One view of language is that it emerged in a single step in Homo sapiens, and depended on a radical transformation of human thought, involving symbolic representations and computational rules for combining them. I argue instead that language should be viewed as a communication system for the sharing of thoughts, and that thought processes themselves evolved well before the capacity to share them. One property often considered unique to language is generativity—the capacity to generate a potentially infinite variety of sentences. (...) I suggest that generativity is derived from the understanding of space and the capacity to recall or construct spatiotemporal scenarios, and probably goes far back in the evolution of animals that move in spatial habitats. Another property essential to language is theory of mind, the ability to understand what others are thinking, which probably emerged from animal empathy and became more complex in hominin evolution. Language evolved for the sharing of experiences, whether remembered or constructed, perhaps initially through pantomime but gradually conventionalized into standardized forms, including speech. These developments probably took place gradually during the Pleistocene, rather than as a sudden event in the evolution of H. sapiens. (shrink)

Although pantomimic scenarios recur in the most important historical as well as current accounts of language origins, a serious problem is the lack of a commonly accepted definition of “pantomime”. We scrutinise several areas of study, from theatre studies to semiotics to primatology, pointing to the differences in use that may give rise to misunderstandings, and working towards a set of definitional criteria of “pantomime” specifically useful for language evolution research. We arrive at a definition of pantomime as a communication (...) mode that is mimetic; non-conventional and motivated; multimodal ; improvised; using the whole body rather than exclusively manual; holistic; communicatively complex and self-sufficient; semantically complex; displaced, open-ended and universal. So conceived, “pantomime” is a near synonym of “bodily-mimetic communication” as envisaged by Donald and Zlatev. On a wider plane, our work may help organise some of the terminology and discussion in language evolution, e.g. by drawing a clear distinction between gestural and pantomimic scenarios or by specifying the relation between pantomimic and multimodal scenarios. (shrink)

This paper contributes to two debates: the debate about language evolution and the debate about the foundations of human collaboration. While both cooperation and language may give the impression of being adaptations that evolved for the “good of the group,” it is well established that the evolution of complex traits cannot be a direct result of group selection. In this paper I suggest how this tension can be solved: both language and cooperation evolved in a unique two-level evolutionary system which (...) was triggered by a well-documented geological event—the drying out of the climate—in East Africa, which subsequently reduced the intermating between groups and thus made it possible that the mechanism that produced differences between groups could be the target of natural selection on the group level. If a social form of selection produced differences in fitness between groups, the displacement process between groups would indirectly select those forms of social selection that produce groups that would displace all others. The main hypothesis presented in this paper is that, in this situation, a backchannel between the two levels of selection naturally evolves. A backchannel between the two levels would, for example, emerge when sexual selection was sensitive to the individual’s contribution to the group. Examples of systems utilizing a backchannel are nerve cells being better nourished when used more frequently, enabling them to be conducive to the survival of the whole organism, or a law firm in which all employees get paid to the extent that they contribute to the survival and success of the firm. In both cases, the selection on the higher level informs the selection on the lower level. The aim of the paper is to illuminate these rather opaque claims, to which the reader probably has many objections in this abridged form. (shrink)

The self-domestication hypothesis suggests that, like mammalian domesticates, humans have gone through a process of selection against aggression – a process that in the case of humans was self-induced. Here, we extend previous proposals and suggest that what underlies human social evolution is selection for socially mediated emotional control and plasticity. In the first part of the paper we highlight general features of human social evolution, which, we argue, is more similar to that of other social mammals than to that (...) of mammalian domesticates and is therefore incompatible with the notion of human self-domestication. In the second part, we discuss the unique aspects of human evolution and propose that emotional control and social motivation in humans evolved during two major, partially overlapping stages. The first stage, which followed the emergence of mimetic communication, the beginnings of musical engagement, and mimesis-related cognition, required socially mediated emotional plasticity and was accompanied by new social emotions. The second stage followed the emergence of language, when individuals began to instruct the imagination of their interlocutors, and to rely even more extensively on emotional plasticity and culturally learned emotional control. This account further illustrates the significant differences between humans and domesticates, thus challenging the notion of human self-domestication. (shrink)

Cultural anthropologists and sociobiologists developed initially incommensurable approaches to explaining cooperation and altruism in human societies. When understood as complex cultural adaptations, however, scientific research programs are subject to piecemeal changes in the research programs driving scientific research. The emergence of new research programs in cultural evolution and group selection resulted. This transformation is examined with a focus on explanations for the origin and maintenance of human inequality. The transmission, modification, and selection of the complex cultural packages underlying egalitarianism and (...) hereditary inequality challenge both the focus on biological roots of hierarchy and the autonomous construction of cultures. (shrink)

