Evolution’s Anomaly: Man’s Ability to Speak

Today, just as it did yesterday, man reached the pinnacle of self-understanding; tomorrow the stage is set for a new breed of thinker to emerge and explain away consciousness, emotions, the soul, and even man’s ability to speak. Thinkers like Damasio, Pinker, and Chomsky before them unleashed a Pandora’s box of answers; answers with which they try to fill an abyss of questions. In Pandora’s box there remains hope that a new generation will fill the abyss with the light of a knowledge whose origins are the guidance of teachers and great thinkers, namely the men mentioned earlier. So one explores why language is man’s unique instinct, if language can be defined as an instinct at all, and how this tool allows man to understand and define his thoughts and emotions, and even more astoundingly, convey them to others.

It is true that virtually all known creatures have an ability to communicate, but they lack a depth of information and tools that limit them to communicating only the basest and most necessary of ideas. Few creatures share even the human infant’s ability to express its needs and desires with most animals using communication primarily to reproduce or illicit fear. Pinker (1994) explains that " nonhuman communication systems are based on one of three designs: a finite repertory of calls (one for warnings of predators, one for claims to territory, and so on), a continuous analog signal that registers the magnitude of some state (the livelier the dance of the bee, the richer the food source that it is telling its hive mates about), or a series of random variations on a theme (a birdsong repeated with a new twist each time)" (p. 334). Human language has an incredibly different design.

Our design, the "discrete combinatorial system called ‘grammar," (Pinker, 1994, p. 334) makes the language infinite. As has been discussed in class and in Pinker’s book, the number of words or phrases man is capable of is infinite and the number of ways to combine those words is indefinite. Pinker (1994) emphasizes the fact that there is no limit to the number of complex words or sentences in a language, that this infinity is achieved by rearranging these elements in certain orders and combinations, and each of the infinite combinations has a different meaning determined by its parts and arrangement (p. 334). Nothing even closely resembles this ability and the language of primates, our closest relatives, is best compared to other human vocalizations like sobbing, laughing, moaning, and shouting in pain (Pinker, 1994, p. 334).

Language is the tool men use to build civilizations. One might even call language God’s gift to mankind, just as the trunk is the elephant’s gift, or webbing the spider’s gift. The grammar that allows for our abilities is not so amazing by itself when considering that humans also have the necessary structures: the correct neural connections, the location of the larynx and the position of the tongue, the control of language by the cerebral cortex (believed to be the newest evolution of the brain), and the gradual development of these structures and the ability to speak with age. When faced with these realizations one has to consider that we were designed and built with our greatest weapon being the ability to speak and the mental capacity to use this tool to the greatest effect.

Several thousand years ago this ability is likely what united man in bringing down the giant wooly mammoths that provided sustenance; today it is that same ability, refined through the development of writing and a huge, many layered lexicon, that allows the law to bring down huge corporations, one man to control the masses, and great men to create knowledge and understanding of the world around us. All great peoples have a language. In fact all people living today have some form of language, whether it is the unwritten and unusual (at least to non-speakers such as myself) knocks and clicks that resonate from the mouths of various African tribes or Chinese with it’s thousands of characters each representing a word or phrase. I have learned Italian (long forgotten), Arabic (I am a speaker of the language not a writer), Latin (long dead to the Romans and myself), English (as I am sure you have realized), and am working on Spanish (the second language of the United States). All of these languages never cease to amaze me. I constantly find myself comparing words in Spanish and Arabic, a relationship I can only explain by the Arab’s long rule over Spain. While reading Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, I learn more about the nuances, exceptions, and organization of the English language that make it the greatest medium for writers of both fact and fiction.

Given the comparison of language to the trunk of the elephant and the webbing of the spider, it seems evident that language is essential for human life. I do not mean to say that an individual being cannot survive without language, but humanity as a community in all its current splendor and grandeur would cease to exist. Consider the idea of consciousness as presented by Antonio Damasio. Damasio (1999) explains that consciousness exists and should be defined as its own cognitive function instead of being defined by language, memory, reason, attention, and working memory. Damasio (1999) admits that memory, intelligent inferences, and language are critical to the generation of what he calls the autobiographical self and the process of extended consciousness, but the study of neurological patients suggests that they are not required for core consciousness (p. 18). Core consciousness is defined as a sense of self about one moment, providing no vision of the future and only a faint connection to the past which occurred in the instant just before. In essence core consciousness is the equivalent of a mouse knowing that it exists and is hungry, and possibly even the awareness that it is searching for food in an enclosed space (a house or a dumpster). Extended consciousness is the essence of being human, at least in terms of consciousness. It is in this state that an organism has an elaborate sense of self, or as Damasio (1999) puts it "an identity and a person, you or me no less — and places that person at a point in individual historical time, richly aware of the lived past and of the anticipated future, and keenly cognizant of the world beside it" (p. 16). Damasio (1999) also considers the fact that some nonhumans exist at a simple level of extended consciousness. When it attains its human peak however, it is enhanced by language (p. 16).

So in an endeavor to explain consciousness, using language of course, man has come full circle and returned to the fact that consciousness cannot reach its human form without language. True consciousness (meaning fully extended consciousness) cannot exist without language, therefore it seems reasonable to say that language is a necessary aspect of man, one inherent in his survival, which through time has been greatly developed but has always been present as one of his abilities. In short, language is an instinct. Children born deaf still develop the baby babble that leads to speaking, and given the opportunity to learn sign language absorb it just as readily as listeners do English. Through my own experience I have watched as a pair of twins developed a language inherently different from the Arabic or English spoken in the home, an exclusive language, fully comprehended only by them. That is to say that two humans will always develop a language and give their words meanings and ideas even if they have no previous language on which to base it. Humans have to communicate.

We communicate what we think, but without language, communication would be almost unnecessary, as it seems almost impossible to think about anything if it cannot be given identification and meaning. Man was given the capacity to think, but without a language to define those thoughts his abilities would have been wasted. Sometimes the most brilliant man on earth, finding himself trying to communicate in a language he does not know, can sound like an incompetent fool. A university would never stand long if its students and teachers could not express their ideas to each other. Language facilitates learning and is at its core. Ideas and brilliance are wasted if they cannot be shared and made use of.

Language is at the heart of everything we do. Language defines our clothing, our learning, our expressions, our ideas, our intelligence, and even the sandwich I will inevitably eat for lunch after writing this paper. The food has a name and its individual parts have different names: a sandwich, with pastrami, Muenster cheese, and deli mustard. Without ever showing it to you, language has defined for you the exact nature of my lunch. Virtually all knowledge is language based, as is all great thought. Philosophy is in itself a play of words and emotions; for this reason I am beginning to seriously consider that Des Cartes should have said long ago: I speak, therefore I think. Therefore I am.

Damasio, A. (1999) The feeling of what happens. San Diego, CA: Harcourt.

Pinker, S. (1994) The language instinct. New York, NY: William Morrow and Company.