Lingua Ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky With the Human Brain

308 Pages·2000·4.581 MB·English

by  William H. Calvin, Derek Bickerton

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William H. Calvin
Derek Bickerton

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Books by DEREK BICKERTON
Lingua ex Machina
Language and Human Behavior
Language and Species
Roots of Language
Books by WILLIAM H. CALVIN
Lingua ex Machina
The Cerebral Code
How Brains Think
Conversations with Neil’s Brain*
How the Shaman Stole the Moon
The Ascent of Mind
The Cerebral Symphony
The River That Flows Uphill
The Throwing Madonna
Inside the Brain*
*with GEORGE A. OJEMANN
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WILLIAM H. CALVIN
DEREK BICKERTON
A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
First MIT Press paperback edition, 2001
Copyright ©2000 by William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton
All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts and personal photocopying of a single
chapter, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form (including
information storage and retrieval, photocopying, and recording) without
permission from the publisher.
[email protected]
http://faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin
[email protected]
Supplements and corrections can be found on the web page
http://WilliamCalvin.com/LEM
This book was designed, and set in Palatino, by William H. Calvin; it was
printed and bound in the USA.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Calvin, William H., 1939-
Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the human
brain / William H. Calvin, Derek Bickerton.
p. cm.
“A Bradford book.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-03273-2 (hc. : alk. paper), 0-262-53198-4 (pb)
1. Neurolinguistics. 2. Brain–Evolution. 3. Chomsky, Noam. 4. Darwin,
Charles, 1809-1882. I. Bickerton, Derek. II. Title.
QP399.C35 2000
612.8'2–dc21 99-33464
CIP
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1. The Villa Serbelloni (WHC) 1
2. What Are Words? (DB) 13
3. Why Putting Words Together Isn’t Easy (DB) 27
4. Bigger than a Word, Smaller than a Sentence (DB) 41
5. Language in the Brain (WHC) 55
6. How Are Memories Stored? (WHC) 67
7. Hexagonal Mosaics and Darwin Machines (WHC) 75
8. A Common Code:
The Brain”s “Esperanto” Problem (WHC) 93
9. Protolanguage Emerging (DB) 103
10. Reciprocal Altruism as the Predecessor of
Argument Structure (DB) 123
11. Role Links for Words (DB) 135
12. The Word Tree as a Secondary Use of Throwing’s
Segmented Movement Planner (WHC) 151
13. Corticocortical Coherence Promotes a
Many-Voiced Symphonic Sentence (WHC) 169
14. The Pump and the Slingshot (WHC) 183
15. Darwin and Chomsky Together at Last (DB) 195
Acknowledgments 213
Linguistics appendix (DB) 215
Glossary 247
Notes 261
About the Authors 281
Index 285
Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in
the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets,
theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists,
biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be
got out of grammarians.
–RUSS RYMER in The New Yorker, 1992
That the ultimate answer in a long-lasting controversy
combines elements of the two opposing camps is typical in
biology. Opponents are like the proverbial blind men
touching different parts of an elephant. They have part of the
truth, but they make erroneous extrapolations from these
partial truths. The final answer is achieved by eliminating the
errors and combining the valid portions of the various
opposing theories.
–ERNST MAYR, This is Biology, 1997
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The Villa Serbelloni
Bellagio, Italy
Derek,
People at dinner last night kept asking me what Chomsky’s
innate grammar is all about. Where is this language macro-
mutation in the brain, and all that?
Wrong question, of course, but it’s a sure sign they’ve gotten
used to the amazing view of Lake Como from the terrace where
we eat at the Villa Serbelloni, on a long table with several dozen
interesting people. You’ll see when you arrive. If there’s a clear
evening before I get back from Milan, remember to watch for the
last of the sunset over the Dolomites.
Provided, of course, the other “residents” give you a chance.
Several confessed to reading up on our subject, in anticipation of
our arrival for a month of writing about the brain and language.
It forcefully reminded me that Chomsky’s innateness has been the
intellectual spectator sport of the last four decades. I tried to
explain to them that some gene-specified aspect was unsurprising
to a biologist – that you and I hoped to flesh it out with
appropriate anthropology and neuroscience in a way that
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Chomsky wasn’t particularly interested in doing, and to provide
some evolutionary proposals that wouldn’t rely on macro-
mutations and the like.
I also tried to explain your notion of protolanguage put forth
in Language and Species, with a good supply of words but with
sentence length limited to only a few words by the lack of
structural elements such as phrases and clauses. Protolanguage
has no way of saying who did what to whom, not without an
enormous effort. I emphasized that there was a large gulf
between protolanguage and our full-fledged syntax without any
obvious intermediate states, quite a jump from my pidgin Italian
to being able to nest four verbs in saying, “I think I saw him leave
to go home.”
It’s going to be challenging for us to try and describe how the
gulf was first bridged by evolutionary processes. I hope we can
avoid the deus ex machina quality of some of the previous attempts
to explain the origins of language ability, the ones that finally
seize upon a slender, unsupported reed as the way out of the
muddied morass – the equivalent of that “god machine” the
ancient Greek playwrights wheeled in to solve thorny plot
problems. Yet it is a language machine we’re searching for, one
capable of those elaborate maneuvers seen in language with
syntax (you don't have to think about it; indeed, you can't turn
language recognition off), but conforming to some design
constraints imposed by the neurobiology (what it’s possible to do
with mere neural circuits) and the evolutionary history (up from
apelike communication and mental powers in only five million
years, each stage bootstrapping the next).
But, in a broader view, language is just our best example of the
whole range of higher intellectual functions. Our lingua ex machina
probably needs to be able to handle creative shaping up of quality
(for instance, figuring out what to do with the leftovers in the
refrigerator), long-range planning, procedural games, and even