The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

In 1 866, the recently formed Societe Linguistique de Paris passed an official resolution banning the presentation of any further papers regarding the origins of human language.The nature of the inquiry itself, it was felt, lacked even the possibility of scientific certainty, and all work pertaining to it was likewise dis- missed on the grounds of being empirically irresolvable, incorrigibly speculative, and unproductively divisive.Terrence W. Deacon, almost a century and a half later, has authored a pro- vocative polemic that will doubtlessly incur even more violent censure on the part of his detractors.Empirically vigorous, incisively speculative and with the poten- tial to be productively divisive, Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolu- tion of Language and the Brain challenges many, if not most, of the assumptions underlying modern linguistic theory.Of particular interest to linguists will be Deacon's refutation of Chomsky's (1972) Universal Grammar paradigm, as well as his corollary rejection of the possibility of innate syntactic processing or language-learning "modules" nestled deep within the human brain.Instead, claims Deacon, language itself-and the symbolic representation which it evinces and encodes-lies not inside individual brains at all, but at the interface between biology and culture.A biological anthropologist with extensive experience in neurology.Deacon supports this argument first with an appeal to evolutionary theory."Universality is not, in itself," Deacon proposes, "a reliable indicator of what evolution has built into human brains" (p.339).Accordingly, the Chomskian notion that some kind of universal grammatical knowledge must be innate in human beings in order to account for certain otherwise unexplainable "universal features" regarding language is an argument which Deacon considers specious.Precisely because some ver- sion of Chomsky's model is so deeply embedded in contemporary linguistic theory, a considerable portion of The Symbolic Species is devoted to its refutation.It is this argument, to the exclusion of so many other fascinating and corollary arguments presented throughout the work, that this review will endeavor to recon- struct.Fundamental to Deacon's argument is nineteenth century American psychologist James Mark Baldwin's ( 1 895; 1902) theory that the very context wherein natu- ral selection takes place can itself be modified by the behavior of its inhabitants and that this modification may, in turn, generate subsequent new sets of selection Issues in Applied Linguistics