Language and Biology

Both the biologist and the linguist are interested in how language evolved in the natural history of the human species. This process was embedded in the evolution of life from the first self-replicating macromolecules to the wealth of species living today on Earth. The evolutionary thinker hits, therefore, on a more fundamental question: Is human language the most complex realization of abstract principles that govern the processing of every kind of biological information?

But let us start with the first question: How did language evolve in our natural history? There is not a single science that can answer this question; research on the natural history of language is an interdisciplinary project that must bring together linguists, neurobiologists, social anthropologists, and evolutionary theorists, among others.

If we want to find the evolutionary origin of language, we need foremost a theory of what language is so that we can describe the relation between the general language competence of humans and the specific use of all those languages that were, are, and will be spoken in different human populations. A first idea could be that a language is just the set of all sentences that were ever spoken in some population. But how can a sentence be defined without criteria for whether an utterance is a well-formed combination of words? So, we need to know a grammar, which is nothing more than a rule-governed set of such criteria.

The grammars of, for example, Japanese and English do not look at all alike. Has the biological evolution of the human species, therefore, nothing to tell us about today's linguistic variety given that it is a result solely of cultural history and nongenetic transmission? On the contrary, according to one of the most influential linguistic theories, Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, every human inherits the same grammatical competence involving abstract principles of how to learn a language. These principles alone cannot determine the language a child will learn; they contain parameters, the values of which are set by the social environment of the child, so that the rich variety of languages is generated by different individual experiences.

What is innate, and what is acquired in the knowledge of grammar, can be decided only by empirical research, in which human biology and social anthropology must cooperate. Apart from other research on anatomical and physiological prerequisites for language use, the most important question for the biologist involves investigating the neural structures in the brain that implement the different parts of the linguistic competence—from the phonological [Page 1406]analysis of utterances, through the generation of syntactic patterns and the semantic understanding of words and sentences, to the pragmatic knowledge of what is expected from the hearer when he or she perceives a certain kind of sentence in a dialogue. The neurobiologist must come to an understanding of how the neural instantiations of partial linguistic competencies are ontogenetically formed, and the zoologist must compare them with homologous parts in the brain of kindred species.

Yet language is, even from a strictly biological point of view, a social phenomenon. No human would speak if there were not others with whom a coordination of behavior is necessary to achieve some individual aims by social action. Therefore, primatologists and anthropologists are asked to explain the coevolution of innate cognitive competencies and social contexts in which the biological evolution of language happened.

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