Building on Dor’s theory of language as a social technology for the instruction of imagination, I suggest that autobiographical memory evolved culturally as a response to the problems of false memory and deliberate deceit that were introduced by that technology. I propose that sapiens’ linguistic communication about past and future events initially occurred in small groups, and this helped to correct individual memory defects. However, when human groups grew in size and became more socially differentiated, and movement between groups prevented (...) story-verification, misattributions of events became more common. In such conditions individuals with better autobiographical memory had an advantage because they could evaluate their own contents and sources of information, as well as that of others, more accurately; this not only benefitted them directly, but also improved their reliability as social partners. Autobiographical memory thus evolved in the context of human linguistic communication through selection for communicative reliability. However, the advantages of imagination, which enables forward-planning and decision-Making, meant that memory distortions, although controlled and moderated by autobiographical memory, could not be totally eradicated. This may have driven the evolution of additional forms of memory control involving social and linguistic norms. I interpret the language and the social norms of the Pirahã as the outcome of the cultural-evolutionary control of memory distortions. Some ways of testing aspects of this proposal are outlined. (shrink)

Universal Darwinism provides a methodology to study the evolution of anatomical form and sociocultural behavior that centers on defining the units and levels of selection, and it identifies the conditions whereby natural selection operates. In previous work, I have examined how this selection-focused evolutionary epistemology may be universalized to include theories that associate with an extended synthesis. Applied evolutionary epistemology is a metatheoretical framework that understands any and all kinds of evolution as phenomena where units evolve by mechanisms at levels (...) of an ontological hierarchy; and it provides three heuristics to search for these units, levels and mechanisms. The heuristics are applicable to language and sociocultural evolution, and here, we give an in-depth analysis of how the unit-heuristic can be implemented into language origin and evolution studies. The importance of developing hierarchy theories is also more fully explained. (shrink)

Accounts of language evolution have largely suffered from a monolingual bias, assuming that language evolved in a single isolated community sharing most speech conventions. Rather, evidence from the small-scale societies who form the best simulacra available for ancestral human communities suggests that the combination of small societal scale and out-marriage pushed ancestral human communities to make use of multiple linguistic systems. Evolutionary innovations would have occurred in a number of separate communities, distributing the labor of structural invention between populations, and (...) would then have been pooled gradually through multilingually mediated horizontal transfer to produce the technological package we now regard as a natural ensemble. (shrink)

Euan Macphail’s work and ideas captured a pivotal time in the late 20th century when behavioral laws were considered to apply equally across vertebrates, implying equal intelligence, but it was also a time when behaviorism was challenged by the view that language was unique to humans, and bestowed a superior mental status. Subsequent work suggests greater continuity between humans and their forebears, challenging the Chomskyan assumption that language evolved in a single step {“the great leap forward”) in humans. Language is (...) now understood to be based on an amalgam of cognitive functions, including mental time travel, theory of mind, and what may be more broadly defined as imagination. These functions probably evolved gradually in hominin evolution and are present in varying degrees in nonhuman species. The blending of language into cognition provides both for interspecies differences in mental function, and continuity between humans and other species. What does seem to be special to humans is the ability to communicate the contents of imagination, although even this is not absolute, and is perhaps less adaptive than we like to think. (shrink)

The history of so-called ‘linguistic relativity’ is an odd and multifaceted one. After knowing alternate fortunes and being treated by different academic branches, today there are some new ways of investigating the language-thought-reality problem that put into dialogue the latest trends in language-related disciplines generate room for philosophical themes previously overlooked, reassess the very idea of linguistic relativity, despite its popularized versions which have circulated for decades and which have led an otherwise fruitful debate to extremes. It is argued that (...) a multidisciplinary approach is desirable in order to broaden future research. In the last few years the opportunity to study this matter following a common trend in several disciplines has been created. Language, and cognition too, are now conceived as intrinsically social phenomena. It is argued that relativistic effects should be investigated in social realms, and that analytic philosophy could help with this task. (shrink)

This article introduces a special issue on mechanisms in language evolution research. It describes processes relevant for the emergence of protolanguage and the transition thereof to modern language. Protolanguage is one of the key terms in the field of language evolution, used to designate a hypothesised intermediate stage in the emergence of language present in extinct hominins: qualitatively different from non-human primate communication in possessing some, but not all, of the features that characterise modern language. Much debate in language evolution (...) focuses on the exact delineation of these features, as well as the means whereby the transitions occurred: first from non-human primate communication systems to protolanguage, and then from protolanguage to modern language. In what follows, we first propose a comprehensive typology of protolanguage debates, taking into account the postulated structural organisation of protolanguage, its functions, and its communicative modality. This makes it possible to show how a specific focus on mechanisms and processes deemed relevant for the emergence of these features allows us to assess the explanatory scope of the existing theories of protolanguage. (shrink)

Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...) motivation behind the cultural turn in cognitive science, and situates some of its central findings with respect to the questions that animate it and the debates that it has inspired. Woven throughout the entry are examples of how the cognitive science of culture, and especially its elevated concern with different forms of diversity and variation, continues to influence and be influenced by philosophers. -/- One cluster of philosophical work falls within the traditional subject matter of philosophy of science, in this case of the cognitive and social sciences. Philosophers have analyzed and assessed the methods and evidence central to the scientific study of cognition and culture, and have offered conceptual scrutiny, clarification, and synthesis. Research in a second vein sees philosophers themselves contributing more directly to cognitive scientific projects, (co)constructing theories, helping build computational models, even gathering empirical data. A third kind of work is naturalistic philosophy or philosophy of nature, wherein philosophers seek to use results from the cognitive science of culture to inform or transform debates over long-standing philosophical questions, including questions about the nature of philosophy and philosophical methodology itself. (shrink)