The Literary Mind.pdf

166 THE LITERARY MIND
understandable. There is no obvious way in which a lone grammatical person
would have a direct reproductive advantage in a community whose other members
are completely incapable of recognizing or parsing grammar by any means,
general or special. The utterances directed at her would not be grammatical. Her
own grammar would have no audience, since none of the grammatical structure
she produced could be recognized by companions. Of course, her grammatical
utterance could still be understood as ungrammatical communication, and she
could still attribute grammar to the ungrammatical communication directed at
her, and there could surely be reproductive advantage conferred by communication;
but it is difficult to see that there would be any additional advantage conferred
by the grammatical component.
In a brief moment in their argument, Pinker and Bloom do consider explicitly
the right scenario their argument needs: a grammatical community of kin.
They write, "Geschwind, among others, has wondered how a hypothetical 'beneficial'
grammatical mutation could really have benefited its possessor, given that
such an individual would not have been understood by less evolved compatriots.
One possible answer is that any such mutation is likely to be shared by individuals
who are genetically related. Because much communication is among kin, a
linguistic mutant will be understood by some relatives and the resulting enhancements
in information sharing will benefit each one of them relative to others who
are not related." This is the only suggestion Pinker and Bloom offer of a community
in which grammar is not widespread. It is still not a picture of reproductive
advantage to the lone grammatical individual in a community whose other
members are completely incapable of recognizing grammar by any means, presumably
because Pinker and Bloom can see no such advantage.
But it is not true that such a mutation is likely to be shared by individuals
who are genetically related. Consider the first genetically grammatical person.
By definition, none of her ancestors or older siblings is genetically grammatical.
If the genetic material expressed in her minimal grammatical competence arose
by mutation from her parents' genetic material, as in a copying error in making
a sperm or egg, it is extraordinarily unlikely that her younger siblings would have
that mutation. If it arose because error-free sexual recombination of her parents'
genetic material finally put together the right package, then later siblings would
receive quite different genetic packages (especially if they do not have the same
two parents). There is also the important difficulty that even if a later sibling
had the right package, the first genetically grammatical infant would nonetheless
still live in grammatical isolation (under Pinker and Bloom's suggestion)
during the period in infancy in which she develops grammar.
If evolution could think ahead, it would certainly see that producing a genetically
grammatical community, even a small one, would be enormously useful