Pinker - Bloom - NATURAL LANGUAGE AND NATURAL SELECTION

PINKER & BLOOM / NATURAL LANGUAGE AND NATURAL SELECTION 38
grammar that can be seen in another system. Not only has no such shared character been
shown, but the dissimilarities between syntax and motor control are rather striking. Motor
control is a game of inches so its control programs must have open continuous parameters
for time and space at every level of organization. Syntax has no such analogue parameters.
A far better case could be made that grammar exploited mechanisms originally used for the
conceptualization of topology and antagonistic forces (Jackendoff, 1983; Pinker, 1989b;
Talmy, 1983, 1988), but that is another story.
6. Conclusion
As we warned, the thrust of this paper has been entirely conventional. All we have
argued is that human language, like other specialized biological systems, evolved
by natural selection. Our conclusion is based on two facts that we would think
would be entirely uncontroversial: language shows signs of complex design for the
communication of propositional structures, and the only explanation for the origin of
organs with complex design is the process of natural selection. Although
distinguished scientists from a wide variety of fields and ideologies have tried to
cast doubt on an orthodox Darwinian account of the evolution of a biological
specialization for grammar, upon close examination none of the arguments is
compelling.
But we hope we have done more than try and set the record straight. Skepticism about the
possibility of saying anything of scientific value about language evolution has a long
history, beginning in the prohibition against discussing the topic by the
Soci@act[h]t@act[h] de Linguistique de Paris in 1866 and culminating in the the
encyclopedic volume edited by Harnad, Steklis, and Lancaster (1976) that pitted a few
daring speculators against an army of doubters. A suspicious attitude is not entirely
unwarranted when one reads about The Age of Modifiers, Pithecanthropus Alalus ("Apeman
without speech"), and the Heave-ho theory. But such skepticism should not lead to
equally unsupported assertions about the necessity of spandrels and saltations.
A major problem among even the more responsible attempts to speculate about the origins
of language has been that they ignore the wealth of specific knowledge about the structure
of grammar discovered during the past 30 years. As a result language competence has been
equated with cognitive development, leading to confusions between the evolution of
language and the evolution of thought, or has been expediently equated with activities that
leave tangible remnants, such as tool manufacture, art, and conquest.
We think there is a wealth of respectable new scientific information relevant to the
evolution of language that has never been properly synthesized. The computational theory
of mind, generative grammar, articulatory and acoustic phonetics, developmental
psycholinguistics, and the study of dynamics of diachronic change could profitably be
combined with recent molecular, archeological, and comparative neuroanatomical
discoveries and with strategic modeling of evolution using insights from evolutionary
theory and anthropology (see, e.g., Bickerton, 1981; Brandon and Hornstein, 1986;
Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, in press; Hurford, 1989a, 1989b; Tooby & DeVore, 1987;
Hinton and Nowlan, 1987). It is certain there many questions about the evolution of