually active pair who call themselves ‘husband’ and ‘wife,’ with other women being added, known as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters,’ and older inmates serving as ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles.’ He points out that male prisoners never organise in this way.44 Wilson’s chief aim all the way through his work was to show how the cultural and even ethical life of humanity can be explained biologically, genetically, and though his tone was cheerful and optimistic, it was uncompromising.
In the second strand of his work, particularly in Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species (1984), Wilson’s aim was to show that humankind’s bond with nature can help explain and enrich our lives as no other approach can.45 Besides arguing that biophilia may explain aesthetics (why we like savannah-type landscapes, rather than urban ones), why scientific understanding of animal life may enrich the reading of nature poems, why all peoples have learned to fear the snake (because it is dangerous; no need to invoke Freud), he takes the reader on his own journeys of scientific discovery, to show not only how intellectually exciting it may be but how it may offer meaning (a partial meaning admittedly) for life. He shows us, for example, how he demonstrated that the size of an island is related to the number of species it can bear, and how this deepens our understanding of conservation. Biophilia struck a chord, generating much research, which was all brought together ten years later at a special conference convened at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts in August 1992. Here, more systematic studies were reported which showed, for example, that, given a choice, people prefer unspectacular countryside landscapes in which to live; one prison study was reported that showed that prisoners whose cells faced fields reported sick less often than those whose cells faced the parade ground; a list of biota that produce psychosomatic illness (flies, lizards, vultures) was prepared, and these were found to be associated with food taboos. The symposium also examined James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which had been published in 1979 and argued that the whole of the earth biota is one interregulated system, more akin to physiology than to physics (i.e., that the gases of the atmosphere, the salinity and alkalinity of the oceans, are regulated to keep the maximum number of things alive, like a gigantic organism). Biophilia was an extension of sociobiology, a less iconoclastic version which didn’t catch on to the same extent.46
Second only to Wilson in the passion with which he advances a neo-Darwinian view of the world is Richard Dawkins. Dawkins won the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1987 for his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, and in 1995 he became Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. His other books were The Extended Phenotype (1982), River out of Eden (1995), and Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), with The Selfish Gene being reissued in 1989. There is a relentless quality about The Blind Watchmaker, as there is about many of Dawkins’s books, a reflection of his desire once and for all to dispel every fuzzy notion about evolution.47 One of the arguments of the antievolutionists is to say: if evolution is a fact, why aren’t there intermediate forms of life, and how did complex organisms, like eyes or wings, form without intermediate organisms also occurring? Surely only a designer, like God, could arrange all this? And so Dawkins spends time demolishing such objectio
ns. Take wings: ‘There are animals alive today that beautifully illustrate every stage in the continuum. There are frogs that glide with big webs between their toes, tree-snakes with flattened bodies that catch the air, lizards with flaps along their bodies, and several different kinds of mammals that glide with membranes stretched between their limbs, showing us the kind of way bats must have got their start. Contrary to the Creationist literature, not only are animals with “half a wing” common, so are animals with a quarter of a wing, three quarters of a wing, and so on.’48 Dawkins’s second aim is to emphasise that natural selection really does happen, and his technique here is to quote some telling examples, one of the best being the cicadas, whose life cycles are always prime numbers (thirteen or seventeen years), the point being that such locusts reach maturity at an unpredictable time, meaning that the species they feed on can never adjust to their arrival – it is mathematically random! But Dawkins’s main original contribution was his notion of ‘memes,’ a neologism to describe the cultural equivalent of genes.49 Dawkins argued that as a result of human cognitive evolution, such things as ideas, books, tunes, and cultural practices come to resemble genes in that the more successful – those that help their possessors thrive – live on, and so will ‘reproduce’ and be used by later generations.
Daniel Dennett, a philosopher from Tufts University in Medford, near Boston, is another uncompromising neo-Darwinist. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995), Dennett states baldly, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space, time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’50 Like Wilson and Dawkins, Dennett is concerned to drum evolutionary theory’s opponents out of town: ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea is reductionism incarnate.’51 His book is an attempt to explain how life, intelligence, language, art, and ultimately consciousness are, in essence, no more than ‘engineering problems.’ We haven’t got there yet, when it comes to explaining all the small steps that have been taken in the course of natural selection, but Dennett has no doubt we will some day. Perhaps the heart of his book (one heart anyway; it is very rich) is an examination of the ideas of Stuart Kauffman in his 1993 book The Origins of Order: Self-Organisation and Selection in Evolution.52 Kauffman’s idea was an attack on natural selection insofar as he argued that the similarity between organisms did not necessarily imply descent; it could just as easily be due to the fact that there are only a small number of design solutions to any problem, and that these ‘inherent’ solutions shape the organisms.53 Dennett concedes that Kauffman has a point, far more than any others who offer rival theories to natural selection, but he argues that these ‘constraints over design’ in fact only add to the possibilities in evolution, using poetry as an analogy. When poetry is written to rhyme, he points out, the poet finds many more juxtapositions than he or she would have found had he or she just been writing a shopping list. In other words, order may begin as a constraint, but it can end up by being liberating. Dennett’s other main aim, beyond emphasising life as a physical-engineering phenomenon, shaped by natural selection, is to come to grips with what is at the moment the single most important mystery still outstanding in the biological sciences – consciousness. This will be discussed more fully later in this chapter.
