Speaking Woman By William Lama, Ph.D
Vivienne Westwood, London Fashion Week (Reference 1)
You might well ask, what’s with the title? There’s nothing remarkable (or scientific) about women speaking. If you watch Giada, Ina, Paula or Rachel on the Food Network you will notice that they all have the gift of gab. While entertaining us, at the same time they are creating fabulous dishes. Women are multifaceted multitaskers. While man is merely Homo Sapien, woman is Femina Loquitur Multifaria.
The interesting question is: When did Sapien become Loquax? How did it happen?
To answer, who better than the irrepressible author of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” – Tom Wolfe?
“Once in a great while you come across a popular science book that can’t be put down.” (2) Tom Wolfe’s “The Kingdom of Speech” (3) is an enthralling story of evolution - and its potential end? - around 11,000 years ago.
The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe
Wolfe’s book is divided into two parts, with a hero and a villain in each part. Human speech is a puzzle at the end of part one, circa 1865, and a mystery still at the end of part two, more than 150 years later.
Darwin versus Wallace
“Our story begins (in 1858) inside the aching, splitting head of Alfred Wallace… when he came down with the dreaded Genghis ague.” (3) Wallace lay abed on an Indonesian island when a book that he read some time ago “comes bubbling up his brain stem.” An Essay on the Principles of Population by Thomas Malthus predicted that die-offs within every species of animal were inevitable, as described by simple math. Animal populations grow geometrically, while the supply of food grows only arithmetically, thus competition for food would ensure the “survival of the fittest.” Wallace had a fevered inspiration. Over evolutionary time the fittest would pass their survival traits to their offspring, and changing environmental conditions would tune those traits over the generations. Wallace realized that this was a solution to the mystery of mysteries: how evolution works.
Alfred Russel Wallace
Wallace wrote up his revolutionary discovery and posted the paper to Charles Darwin, together with a covering letter asking for an opinion from the renowned author of The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). Darwin read it with dismay! He “freaked out.” Wallace was set to publish ideas Darwin had long held, but failed to publish. His friend Sir Charles Lyell had read a prior paper by Wallace, noted the similarities, and urged Darwin to publish to establish priority. But Darwin demurred, fearing the wrath of the Church. Now he wrote to his friend:
My dear Lyell, A year or so ago, you recommended me to read a paper by Wallace in the Annals, which had interested you. He has today sent me the enclosed and asked me to forward it to you. Your words have come true with a vengeance. You said this when I explained my views of “Natural Selection” depending on the Struggle for Existence. I never saw a more striking coincidence. So, all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed. (5)
Darwin’s friends came to his rescue. They hastily prepared two abstracts describing Darwin’s ideas on natural selection, after Darwin declined to do it himself, and then presented both abstracts and Wallace’s paper at the 1858 meeting of the Linnean Society of London. The friends then published the Darwin abstracts with Wallace’s paper in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology. Wallace was away doing more Indonesian field work, totally unaware of the presentation or the publication of his work. Spurred on by these shocking developments, Darwin hastily drafted his famous book On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. In Origin Darwin barely mentions human evolution. Only in the last chapter he writes: “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”
It was Wallace who wrote the seminal paper analyzing the role of natural selection in human evolution. The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man “lives on in the annals of annihilation by anesthesia.” (3) Around 11,000 years ago, as estimated by Wallace, the brain became the primary target of selection. The power of the human brain was so far beyond the boundaries of natural selection that it required the “agency of some higher power.” And with the big brain came speech.
Darwin and everyone else had a huge problem with speech. Though language set humans apart from the animals, there was nary a scrap of evidence that it had evolved. In the opinion of the distinguished linguist Max Muller: “Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it.” Muller called Darwin’s proposal that language had somehow evolved from imitation of animal sounds the “bow-wow theory.” The origin of language entered a “dark age” that lasted nearly 80 years. Then along came Chomsky.
Chomsky versus Everett
As Tom Wolfe described Noam Charisma: “Nobody in Academia had ever witnessed a performance like this before.” In his 20s Chomsky had “taken an entire field of study, linguistics, and hardened it from a spongy so-called social science into a real science, and put his name on it.”
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky, born in 1928, was by 1957 a professor at MIT. (6). He published his first book, Syntactic Structures, that revolutionized the scientific study of language. In 1959, he wrote a scathing review of B. F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior which argued against Skinner's view of language as “learned behavior.”
