Evolutionary Reading

I hope to make Friday this blog's book-review day, and I thought that before the blog gets too old I would list a few classic titles. There are many candidates so I am focusing on a few that grounded this blog’s assumption that speech is something that evolved along with the human species.

Last month, in its Aug. 11 issue Science magazine reported the disheartening (though hardly surprising) results of a survey  taken in 32 European countries and the United States. It found that only Turkey has a higher percentage of adults than the US has who do not even accept the concept of [biological] evolution. One third of Americans reject evolution completely. At the other end of the spectrum, 80% of Danish, Swedish, and French adults accept evolution.

The survey also found some general ignorance of facts. Only one-third of American adults know that more than half of human genes are identical to mouse genes, and only 38% even know that more than half of human genes match those of a chimpanzee. (The correct number of matching chimpanzee/human genes is way above 50%; more like 98%.)

The report mentioned that America is the only country where evolution has become a political issue, so that many Republicans run against it. The conservative publishing house, Regnery, has just published a book titled The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design,  turning scientific work into a partisan debate.

This kind of ideological wrangling over scientific facts is particularly discouraging for a blog like this one where, by the subject’s very nature, there is so much uncertainty about how evolution worked in this instance. It would be terrible if questions about how something happened were ripped out of context to suggest that this blog has any doubts that our powers of speech evolved.

If you want background in this area, you can start with these books:

• Eric Lenneberg, The Biological Foundations of Language  (1967): This is a classic work that long ago persuaded me it was just silly to speak of language as though it were entirely a cultural phenomenon.
• Philip Lieberman, The Biology and Evolution of Language (1984): This book is another oldie, but Lieberman is very important for anybody thinking about speech’s evolutionary origins because he pays attention to the fossil evidence, and made his name from the detailed examination of the evolution of the vocal tract.    He has written a number of other books including the popularly aimed Eve Spoke (1998)   and his most recent book Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language (2006)  which still sits on my “to read” list.
• Lyle Jenkins, Biolinguistics (2001).  Although a very ugly piece of writing, it does include a long look at the evolution of language. Jenkins is enthusiastic about Chomsky’s ideas and thus provides a counterweight to Lieberman’s approach which argues that Chomsky’s ideas are not supported by the biological evidence.
• Language Evolution, eds. Morton H. Christiansen & Simon Kirby (2003): a collection of articles on the origin of language from a variety of perspectives.

Comments

[TLTB]

That's a great list.

I would also add Jackendoff's book "Foundations of Language" to the list for another modern take. I don't think he's right about much, but it is one of the only examples of a full-fledged theory of language that is largely based on biological and evolutionary arguments. More work should be done in that vein.