Keywords In and Out of Context

I mentioned Robert Worden’s “The Evolution of Language by Sexual Selection” in Chapter 1, as he offers an appealing hypothesis as to the role that language played in human evolution: that what may have begun as a very task-oriented method of communication for group activities only slightly advanced from that of other primates eventually became a way in which certain hominins could demonstrate their empathy, intelligence, and leadership capabilities to others within their small group through early forms of proto-speech, appearing more attractive to both peers and potential mates, and therefore may have received a reproductive advantage over the less articulate, therefore passing on the “gift of gab” as it were.

This could have supplemented and perhaps even supplanted the more usual forms of primate dominance. (I think his hypothesis is gender-neutral, which would make it more powerful if so, since both sexes would have to become somewhat fluent linguistically over time if this were to provide a sustainable advantage to help insure the survival of the community.)

This is of course only one of many hypotheses offered to explain why language evolved beyond the simplest of “key words” to the sophisticated syntax and grammar of modern language. Here is Worden’s take on the critical questions that all language evolution hypotheses must address (pages 14-15):

“Számadó and Szathmáry (2006) have reviewed a range of scenarios for the evolution of language, and have proposed criteria for evaluating the different scenarios. They list a number of possible accounts (primary uses of early language) which have been proposed for language evolution:

• Gossip
• Grooming
• Group bonding/ritual
• Hunting
• Language as a mental tool
• Mating contract and/or pair bonding
• Motherese
• Sexual selection
• Song hypothesis
• Status for information
• Tool making
  
  They identify four questions to ask of each hypothesis:
  
• Honesty: can the theory account for the honesty of early language? (note: this question relates to the honest use of language, to say true things – not to any concept of “honest signalling” as in sexual selection).
• Groundedness: are the concepts proposed by the theory grounded in reality?
• Power of Generalisation: can the theory account for the power of generalisation, which is unique to human language?
• Uniqueness: can the theory account for the uniqueness of human language?”

Worden then adds a fifth question of his own (page 15):

“Selection Pressure: How strong is the selection pressure implied by the primary purpose of language in the account? This is not, like the other four questions, a yes/no question. It is a matter of estimating, in order of magnitude terms, the percentage change in fitness (= Survival times Reproduction) arising from the proposed use of language.”

It seems unlikely to me that we’ll ever get a final answer to this question, but the use of computer agent simulations may provide a set of the most likely alternatives, though there are also arguments by many in the scientific community against this approach as a solution to what’s been famously called “the hardest problem in science.”