Biological and cultural evolution in the evolution of language
This week you are going to be debating the role of biological and cultural evolution in the evolution of language. It’s a big topic, and the readings I am setting are also a bit bigger than in previous tutorials: two articles in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which publishes lengthy review/opinion pieces plus a bunch of “peer commentaries”, basically little notes by other academics. I just want you to read the main article (which is about 20 pages long in both cases), you don’t need to wade through all the commentaries and the author responses.
Team 1 will read the classic 1990 article by Steve Pinker and Paul Bloom, arguing that language is a biological adaptation for communication, i.e. the story of language evolution is primarily a story about the biological evolution of the language faculty. This article is pretty old now, and some features will hopefully seem a bit odd to you - there’s no comparative data considered, for instance - but it’s still a great read.
Team 2 will read a more recently article by Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater, arguing that the main factor in the evolution of language has been cultural evolution of languages, rather than biological evolution of the language faculty - language has adapted to us, rather than us adapting to have language. The field has also moved on a bit since 2008 - all the experimental work I will talk about in the lecture came out after this article - but it’s still a good overview article of what a cultural evolutionary account might look like.
As usual, read the articles, discuss the most persuasive points (given the length of the papers you’ll have to be quite focussed), duke it out for a bit, then see if you can agree on what the important points are, what evidence we can use to evaluate them, and what you think the correct balanced view is.
You will need to be on the University network to access these papers via the direct links below.
Team 1: Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 707-784. [but the article itself is only 20 pages]
Team 2: Christiansen, M. H., & Chater, N. (2008). Language as shaped by the brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 489-558. [but the article itself is only 20 pages]
All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.