Charles Darwin & W. Tecumseh Fitch & Derek Bickerton on the Evolution of Language

Over at Language Log there are two very nice guest posts on the occasion of Darwin's 200th Birthday and his view of the evolution of language. The first post, by W. Tecumseh Fitch of St. Andrew's University, in which he reexamines Charles Darwin's proposal that the ancestors of humans first developed a emotionally expressive musical protolanguage which later developed into modern meaningful symbolic language. He discusses this view in the light of present-day evidence and concludes that

"suitably updated, [it] provides a compelling fit to both the phenomenology of modern music and language, and to a wealth of comparative data. "

He further argues that:

"This year of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday seems an opportune time for Darwin' own model of language evolution to regain the prominence it deserves."

In the second post, Derek Bickerton comments on Fitch's essay and critices his verdict that

"Darwin's view of language was ahead of its time, and his model and arguments remain surprisingly relevant."

Instead, he argues, although Darwin got a lot of things right,

"in many cases he was, inevitably, limited by the state of knowledge in his time."

In regards to the speculations on the evolution of language, Darwin's lack of knowledge about the ancestral environments of pre-humans ist the graves limitation.

In a savanna environment in which much of homo evolution supposedly took place, a musical, singing way of communication would simply be bizarre and even extremely dangerous because it would attract predators.

This is a problem Bickerton sees with a lot of theories of language evoltion. For example, he also critized the lack of regard for the environmental context of language evolution in a review of James Hurford's fantastic book, "The Origins of Meaning:"

"Hurford gives a favorable mention to niche construction theory, and I kept hoping he was going to draw the conclusion I drew from it: that the key to the origin of language must be sought somewhere among the niches constructed by human ancestors between the date of the last common ancestor of humans and other apes and the present—niches very different from any occupied by other apes. But he did not."

For Bickerton, Darwin, unknowingly, and Fitch, unwittingly, have made the same mistake:

"The notion of a terrestrial and heavily-predated primate indulging in any form of vocal activity-especially one that must, in quantity as well as quality, have exceeded those of all other primates barring gibbons-is simply bizarre,."

Both posts make for very interesting reading and I'm looking forward to the publication of both Bickerton's "Adam's Tongue" (out next month) and Fitch's book "The Evolution of Language" which apparently is in press as well.

Update: W. Tecumseh Fitch has replied to Bickerton's criticism with a post with the entertaining title ""Silence on the Savannah!" On Bickerton's Yodeling Australopithecines and Missing the Point of Musical Protolanguage"

Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!

So today is Darwin's 200th Birthday, aka Darwin Day.
There are quite a lot of interesting posts up.
John Wilkins adresses the myth that Darwin didn't actually adress the origin of species in his book, and Ed Yong has tackled human evolution in the 6th post of his 8 part series celebrating Darwin's bicentennial.

There's also a lot of discussion on how to assess Darwin's importance in modern evolutionary biology, especially about the usage of the term "Darwinism" (for positive voices see for example, here, here, for more negative assesments see here, here, and here)

Overall, I like the assesment made by John Wilkins in his very nice article "Not Saint Darwin:"

"What we remember Darwin for is a synthesis and the empirical support he brought in its defense. He brought together many ideas that were `in the air', so to speak, reading more widely than almost anyone else as well as doing his experimental and anatomical work, and more importantly, managed to filter out most of the bad ideas.

Darwin's achievement was to identify crucial questions and offer a coherent theoretical account that answered them

[...]

So let us remember Darwin not as the discoverer of anything (apart from the cru-
stacean nature of barnacles etc.), but as the guy who set of a fruitful, active, com- plex and ultimately explanatory research program in biology, which continues to become ever more active.
Don't make him a saint, an authority, or a hero. He's just a damned good scientist."

Preparing for Darwin's Birthday: Celebrations & Myths

Tomorrow is Darwin's 200th Birthday and all over the blogosphere and in magazines, TV etc. there are a lot of interesting things on Darwin, "Darwinism", and evolutionary biology.

Some Highlights:

Ed Yong of Not Exaxtly Rocket Sciene has started a 8-posts series on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial. The topics covered so fare are

• Evolution of the eye
• The rise of new species
• Evolution in real-time
• Punctuated evolution

Posts on evolutionary arms races, human evolution, virus evolution, and co-evolution and horizontal gene transfer are still to follow.

John Wilkins of Evolving Thoughts will try to clarify some of the oft-repeated myths about Darwin and his ideas.
These will include:

• Darwin did not believe in the reality of species
• Darwin did not explain the origin of species in The Origin of Species
• Darwin was actually a Lamarckian
• Darwin was a gradualist
• Darwin thought evolution relied on accidents and chance
• Darwin thought everything was due to natural selection
• Darwin thought that Australian aborigines were closer to apes than to Europeans
• Darwin was a social Darwinian

There are some things in there I thought to be true. But otheres are pretty obvious. Just for fun I'll quicky adress two of these myths (although John Wilkins will have a lot mor to say about them, of course), and add another one that's not a myth but just a wrong assumption.

Myth: Darwin thought everything was due to natural selection
Wrong. In The Origin of Species he clarifies that:

"I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification. (69)"

In this book he also introduced the factor of sexual selection, i.e. the fact that evolutionary change can also be influenced by females choosing mates with certain traits.
In his 1871 book adressing human evolution, The Descent of Man, Darwin tried to explain the evolution of many of the mental powers of humans in terms of sexual selection.

It is also important to note that in this book Darwin also pointed out that:

"Important as the struggle for existence has been and still is yet as far as the highest part of our nature is concerned there are other agencies more important"

This also brings us to the next Myth

Myth: Darwin was a Social Darwinist
No. People who advocated these ideas of laissez faire capitalism were Herbert Spencer, John Fiske and William Graham Sumner (although it is debated how much he really was a Social Darwinist). They came up with this ideads after reading Darwin, but more often, (as in the case of John Fiske), after reading Herbert Spencer interpreting Darwin in his own way.

Also, Darwin is sometimes quoted a promoting eugenics with this statement:

"It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

But as we have seen above, for humans there are other agencies more important and this is why he continues:

"If we were to intentionally neglect the weak and the helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with overwhelming present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind"

Another popular misconception, not really a myth, is that Darwin coined the term "survival of the fittest." But in fact the term was coined by Herbert Spencer (who had already proposed his own concept of evolution in 1855) after reading Darwin. Darwin then used the term in later versions.

The New Scientist also has a page up on 24 popular misconceptions about evolutionary theory

There's also another reason to celebrate: Carl Zimmer of the Loom has announced that he's writing a textbook for non-biology-majors and the general reader called The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution and it's going to come out this year in August. Woohoo!