Tamed Males

Many people interested in the origins of language have noticed the humanity’s peculiar sexual arrangements and wondered if they had anything to do with language’s start. What arrangement are those? Humans engage in a variety of heterosexual arrangements—polygamy, monogamy, polyandry—but we don’t organize our societies around systems in which males and females mate widely and randomly with each other (bonobos do that), nor do the males fight among themselves over who gets to mate with anyone and who does not (gorillas do that). To put it technically, adult human societies are organized in many ways but whatever way they choose they minimize competition between sperm. How could that have anything to do with language?

Well, Terrence Deacon has looked at the relation between sexual organization and the need for symbols to enable that organization. Chris Knight has investigated the impossibility of language under the standard ape society structure in which males contribute very little to survival. They fight among themselves and take what they want from the females. Until that system changed, Knight argues, language as a social tool was impossible. This blog has also insisted many times that the trust and sharing that language requires is only possible if the chief form of evolutionary selection was group selection rather than selection at the individual level.

At the technical level, all three of us have been saying that to have language you have to get rid of competition between sperm. So the breakthrough analysis of the Y chromosome’s genetic structure that has just appeared in Nature (introduction here ) is a real support to these ideas. It turns out that the human and chimpanzee Y chromosomes have diverged so much and so fast that it is as though we shared a last common ancestor from 310 million instead of 6 million years ago. What’s more, while chimpanzee sperm has been streamlining for ever  tighter competition, the human Y chromosome looks to be competition free. This kind of finding is exactly the kind of thing that Deacon, Knight, and this blog have been looking for.

For full stories on the report see The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Comments

[Forrest]

Could it simply be the fact that humans have fewer children, who are vulnerable far longer than most other species? We need more parental care than horses do, for example; horses can walk minutes after birth. This means that human children demand far more parental investment than most other species, and genes "for" such investment would lead to more offspring, whether those genes are in males or females.

Also, I've read that many species have a "strategy" of promiscuity. Female cats are said to mate with all the males in a group, so that no male will kill a kitten that might plausibly be its offspring. Whether humans are (mostly) monogamous or not is up to the culture and the individual ... but I have a hunch that a human male is more likely to have a high degree of certainty of his fatherhood than many other species.

Could much of this have to do with the fact that human reproductive cycles are hidden, unlike many of our primate cousins?

[Barbara Julian]

Doesn't origin of language have more to do with human mothering arrangements than sexual arrangements? And with bipedalism: the human-primate mother could stand up and carry her infant - her arms were freed from being legs. Arms were for holding a baby, and exactly at the level for eye contact and facial expression which leads to sounds which became standardized as language. Note also that the bend of the elbow holds the infant's head at exactly the position of the nipple; the baby is nourished simultaneously by food and by mother's loving attention. Of course such infants were stimulated, contented i.e. got the emotional "survival skills." So they survived, reproduced most in turn etc.: Darwinian selection - all happening once mothers invented language to commuicate with their infants: instinctively to soothe, reassure, stimulate, and later to teach.

Over the eons juveniles took these evolving brain skills into adult relationships, and human peculiar sexual relationships would have come out of that? e.g. negotiating, reciprocating, and tend-and-befriend behaviour? These became tools to deal with threat -- "fight and flight" isn't the only way. For the weaker and slower (females, nursing mothers) other techniques had to be invented. Language!

Thank you,
B. Julian
www.ninshupress.ca

[JanetK]

Given all that B. Julian says about the mother-child link, we have to think about that there is available to support and allow the luxury of mothers caring for children in this way. 'It takes a village to raise a child.' Grandmothers, aunts, or daughters are needed. A secure group is needed. A father is needed. Cooperation between the men as well as between women is needed. A low level of sexual jealosy is need. We have to look at the nature of the group before we can envisage the dedicated mother.