The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution (27 page)

And when highly social animals get together, they do like to chat.

10
:
The Things We Say

If heard from a long way off—so you can’t hear what’s being said—the conversations between parents dropping their children off at primary school probably sound very like the squawks of crows in a wood at evening. The content of both sets of exchanges would probably be very similar, even if you could hear the words spoken by the humans, or make sense of the squawks of the crows.

Is this not a scandalous suggestion? After all, human language—the system whereby we communicate information through the rapid modulation of sounds carried on exhaled packets of air—seems something unique, exceptional. The complicated arrangement of the larynx, the resonant chambers in our nose and mouth, the shape of our throat, the musculature that controls our lips and tongue with great precision and delicacy—all seem refined to a degree seen nowhere else, suitable for conveying the infinite subtleties of language. Apes and monkeys do communicate vocally, but they have nothing to match the sophisticated vocal apparatus of humans, nor, as far as we know, do they indulge in communications of a subtlety that might demand such complexity.

When one looks beyond our immediate primate relatives, we see that many animals have equally unique forms of vocal communication, dependent on equally sophisticated and refined structures. Frogs, for example, display an astonishing range of calls used to attract and respond to prospective mates. Humpback whales have what can only be described as a “culture” of songs, which, like traditional Indian ragas, are built on immensely long sonic structures. Insects of all kinds communicate by chirps, rasps, and buzzes, and the air is full of the songs of birds—created using an organ called the syrinx, every bit as complex and specialized as the larynx, tongue muscles, lips, and so on that we
use to create speech. The world is full of the sounds made by animals calling to one another, conveying information.

But what about the complexities of grammar and syntax? Isn’t this complexity something that only humans can muster, let alone master? To be sure, human language is rich with meaning and intention. The things we say to one another convey meaning about the ever-changing relationship between people and things in times past, present, and yet to come. To marshal such complexities, the atoms of human language are organized into various categories such as nouns (the names of things) and verbs (which indicate actions and the relationships between nouns), both of which can be modified by adjectives (which modify nouns), adverbs (the same, for verbs), and many other particles that indicate gender, person, time (that is, tense), place, and the relationships between all of these.

Against a pearl of language such as this—

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing, end them.

—the bark of a dog seems no more than an involuntary exclamation. But the apparent meaning of words and the relationships between the words, and between their meanings, is just for starters. Human language conveys layer upon layer of
implicit
meaning that can only be understood by the context in which the speech is uttered, and with reference to shared cultural norms.

Figures of speech such as similes and metaphors draw on cultural referents not directly encoded in the text but which will be apparent to the reader, without which the actual words used make no sense. So, when Hamlet talks of slings and arrows, he doesn’t mean actual weapons—more the effects of “outrageous fortune.”
¹
The depth to which cultural convention influences language is a source of much misunderstanding (and humor) when cultures clash. Jared Diamond recalled to me once how he’d got into trouble in New Guinea when he used the pidgin word “pushim” mistakenly to mean “to push” when in pidgin it actually means sexual intercourse. If this seems terribly exotic, think
of our own euphemistic sense of the verb “sleep.” For example, when Patti LaBelle (in her song “Lady Marmalade”) purrs “voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?” she has something more earthy in mind than a slumber party for the kids.

Examples of unintentionally funny translations in public speech and signage are legion—such as the notice in a hotel room inviting guests to “take advantage of the chambermaid”—and the possibly apocryphal tale of how Winston Churchill decided (against advice) to address an audience of Free French in their own language. “Quand je regard mon derrière,” boomed Britain’s great wartime leader, “je regarde qu’il est divisé en deux parts.”

But one doesn’t have to look to losses in translation to find humor that takes advantage of the subtlety of language. One of my favorite examples
²
is the newspaper headline from World War II that read

EIGHTH ARMY PUSH BOTTLES UP GERMANS

Indeed, there are words and phrases that, when their cultural referents are taken away, would seem no more meaningful than, say, the bark of a dog, or the clearing of one’s throat. Here is one:

If.

As an isolate, this could mean anything. It could be the first word in the eponymous poem by Rudyard Kipling:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

or the last one in a verse in Lewis Carroll’s whimsy, Humpty Dumpty’s recitation:

He said “I’d go and wake them, if—”

What I am thinking of is the single-word response of the king of Sparta to threats of invasion by Philip II of Macedon when, with all the other Greek city-states having submitted, Philip II advised the Spartans to surrender, having said words to the effect that
if
he invaded Spartan territory he’d kill all the men, violate all the women, enslave all the chil
dren, raze the city to the ground, plow salt into the fields so that nothing would ever grow there again, and so on and so forth in a similar bloodthirsty vein. The single-word rejoinder seems hardly more than a grunt, yet it was freighted with the reputation of Sparta, as fierce in battle as spare with words, such that Philip avoided it—as did his son, Alexander the Great. But the simple word “if,” when isolated, gives no clue whatsoever about the meaning and its interpretation in context.

To go further, people sometimes say one thing when what they mean is quite different. Steven Pinker gives an excellent example in his book
The Language Instinct
. When asked by a prospective employer to supply a reference for a candidate, the previous employer can hardly say that the candidate is (in Pinker’s words) “as dumb as a tree.” On the face of it, the reference letter (you’ll have to read Pinker’s book for the whole example) seems very positive, but on close inspection, it is clear that it offers a very negative report by virtue of the fact that it discusses everything
except
the candidate’s suitability.

In this context I might mention an Internet meme called “What Brits Say versus What They Mean,” which makes light of the British tendency for reserve, and to avoid embarrassment at all costs. For example, when Brits say that something is “very interesting,” they mean that it’s “clearly nonsense”; or when Brits say that “it’s my fault,” they mean that it’s
your
fault; and so on.

