The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee Read online

  However, Bickerton goes further than Chomsky and concludes that we are pre-programmed not just to a universal grammar with adjustable switches, but to a particular set of switch settings: the settings that surface again and again in creole grammars. The pre-programmed settings can be overridden if they turn out to conflict with what a child hears in the local language around it. But if a child hears no local switch settings at all because it grows up amidst the structureless anarchy of pidgin language, the creole settings can persist.

  If Bickerton is correct in that we really are pre-programmed at birth with creole settings that can be overridden by later experience, then one would expect children to learn creole-like features of their local language earlier and more easily than features conflicting with creole grammar. This reasoning might explain the notorious difficulty of English-speaking children in learning how to express negatives: they insist on creole-like double negatives such as ‘Nobody don’t have this’. The same reasoning could explain the difficulties of English-speaking children with word order in questions.

  To pursue the latter example, English happens to be among the languages that uses the creole word order of subject, verb, and object for statements: for instance, ‘I want juice’. Many languages, including creoles, preserve this word order in questions, which are merely distinguished by altered tone of voice (‘You want juice?’). However, the English language does not treat questions in this way. Instead, our questions deviate from creole word order by inverting the subject and verb (‘Where are you?’, not ‘Where you are?’), or by placing the subject between an auxiliary verb (such as ‘do’) and the main verb (‘Do you want juice?’). My wife and I have been barraging my sons from early infancy onwards with grammatically correct English questions as well as statements. My sons quickly picked up the correct order for statements, but both of them are still persisting in the incorrect creole-like order for questions, despite the hundreds of correct examples that my wife and I utter for them every day. Today’s samples from Max and Joshua include ‘Where it is?’, ‘What that letter is?’, ‘What the handle can do?’, and ‘What you did with it?’. It is as if they are not yet ready to accept the evidence of their ears, because they are still convinced that their pre-programmed creole-like rules are correct.

  I have discussed creoles as if they appeared only with the rise of colonialism in the past 500 years. In fact, the social conditions that produced modern creoles have arisen repeatedly during thousands of years of documented human history, and probably long before that. Hence some of the world’s ‘normal’ languages may have passed through stages of creolization and gradually re-evolved a more complex grammar. The possible example closest to home is the language of these pages. There has been a long controversy among linguists over the history of the Germanic language family that includes English, and that presumably arose in the area of the Baltic Sea. As I shall discuss in Chapter Fifteen, Germanic languages belong to a wider grouping of languages termed Indo-European. All Indo-European languages clearly derived much of their vocabulary and grammar from an ancestral language known as proto-Indo-European, which may have been spoken in southern Russia 5,000 years ago and then spread west across Europe. However, the Germanic languages also include many word roots and grammatical features unique to them, and absent from all other Indo-European families. Familiar examples include the English words ‘house’, ‘wife’, and ‘hand’, close to the modern German words Haus, Weib, and Hand. The shores of the Baltic are the source of prized amber that was traded to southern Europe and Russia thousands of years ago, just as it is still traded around the world today. Could the Germanic languages have arisen as a creole, when proto-Indo-European traders settled among proto-Germanic tribes of the Baltic to buy amber in exchange for pottery, battle-axes, and horses?

  *

  Now let’s pull together all these animal and human studies to try to form a coherent picture of how our ancestors progressed from grunts to Shakespeare’s sonnets. A well-studied early stage is represented by vervet monkeys, with at least ten different calls that are under voluntary control, are used for communication, and have external referents. The calls may function as words, explanations, propositions, or as all of those things simultaneously. Scientists’ difficulties in identifying those ten calls have been such that more surely await identification, but we still do not know how large the vervet vocabulary really is. We also do not know how far other animals may have progressed beyond vervets, because the vocal communications of the species most likely to have eclipsed vervets, the common and the pygmy chimp, have yet to be studied carefully in the wild. At least in the laboratory, chimps can master hundreds of symbols that we teach them, suggesting that they have the necessary intellectual equipment to master symbols of their own.

  The single words of young toddlers, like ‘juice’ as uttered by my son Max, constitute a next stage beyond animal grunts. Like vervet calls, Max’s ‘juice’ may have functioned as some combination of a word, an explanation, and a proposition. But Max has made a decisive advance on vervets by assembling his ‘juice’ word from the smaller units of vowels and consonants, thereby scaling the lowest level of modular linguistic organization. A few dozen such phonetic units can be reshuffled to produce a very large number of words, such as the 142,000 words in my English desk dictionary. That principle of modular organization lets us recognize far more distinctions than can vervets. For example, they name only six types of animals, whereas we name nearly two million.

  A further step towards Shakespeare is exemplified by two-year-old children, who in all human societies proceed spontaneously from a one-word to a two-word stage and then to a multi-word one. But those multi-word utterances are still mere word strings with little grammar, and their words are still nouns, verbs, and adjectives with concrete referents. As Bickerton points out, those word strings are rather like the pidgin languages that human adults spontaneously reinvent when necessary. They also resemble the strings of symbols produced by captive apes whom we have instructed in the use of those symbols.

