The Literary Mind.pdf

LANGUAGE 167
to members of that community. Pinker and Bloom are certainly right about that.
But evolution cannot think ahead. It cannot think even one step ahead. As George
C. Williams puts it in Natural Selection, "Every step of the way, as Darwin made
clear, had to be immediately useful to each individual possessor. No future usefulness
is ever relevant." A good natural selection story for the origin of rudimentary
grammar must show that the first lone genetically grammatical human
being had a reproductive advantage. If she was born into a community whose
members had, by virtue of parable, a minimal capacity for grammar, then the
reproductive advantage to her is obvious; but in that case, the origin of rudimentary
grammar comes from parable, not from genetic specialization. Pinker and
Bloom must disallow on principle the existence of such a community. They are
therefore obliged to show benefit to the first genetically grammatical person, born
into a community whose other members have zero capacity for grammar, who
lack the ability even to recognize the existence of grammar, much less to parse it.
This is the hard and all-important step in the argument. It is a step they skip
over.
The least implausible picture Pinker and Bloom might have offered would
be one in which the lone grammatical individual somehow develops grammar
by using its grammar module in the absence of any grammatical utterances from
other members of the community, grows up, passes the trait to one or more of
her children, and converses with them in such a way that the minimal additional
grammatical component that they add to communication confers, in some fashion,
reproductive advantage to them, beyond the advantage conferred by the
nongrammatical form of that communication, and skirting any costs in fitness
associated with that genetic change, especially costs to the first lone grammatical
person early in life, before she had a chance to reproduce and converse with
offspring. This is a hazy picture, with central components missing, but nonetheless
one in which genetic specialization for grammar could in principle have
been adaptive even though rudimentary grammar was otherwise absent.
But there is no need to resort to such a picture. Very little grammatical competence
would be needed to create an environment in which genetic specialization
for grammar could be adaptive, and parable can supply a substantial grammar. The
view that rudimentary grammar arises from parable provides an appropriate environment
of evolutionary adaptiveness of the sort that any good natural selection
story must have.
The hypothesis that human beings now living have some genetic specialization
for grammar is an open question, to be decided on empirical grounds,
principally in the study of genetics and neurobiology. The view of parable as the
origin of grammar is not incompatible with this hypothesis. On the contrary,
the parabolic account is the only one I see that straightforwardly provides the