Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain by
William Calvin and Derek Bickerton, MIT Press, £16.95, ISBN 0262032732
“NOW, Derek, let me summarise what we said at breakfast and afterwards, when
we walked up to the castle,” says William Calvin, a typical comment from the
somewhat rambling exchange of views that makes up Lingua ex Machina.
Why should Derek and William’s chatter interest us? Perhaps it is the
topic—language—or perhaps it is the novelty of bringing together
these two specialists.
Derek is Derek Bickerton, professor of linguistics at the University of
Hawaii for 24 years. Conversational partner Calvin is a neurologist and
affiliate professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the University of
Washington School of Medicine, Seattle. The burden of their argument is that
language cannot have emerged in a single swoop: a protolanguage must have
preceded the “great leap forward”. This double-layered approach is increasing in
popularity among evolutionists, although the father of the opposite viewpoint,
MIT’s Noam Chomsky, naturally disputes it.
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The book gives the impression of being a neatened up version of a
freewheeling conversation, in which Bickerton and Calvin take charge of
alternate chapters. It sums up ideas put forward during a month’s stay at an
Italian villa overlooking Lake Como, hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation.
“We’re not trying to write the book about language origins . . . we’ll be happy
just to show several powerful ways of getting from ape behaviours to syntax,”
claims Calvin. “And if by this time you are thoroughly confused, like the
centipede who started to wonder which foot to put down first . . . that’s fine,”
says Bickerton. It takes time to see a pattern amid the verbiage. Yet
eventually, points of agreement surface such as the claim that a minimal
protolanguage came first.
But how that first hop forward took place is uncertain: “There are good
reasons for supposing that the first emergence of protolanguage had very little
to do with social intelligence,” Bickerton claims, arguing against a widely held
viewpoint. He proposes foraging—giving more specific information about
food than just “follow me”—and instruction of the young, even though he
admits that such speculation is “light luggage, it’s easy to junk and try
again”. He also argues that the practice of reciprocal altruism created the set
of abstract categories and structures required by syntax, and that syntax began
when people began to map thematic roles—categories such as “agent” and
“goal”—onto a protolinguistic output of unstructured words.
Calvin also points out that the brain shows specialisation that might reflect
these prehistoric staging posts, a contentious idea. For example, the temporal
lobe is quite specialised for naming, he claims, whereas verbs are dealt with in
the frontal lobe.
Readers new to the topic might have difficulty assessing the debate, as
strongly held personal viewpoints are interleaved with alternative beliefs. For
instance, Calvin points out that language and hand-arm movements share the same
cortical space. He repeats his well-known yet controversial view that the
“ballistic movement planner” might do double duty, serving as “the structured
utterance planner when not too busy with throwing or hammering”.
In the best parts of Lingua ex Machina, good points emerge and are
honed by discussion. “The way evolution normally works is to throw up all manner
of possibilities and then let competition thin them out. We can be fairly sure
that what we find today represents the cream of whatever crop there was then,”
Bickerton says. Calvin disagrees: “Not necessarily the cream of the crop of
early devices, Derek . . . Sometimes you just standardise on something that is
merely `good enough’.” In economics, they talk of “market capture”.
The reconciliation promised by the title is not entirely delivered: each
participant in the discussion is too taken with his own ideas. The final chapter
concludes vaguely that the “trimming and fitting” of two separate lines of
thought, the Darwinian and the Chomskyan, “does not in fact require either side
to cede significant territory”. The main point of this book, then, is the
open-ended discussion between scholars from different disciplines. As Bickerton
concludes: “The whole point of research is to explore the unknown without too
many preconceptions . . . Better by far to open doors on the unknown than to
lock them with dogma.”