John Maynard Smith, emeritus professor of biology at the University of Sussex, is the doyen of the neo-Darwinists, publishing his first book as long ago as 1956. Less of a populariser than the others, he is one of the most original thinkers and uncompromising theorists. In 1995, in conjunction with Eörs Szathmáry, he published The Major Transitions in Evolution, where the chapter titles neatly summarise the bones of the argument:
Chemical evolution
The evolution of templates
The origin of translation and the genetic code
The origin of protocells
The origin of eukaryotes
The origin of sex and the nature of species
Symbiosis
The development of spatial patterns
The origin of societies
The origin of language54
In the same year that Maynard Smith and Szathmáry were putting together their book, Steven Pinker, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, released The Language Instinct. Maynard Smith’s book, and Pinker’s, finally put to rest the Skinner versus Chomsky debate, both concluding that the greater part of language ability is inherited.55 Mainly this was done by reference to the effects on language ability of various forms of brain injury, the development of language in children, and its relation to known maturational changes in the child’s nervous system, the descent of later languages from earlier ones, the similarity in the skulls of various primates, not to mention certain areas of chimpanzee brains that equate to human brains and seem to account for the reception of warning sounds and other calls from fellow chimpanzees. Pinker also presented evidence of language disabilities that have run in families (particularly dyslexia), and a new technique, called positron emission topography, in which a volunteer inhales a mildly radioactive gas and then puts his head inside a ring of gamma ray detectors. Computers can then calculate which parts of the brain ‘light up.’56 There seems no doubt now that language is an instinct, or at least has a strong genetic component. In fact, the evidence is so strong, one wonders why it was ever doubted.
*
Set alongside – and sometimes against – Wilson, Dawkins, Dennett, and Co. is a second set of biologists who agree with them about most things, but disagree on a handful of fundamental topics. This second group includes Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of Harvard, Niles Eldredge at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Steven Rose at the Open University in England.
Pride of place in this group must go to Gould. A prolific author, Gould specialises in books with ebullient, almost avuncular tides: Ever since Darwin (1977), The Panda’s Thumb (1980), The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Shoes (1983), The Flamingo’s Smile (1985), Wonderful Life (1989), Bully for Brontosaurus (1991), Eight Little Piggies (1993), and Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1999). There are four areas where Gould and his colleagues differ from Dawkins, Dennett, and the others. The first concerns a concept known as ‘punctuated equilibrium.’ This idea dates from 1972, when Eldredge and Gould published a paper in a book on palaeontology entitled ‘Punctuated Equilibrium: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism.’57 The thrust of this was that an examination of fossils showed that whereas all orthodox Darwinians tended to see evolutionary change as gradual, in fact there were in the past long periods of stasis, where nothing happened, followed by sudden and rapid periods of dramatic change. This, they said, helped account for why there weren’t intermediate forms, and also explained speciation, how new species arise – suddenly, when the habitat changes dramatically. For a while, the theory also gained adherents as a metaphor for sudden revolution as a form of social change (Gould’s father had been a well-known Marxist). However, after nearly thirty years, punctuated equilibrium has lost a lot of its force. ‘Sudden’ in geological terms is not really sudden in human terms – it involves hundreds of thousands if not a few million years. The rate of evolution can be expected to vary from time to time.
The second area of disagreement arose in 1979, in a paper by Gould and Lewontin in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, entitled ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.’58 The central point of this paper, which explains the strange architectural reference, is that a spandrel, the tapering triangular space formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at a right angle, isn’t really a design feature. Gould and Lewontin had seen these features at San Marco in Venice and concluded that they were inevitable by-products of other, more important features – i.e., the arche
s. Though harmonious, they were not really ‘adaptations’ to the structure, but simply what was left when the main design was put in place. Gould and Lewontin thought there were parallels to be drawn with regard to biology, that not all features seen in nature were direct adaptations – that, they said, was Panglossian. Instead, there were biological spandrels that were also by-products. As with punctuated equilibrium, Gould and Lewontin thought that the spandrel approach was a radical revision of Darwinism. A claim was even made for language being a biological spandrel, an emergent phenomenon that came about by accident, in the course of the brain’s development in other directions. This was too much, and too important, to be left alone by Dawkins, Dennett, and others. It was shown that even in architecture a spandrel isn’t inevitable – there are other ways of treating what happens where two arches meet at right angles – and again, like punctuated equilibrium, the idea of language as a spandrel, a by-product of some other set of adaptations, has not really stood the test of time.
The third area where Gould differed from his colleagues came in 1989 in his book Wonderful Life.59 This was a reexamination and retelling of the story of the Burgess Shale, a fossil-rich rock formation in British Columbia, Canada, which has been well known to geologists and palaeontologists since the turn of the century. The lesson that Gould drew from these studies was that an explosion of life forms occurred in the Cambrian period, ‘far surpassing in variety of bodily forms today’s entire animal kingdom. Most of these forms were wiped out in mass extinctions; but one of the survivors was the ancestor of the vertebrates, and of the human race.’ Gould went on to say that if the ‘tape’ of evolution were to be run again, it need not turn out in the same way – a different set of survivors would be here now. This was a notable heresy, and once again the prevailing scientific opinion is now against Gould. As we saw in the section on Dennett and Kauffman, only a certain number of design solutions exist to any problem, and the general feeling now is that, if one could run evolution all over again, something very like humans would result. Even Gould’s account of the Burgess Shale has been attacked. In a book published in 1998 Simon Conway Morris, part of the palaeontological group from Cambridge that has spent decades studying the Shale, concluded in The Crucible of Creation that in fact the vast army of trilobites does fit with accepted notions of evolution; comparisons can be made with living animal families, although we may have made mistakes with certain groupings.60