The language we use is laden with subtlety. But does the fact that we humans use and misuse it without apparent effort make it special? It is not as if one can claim any extra human know-how to be able to use language. As Steven Pinker reminds us in
The Language Instinct
, no human society has ever been discovered that lacks language. The languages of “Stone Age” tribes are as complex, and sometimes much more so, as those of more “developed” societies. But wherever they’re from, and irrespective of the culture of the speakers, all language appears to obey the same underlying set of rules, the organization into verbs with tenses, nouns with cases, and so on. It’s elegant, it’s beautiful, and it’s
hardwired
—every bit as the instructions for making hand axes were in the brains of
Homo erectus
, or the instructions for making nests are hardwired into the brains of birds.

But don’t we depend on a learning environment in order to translate that hardwired potential into jabbering reality? Isn’t the special thing about humans that they learn, rather than operating on instinct? Don’t human infants learn to use language only if they are raised in
the milieu of older, language-using humans? Yes—but the same is true for other animals that communicate. Humans all have the innate capability of using language, but can only exercise that capability by being raised among speakers of language. Humpback whales can all sing, but they learn their repertoire from other whales.
³
Young male songbirds learn vocal tips from their more experienced elders.
⁴
So it is that human babies learn from other humans in a similar way, and with the same unconscious, undirected ease. It is perhaps significant that if human children aren’t exposed to language during a particular phase of development, they find it very hard to learn later. We all know how hard it is to learn a new language when we’re adults. By the same token, dogs that aren’t “socialized” through exposure to people and other dogs during a brief “window” of development as pups, may develop as morose, ill-adjusted, and violent.

As a phenomenon, then, language is just one facet of the social behavior of a sociable species. Learning language, like learning to be a sociable member of society, is something we see as human, but the same kind of learning is seen in many social animals that communicate.

That doesn’t answer the question, though, of whether human language is either quantitatively or qualitatively more subtle and complex than the systems of communication used by other creatures, such that its possession and use elevates us above all creation. This is a concept with which we all instinctively agree. One of the first things that Adam does in the Bible is give names to the freshly minted animals and plants—this is even before Eve appears (Genesis 2:19–20). Having read this far, however, you’ll no doubt appreciate that any assumption of human superiority in this regard will be as suspect as it is in any other.

This assumption—of the superiority of human language, as regards its complexity—relies on an additional, implicit assumption. That is, that it is possible to compare different modes of communication between species and assess them for complexity. The problem with this is that whereas it is possible to measure the raw information content of any signal, such an analysis will not tell us what that signal actually
means
. Moreover, if human language is a trait of humans that is distinctively and uniquely human, it follows that features of communication unique to any given species cannot, by definition, be compared with those of any other, simply because different animals experience the world in different ways. Looked at in this way, it’s plain that whale communication is uniquely whale: it probably cannot be rendered simply
into human language, and will perhaps be unintelligible to us. There will be aspects of it that we, as humans, will not be able to grasp, simply because of the inherent “whaleness” of its context.

The songs of larks could well mean very much more to other larks than we could ever understand. When you see a male skylark flying high in the sky, the tiny bird producing song of such volume and quantity that you’re amazed he doesn’t burst, you are sure that he is communicating
something
, else he wouldn’t go to all that effort. Your presumption—entirely fair, because it is borne out by the evidence—is that he is singing to attract mates. But that says nothing about precisely what, if anything, he’s singing
about
. If he’s singing about love and sex, then one could say the same for most human popular music, and quite a lot of unpopular music. If the songs of skylarks have no inherent meaning, in the sense of words and grammar and syntax—one might say the same of much instrumental music, or scat singing in jazz. That the lyrics of “Lady Marmalade” are sexually explicit is undeniable, but music exerts an emotional power even if we can’t understand the words, or if there are no words at all. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony—the
Pastoral
—can move me to tears. As a young driver, in my twenties, I would avoid playing heavy rock on the car stereo. Not because I didn’t like heavy rock, because I adored it and still do, but because it made me drive more aggressively.
⁵

And that’s just for species that communicate by sound, as we do. I have not mentioned the subtleties of pheromonal communication in ants, or the waggle dances of bees, or the scent trails of voles. We can get a good idea of what these modes of communications do, in terms of raw function, but of implicit meanings, if any, we will be blind.

So, if the loading of social and cultural context makes the translation of phrases between one human language and another so difficult, imagine how hard it must be to translate languages precisely between different species. To us, the caw of a crow is just that, a caw—but to a crow, that proverbially laconic “if” would seem equally meaningless.

All right then, you might say: even if we concede that there’s no
qualitative
difference between the language of humans and the various modes of communication between social animals, don’t we humans talk about more elevated things than the matters that (we assume) preoccupy the rest of creation?

No, not really. We do not, as a rule, make idle chat about the tides of politics, or the great unanswered questions of philosophy. Go back to
that crowd of gossiping parents in a schoolyard, and listen to what they are talking about. It’ll be chat about themselves, their children, their friends, and their everyday social interactions. Many—perhaps most—of the things we talk about can be boiled down to what anthropologists call “social grooming.” In his book
Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language
, anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that language is really about the affirmation of relative social standing. If this seems somewhat harsh, just ask yourself this question. Why, when meeting another person, is it considered polite to inquire about that person’s
health
? “How are you?” we ask. Why that, when the world is full of potentially interesting topics of conversation? After all, we
could
kick off a conversation with a complete stranger on practically anything we liked—science policy in Mexico under the government of Carlos Salinas, for example; the problems of rendering the rhyming structure of the Middle English poem
Pearl
into satisfying Modern English stanzas; or the disquieting excess (for the Standard Model of physics) of gamma-ray photons produced in the decay of the purported Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider—anything.