t h e h u m a n f a c t o r some notable scientists – rejected such talk, partly because it seemed to contradict the biblical narrative, but also because it was at odds with Plato, who in the West was accorded the status of a semi-divine. Plato argued that species are immutable and therefore cannot change over time, because each one represents an idea, or ideal, of God. Others were content simply to argue that God was, or is, the creator of all – yet they felt that He did not, as Plato suggested, make any one lineage of creature as a once-for-all ideal. God was content instead to begin each lineage afresh, but to allow it to change over time. Thus these middle-of-the-roaders sought to reconcile evolutionary thinking with fairly standard theology. But just to complicate matters, some key thinkers – including Cuvier, Lyell, and Owen – seemed to veer between different points of view.
Troubling for the committed evolutionists
– whether or not they admitted God into the discussion – was the question ‘How?’ They agreed that creatures were transformed over time, but by what means and in response to what? In France, Lamarck invoked a whole raft of possible mechanisms, from the direct influence of the changing environment to the principle of use and disuse (the latter illustrated by giraffes, whose necks he famously suggested grew longer over time as they strove to reach the topmost branches). In contrast, Darwin in On the Origin of Species spelled out the principle of natural selection, as did the modest and somewhat saintly collector, Alfred Russel Wallace, at almost exactly the same time. But before either of them came on the scene, relative unknowns including the arboriculturist Patrick Matthew, the publisher Robert Chambers, and (believe it or not) the founder of scouting, Robert Baden Powell, had all published works suggesting that they had grasped the main idea.
Darwin died in 1882, twenty-three years after Origin was published, leaving several loose ends. Some of them have now been tied, at least partially. Darwin did not understand the mechanism of heredity, though this is essential to his idea (as he well knew). Now his ideas have been neatly combined with those of Gregor Mendel, and the overall narrative – known as ‘neo-Darwinism’ – seems complete. Darwin himself suggested that natural selection probably wasn’t the only evolutionary force at work: the extent to which it really operates, and at what level (group, individual, gene, or all three), continues to rankle. Lamarck’s ideas, for a long time ridiculed, have crept back in various guises.
Here is a rich tale indeed. It needs a novelist like Rebecca Stott to get to grips with it; and so she does, triumphantly. To order this book for £20, see the Literary Review bookshop on page 38
pat r i c k w i l c k e n
Words to the Wise anguage: The Cultural Tool
By Daniel L Everett (Profile Books 320pp £14.99)
After decades of research among the Pirahã – a small indigenous group of people in a remote southern region of the state of Amazonas in Brazil – American linguist Daniel Everett found unlikely fame. What began as missionary work,under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, continued academically with a doctorate at the University of Campinas and then a career as a linguistics professor in the United States and, for a time, the UK. In 2005, dissatisfied with conventional approaches, Everett posted on his website an article entitled ‘Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã’, which was later published in the journal Current Anthropology.The paper reignited the old debates about whether human capacity for language is innate or learned, and whether its underlying principles are universal or culturally constrained.
The article provoked not just an avalanche of academic rebuttals but substantial press coverage, with the New Scientist reporting that, according to Everett, Pirahã represented ‘the final nail in the coffin for Noam Chomsky’s hugely influential theory of universal grammar’. A largely sympathetic full-length feature in the New Yorker by John Colapinto consolidated Everett’s reputation as the maverick theorist who was taking on the Establishment, while for many specialists in the field, including Chomksy, he was dismissed as no more than a charlatan. Many have questioned both Everett’s data and his interpretations – a detailed, point-by-point refutation in the leading linguistic journal Language appeared in 2009 – but the strangeness of the tribe’s language combined with the iconoclasm of Everett’s claims guaranteed exposure.
After the years of often highly technical academic skirmishes that followed, Language:The Cultural Tool is Everett’s attempt to set down his ideas in accessible form. Although the Pirahã data is discussed at length, much of the book is far broader in scope, explaining the author’s position on the big questions: the evolution of language, how children learn languages, and the relationship between culture and language.
For Everett, the ‘cognitive fire of language’ is a tool, akin to a bow and arrow or a guitar or even a set of golf clubs. Forged through evolutionary pressures, language has come into being ‘to solve the twin problems of communication and social cohesion’. In this looser scheme, in which Everett views language more as a property emerging from a set of circumstances than an inbuilt capability, there is no need to appeal to a priori knowledge or specialised structures in the brain – Chomsky’s ‘language organ’. Instead the brain, as an ‘all-purpose device’, uses general principles of learning – such as a theory of mind, the ability to distinguish between figure and ground, and the capacity to have directed thoughts (intentionality) – to build languages in different cultural settings.
From these foundations, Everett attacks Chomsky’s key assumptions. Diverse languages’ ‘light family resemblance’ is not the result of the workings of a deep, abstract universal grammar, but the repeated combinations over space and time of ‘standard human intelligence and evolution’. When children learn language, they are not applying hard-wired ‘algebraic procedures’ to j u n e 2 0 1 2 | Literary Review 9