  From pidgins to creoles, or from the word strings of two-year-olds to the complete sentences of four-year-olds, is another giant step. In that step were added words lacking external referents and serving purely grammatical functions; elements of grammar such as word order, prefixes and suffixes, and word root variation; and more levels of hierarchical organization to produce phrases and sentences. Perhaps that step is what triggered the Great Leap Forward discussed in Chapter Two. Nevertheless, creole languages reinvented in modern times still give us clues to how these advances arose, through the creoles’ circumlocutions to express prepositions and other grammatical elements. As another illustration of how this might have happened, my Indonesian colleague and I were just in the process of reinventing prepositions when the helicopter picked us up and terminated our experiment in pidgin evolution. We had begun to assemble word strings that functioned as locative prepositional phrases but were still composed solely of nouns with concrete referents – strings such as ‘spoon top plate’ and ‘spoon bottom plate’, to mean that the spoon was on or under the plate. Many virtual prepositions in Neo-Melanesian, Indonesian, and other creoles are similarly constructed.

  If you compare the Neo-Melanesian advertisement on pages 150–51 with a Shakespearean sonnet, you might conclude that a huge gap still exists. In fact, I would argue that, with an advertisement like Kam insait long stua bilong mipela, we have come 99.9% of the way from vervet calls to Shakespeare. Creoles already constitute expressive complex languages. For example, Indonesian, which arose as a creole to become the language of conversation and government for the world’s fifth most populous country, is also a vehicle for serious literature.

  Animal communication and human language once seemed to be separated by an unbridgeable gulf. Now, we have identified not only parts of the bridges starting from both shores, but also a series of islands and bridge segments spaced across the gulf. We are beginning to understand in broad outline how the most uni
que and important attribute that distinguishes us from animals arose from animal precursors.

  Appendix

  NEO-MELANESIAN, IN ONE EASY LESSON

  Try to understand this Neo-Melanesian advertisement for a department store:

  Kam insait long stua bilong mipela – stua bilong salim olgeta samting – mipela i-ken helpim yu long kisim wanem samting yu laikim bikpela na liklik long gutpela prais. I-gat gutpela kain kago long baiim na i-gat stap long helpim yu na lukautim yu long taim yu kam insait long dispela stua.

  If some of the words look strangely familiar but do not quite make sense, read the advertisement aloud to yourself, concentrate on the sounds, and ignore the strange spelling. As the next step, here is the same advertisement rewritten with English spelling:

  Come inside long store belong me-fellow – store belong sellim altogether something – me-fellow can helpim you long catchim what-name something you likim, big-fellow na liklik, long good-fellow price. He-got good-fellow kind cargo long buyim, na he-got staff long helpim you na lookoutim you long time you come inside long this-fellow store.

  A few explanations should help you make sense of the remaining strangenesses. Almost all the words in this sample of Neo-Melanesian are derived from English, except for the word liklik for ‘little’, derived from a New Guinean language (Tolai). Neo-Melanesian has only two pure prepositions: bilong, meaning ‘of’ or ‘in order to’, and long, meaning almost any other English preposition. The English consonant f becomes p in Neo-Melanesian, as in stap for ‘staff’, and pela for ‘fellow’. The suffix -pela is added to monosyllabic adjectives (hence gutpela for ‘good’, bikpela for ‘big’), and also makes the singular pronouns ‘me’ and ‘you’ into plural ones (for ‘we’ and ‘you’ -plural). Na means ‘and’. So the advertisement means:

  Come into our store – a store for selling everything – we can help you get whatever you want, big and small, at a good price. There are good types of goods for sale, and staff to help you and look after you when you visit the store.

  NINE

  ANIMAL ORIGINS OF ART

  Art is often viewed as lacking animal precursors, cultivated solely for pleasure, and serving no biological function. In fact, even art experts have been unable to distinguish human artworks from those produced by apes and elephants. Like the bower decorations of bowerbirds, human art may have evolved as a signal of status and thereby helped us to pass on our genes.

  *

  GEORGIA O’KEEFFE’S DRAWINGS were slow to win recognition for her, but Siri’s drawings brought her acclaim as soon as other knowledgeable artists saw them. They had a kind of flair and decisiveness and originality’ – that was the first reaction of the famous abstract-expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. Jerome Witkin, an authority on abstract expressionism who teaches art at Syracuse University, was even more effusive: ‘These drawings are very lyrical, very, very beautiful. They are so positive and affirmative and tense, the energy is so compact and controlled, it’s just incredible … . This drawing is so graceful, so delicate … This drawing indicates a grasp of the essential mark that makes the emotion.’

