Review of M. H. Christiansen and S. Kirby (eds), Language Evolution

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(4): 929-930 (2004).

Despite its title, this volume is not concerned with how languages evolve. Its topic is a quite different question: the evolutionary emergence of language in our species. Debates in this area have been notoriously fractious, and this wide-ranging collection gives an accurate picture of the current interdisciplinary state of play.

The book consists of seventeen chapters written by twenty-one authors. The editors’ opening chapter surveys the difficulties facing scholars in addressing what may be ‘the hardest problem in science’. In the second chapter, however, Steven Pinker is already undermining the editors’ whole approach: language is a biological adaptation like any other, he argues, and evolved in the normal Darwinian way. There is therefore no ‘hard problem’ at all. James Hurford agrees that language is part of human biology. But he views it also as embedded in uniquely human social and cultural processes, the details of its evolution remaining elusive at best. Simon Kirby and Morten Christiansen concur that a complete theory of language evolution will necessarily be multi-faceted: ‘We should not expect a single mechanism to do all the work’. Frederick Newmeyer surveys a range of recent evolutionary scenarios, bringing out their mutual incompatibility. Derek Bickerton insists that fully fledged syntactical speech emerged from its predecessor in a sudden leap. Michael Tomasello argues that no dedicated language faculty ever evolved – the core relevant adaptation was simply for ‘understanding others on analogy with the self’. Terrence Deacon argues that syntactical universals are neither genetic nor cultural but best conceptualized on the model of mathematical principles, destined to be discovered once symbols begin to be used.

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Christiansen,Morten H. & Simon Kirby (eds). Language evolution. xvii, 395 pp., figs, tables, bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2003. £60.00 (cloth), £17.99 (paper)