I just received Derek Bickerton’s Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans in the mail yesterday. Got a few pages into it this morning, and decided to check out whether there was a “Criticisms” section on his Wikipedia page (there isn’t).
Bickerton does (did), however, maintain a blog … wherein he rails and nit-picks massively against Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett … while pooh-poohing the (widely-known) idea that the “Virgin Birth” is based on a mistranslation (of the word almah).
Thankfully, the book itself (I’m a quarter of the way through) looks to be more worth reading.
Bickerton proposes that in the evolution of homo sapiens, they developed a new way of living, by “power scavenging.” This meant chasing off the other scavengers, which in Bickerton’s theory they could only accomplish by weight of numbers, since their weaponry consisted only of stones, some sharpened. Since humans needed to move in small bands to locate food, this meant they needed to “recruit” other bands when a large dead animal was spotted. Language grew up as a recruitment tool, although once developed, it found many other uses. Bickerton believes language must precede more complex thought, rather than the other way around, although no real evidence is given. In particular, he emphasizes displacement, which means referring to things which are not present, and makes a big distinction between humans and other primates in this regard. Kind of strange, since it is known that chimpanzees will on occasion go on raids against neighboring chimps to cite one example of displacement type thinking. Bickerton also believes ACS (animal communication systems) are genetic rather than learned, but no evidence is given, and since even Bickerton acknowledges that there is such a thing as animal culture, evidence is surely needed. In fact, monkeys are not naturally afraid of snakes, it is learned behavior, so why would the particular scream reserved for snakes not also be learned?
That’s interesting if true, just because humans are naturally/genetically afraid of snakes.