  Witkin applauded Siri’s balance of positive and negative space, and her placement and orientation of images. Having seen the drawings but knowing nothing about who made them, he guessed correctly that the artist was female and interested in Asian calligraphy. But Witkin did not guess that Siri was 8 feet tall and weighed 4 tons. She was an Asian elephant who drew by holding a pencil in her trunk.

  de Kooning’s response to being told Siri’s identity was, ‘That’s a damned talented elephant.’ Actually, Siri was not extraordinary by elephant standards. Wild elephants often use their trunks to make drawing motions in the dust, while captive elephants often spontaneously scratch marks on the ground with a stick or stone. Hanging in many doctors’ and lawyers’ offices are paintings by an elephant named Carol, who sold dozens of her works at prices of up to 500 dollars.

  Supposedly, art is the noblest distinctively human attribute – one that sets us apart from animals at least as sharply as does spoken language, by differing in basic ways from anything that any animal does. Art ranks as even nobler than language, since language is really ‘just’ a highly sophisticated advance on animal communication systems, serves an obvious biological function in helping us to survive, and obviously developed from the sounds made by other primates. In contrast, art serves no such transparent function, and its origins are considered a sublime mystery. But it is clear that elephant art could have implications for our own. At the minimum, it is a similar physical activity resulting in products that even experts could not distinguish from human products accepted as constituting art. Of course, there are also huge differences between Siri’s art and ours, not least of which is that Siri was not trying to communicate her message to other elephants. Nevertheless, we cannot just dismiss her art as a quirk of one individual beast.

  In this chapter I shall go beyond elephants to examine art-like activities of some other animals. I believe that the comparisons will help us understand the original functions of human art. Thus, although we usually consider art to be the antithesis of science, there may really be a science of art.

  *

  To appreciate that our art must have some animal precursors, recall from Chapter One that it is only about seven million years since we branched off from our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees. Seven million years sound like a lot on the scale of a human lifetime, but they are barely one per cent of the history of complex life on Earth. We still share over ninety-eight per cent of our genes with chimps. Art and those other features that we consider uniquely human must be due to just a tiny fraction of our genes. They must have arisen only a few moments ago on the evolutionary time clock.

  Modern studies of animal behaviour have been shrinking the list of features once considered uniquely human, so much so that most differences between us and so-called animals now appear to be only matters of degree. For example, I described in Chapter Eight how vervet monkeys have a rudimentary language. You may not have considered vampire bats allied with us in nobility, but they prove to practise reciprocal altruism regularly (towards other vampire bats, of course). Among our darker qualities, murder has now been documented in innumerable animal species, genocide in wolves and chimps, rape in ducks and orangutans, and organized warfare and slave raids in ants.

  As absolute distinctions between us and animals, these discoveries leave us few characteristics besides art, which we managed to dispense with for the first 6,960,000 of the seven million years since we diverged from chimps. Perhaps the earliest art forms were wood carving and body painting, but we would not know because they are not preserved. The first preserved, even questionable, hints of human art consist of some flower remains around Neanderthal skeletons, and some scratches on animal bones at Neanderthal campsites. However, their interpretation as having been arranged or scratched intentionally is in doubt. Not until the Cro-Magnons, beginning around 40,000 years ago, do we have unequivocal evidence for art surviving in the form of the famous cave paintings, statues, necklaces, and musical instruments.

  If we are going to claim that true art is unique to humans, then in what ways do we claim that it differs from superficially similar productions of animals, like bird-songs? Three supposed distinctions are often put forward: that human art is non-utilitarian, that it is only for aesthetic pleasure, and that it is transmitted by learning rather than through our genes. Let’s scrutinize these claims more closely.

  Firstly, as Oscar Wilde said, ‘All art is quite useless.’ The implicit meaning a biologist sees behind this quip is that art is non-utilitarian in a narrow sense employed within the fields of animal behaviour and evolutionary biology. That is, human art does not help us to survive or to pass on our genes, which are the readily discernible functions of most animal behaviour. Of course, most human art is utilitarian in the broader sense that the artist thereby communicates something to fellow humans, but transmitting one’s thoughts
to the next generation is not the same thing as transmitting one’s genes. In contrast, bird-song serves the obvious functions of wooing a mate, defending a territory, and thereby transmitting genes.

  Regarding the second claim that human art is instead motivated by aesthetic pleasure, Webster’s dictionary defines art as ‘the making or doing of things that have form or beauty’. While we cannot ask mockingbirds and nightingales if they similarly enjoy the form or beauty of their songs, it is suspicious that they sing mainly during the breeding season. Hence they are probably not singing just for aesthetic pleasure.

  As for human art’s third claimed distinction, each human group has a distinctive art style, and the knowledge of how to make and enjoy that particular style is learned, not inherited. For example, it is easy to distinguish typical songs being sung today in Tokyo and in Paris. But those stylistic differences are not hard-wired in our genes, as are the differences, say, in the eyes of Parisians and Japanese. Parisians and Japanese can and often do visit each other’s cities and learn each other’s songs. In contrast, many species of birds (the so-called nonpasserine birds) inherit the knowledge of how to produce and respond to the particular song of their species. Each of those birds would produce the right song even if it had never heard it, and even if it had heard only the songs of other species. It is as if a French baby adopted by Japanese parents, flown in infancy to Tokyo, and educated there began spontaneously to sing the ‘Marseillaise’.