Chomsky introduced a radically new theory of language. You were born with a built-in “language organ.” Chomsky called it a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), located somewhere in the brain, and functioning from the moment you come into the world. In Chomsky’s world the human mind has evolved an innate capacity for language and human languages share certain universal forms (the Universal Grammar and Syntax) that are constrained by the way that we think.
In the following 40 years Chomsky published books, an average of two per year, and articles at a rate of nearly five per year. His output of linguistic science (and politics: He vocally opposed the Vietnam War using his formidable language output devices.) was astounding. In 2002, Chomsky published the definitive word on language and that word was “recursion” – putting one thought inside another, in a series that could be endless.
Tom Wolfe used this example of recursion: “Now that her bulbs had burned out, he could shine and achieve the celebrity he had always longed for.”
Her bulbs had burned out…. he could shine…. and achieve celebrity …. he longed for.
According to Chomsky, every language depended on recursion, the one capability that distinguished human thought from animal thought.
Then along came Everett, and the Pirahã kill shot. Daniel Everett, PhD was a devoted Chomskyite linguist and Methodist missionary living with the primitive Pirahã tribe deep within the Amazon jungle. He was the very first missionary able to learn their language – it took him three years. The Pirahã were illiterate. They spoke only in the present tense. They had no numbers, not even 1 and 2. Money was a mystery to them. They made no artifacts — with the exception of the bow and arrow. “Everett could see he had before him the early history of speech and, miraculously, he could study them alive, in the here and now.”
And in a direct afront to Chomskyite orthodoxy, the Pirahã language had no recursion. Every sentence stands alone and refers to a single event.
In Everett’s view the Pirahã language, such as it was, was shaped by their distinctive culture, such as it was, not by any “language acquisition device.” Everett published his findings in 2005, and Chomskyite hell fell on his head.
The story is reminiscent of Darwin vs. Wallace. Everett got the last laugh when he published the memoirs of his 30 years with the Pirahã, and the snakes, in the Amazon.
Daniel Everett (7)
There is Everett submerged up to his neck in the Maici River. Only his smiling face is visible. Above him is an indigenous Pirahã, sitting in a canoe in his gym shorts.
Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes became an instant hit and “the biggest wallop in the breadbasket Noam Chomsky’s hegemony had ever suffered.”
In 2012 Everett published his manifesto Language: The Cultural Tool. It was his Origin of Species. Everett explained that “language, is not something that evolved in Homo Sapiens. Speech is man-made. It is an artifact . . . and it explains man’s power over all other creatures in a way Evolution all by itself can’t begin to.” Just as woman had taken natural materials to create the bow and arrow, she had taken natural sounds and created codes that represented objects, actions and thoughts, and called them words. (8)
What was Chomsky’s response? First, he ignored Everett, just as Darwin had ignored Wallace. Then he hid away his marvelous creations, universal grammar and recursion, in the closet of his MIT office. Then he issued a paper called, amusingly: “How could Language Have Evolved?” The first words of the piece read as follows: “The evolution of the faculty of language remains largely an enigma.”
An enigma! Still, 150 years after Darwin-Wallace and 50 years after Chomsky-Everett.
In conclusion, I’ll return to the Femina Loquitur Multifaria who talk and create at the same time. Some even brave “the field” where Noam Charisma dared not tread.
Dan Everett’s wife Keren is also a linguist and missionary who spent a decade with the Pirahã, and nearly lost her life to typhoid fever in the Amazon. Keren believes that singing is the key to learning the Pirahã language. Pirahã are able to communicate by variations in pitch, stress and rhythm, what linguists call “prosody.” One night a woman with a toddler was heard intoning a series of notes that sounded like a muted horn. Keren explained that the child was learning to speak through the endless repetition of tones, through prosody. (9)
Last words:
See the fab documentary “The Grammar of Happiness” on YouTube (10)
“My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.” (Steven Wright)
References
(1) Vivienne Westwood Heralds A Myriad of Political Talking Points at LFW Show
(2) Novel Matters by William Lama, Ph.D. — Palos Verdes Pulse
(3) Amazon - The Kingdom of Speech: Wolfe, Tom
(4) Amazon.com: Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace
(5) Introduction | The Alfred Russel Wallace Website
(7) Amazon.com: Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes
Dr. William Lama has a PhD in physics from the University of Rochester. Taught physics in college and worked at Xerox as a principle scientist and engineering manager. Upon retiring, joined the PVIC docents; served on the board of the RPV Council of Home Owners Associations; served as a PV Library trustee for eight years; served on the PV school district Measure M oversight committee; was president of the Malaga Cove Homeowner's Association. Writes about science, technology and politics, mostly for his friends.
email: wlama2605@gmail.com
