Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

The Role of Language in Intelligence 371
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Losing Our Minds to
Darwin
1. THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN INTELLIGENCE
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
—ANONYMOUS '
We are not like other animals; our minds set us off from them. That is the
claim that inspires such passionate defense. It is curious that people who want
so much to defend this difference should be so reluctant to examine the
evidence in its favor coming from evolutionary biology, ethology, primatology,
and cognitive science. Presumably, they are afraid they might learn
that, although we are different, we aren't different enough to make the lifedefining
difference they cherish. For Descartes, after all, the difference was
absolute and metaphysical: animals were just mindless automata; we have
souls. Descartes and his followers have suffered calumny over the centuries at
the hands of animal-lovers who have deplored his claim that animals have no
souls. More theoretically minded critics have deplored his faintheartedness
from the opposite pole: how could such a sound, ingenious mechanist flinch
so badly when it came to making an exception for humanity? Of course our
minds are our brains, and hence are ultimately just stupendously complex
"machines"; the difference between us and other animals is one of huge
degree, not metaphysical kind. It is no coincidence, I have shown, that those
who deplore Artificial Intelligence are also those who deplore evolutionary
accounts of human mentality: if human minds are
1. This bon mot appeared in the Tufts Daily, attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
but I daresay it is a meme of more recent birth.
nonmiraculous products of evolution, then they are, in the requisite sense,
artifacts, and all their powers must have an ultimately "mechanical" explanation.
We are descended from macros and made of macros, and nothing we
can do is anything beyond the power of huge assemblies of macros ( assembled
in space and time).
Still, there is a huge difference between our minds and the minds of other
species, a gulf wide enough even to make a moral difference. It is—it must
be---due to two intermeshed factors, each of which requires a Darwinian
explanation: (1) the brains we are born with have features lacking in other
brains, features that have evolved under selection pressure over the last six
million years or so, and (2) these features make possible an enormous
elaboration of powers that accrue from the sharing of Design wealth through
cultural transmission. The pivotal phenomenon that unites these two factors
is language. We human beings may not be the most admirable species on the
planet, or the most likely to survive for another millennium, but we are
without any doubt at all the most intelligent. We are also the only species
with language.
Is that true? Don't whales and dolphins, vervet monkeys and honeybees
(the list goes on) have languages of sorts? Haven't chimpanzees in laboratories
been taught rudimentary languages of sorts? Yes, and body language is
a sort of language, and music is the international language ( sort of), and
politics is a sort of language, and the complex world of odor and olfaction is
another, highly emotionally charged language, and so on. It sometimes seems
that the highest praise we can bestow on a phenomenon we are studying is
the claim that its complexities entitle it to be called a language—of sorts.
This admiration for language—real language, the sort only we human beings
use—is well founded. The expressive, information-encoding properties of
real language are practically limitless (in at least some dimensions), and the
powers that other species acquire in virtue of their use of proto-languages,
hemi-semi-demi-languages, are indeed similar to the powers we acquire
thanks to our use of real language. These other species do climb a few steps
up the mountain on whose summit we reside, thanks to language. Looking at
the vast differences between their gains and ours is one way of approaching
the question we now must address: just how does language contribute to
intelligence?
What varieties of thought require language? What varieties of thought (if
any) are possible without language? We watch a chimpanzee, with her soulful
face, inquisitive eyes, and deft fingers, and we very definitely get a sense of
the mind within, but, the more we watch, the more our picture of her mind
swims before our eyes. In some ways she is so human, so insightful; yet we
soon learn (to our dismay or relief, depending on our hopes ) that in other
ways she is so dense, so uncomprehending, so unreachably cut off from our
human world. How could a chimp who so obviously understands A fail to
understand B? Consider a few simple questions about chimpanzees.