58 Scientific American, September 2018
GENETIC CODE
THE LIST OF ABILITIES that were formerly thought to be a
unique part of human language is actually quite long.
It includes parts of language, such as words. Vervet
monkeys use wordlike alarm calls to signal a specific
kind of danger. Another crucial aspect is structure. Be-
cause we have syntax, we can produce an infinite
number of novel sentences and meanings, and we can
understand sentences that we have never heard be-
fore. Yet zebra finches have complicated structure in
their songs, dolphins can understand differences in
word order and even some monkeys in the wild seem
to use one type of call to modify another. The list ex-
tends to types of cognition, such as theory of mind,
which is the ability to infer others’ mental states. Dol-
phins and chimpanzees are excellent at guessing what
an interlocutor wants. Even the supposedly unique
ability to think about numbers falls by the wayside—
bees can understand the concept of zero, bees and rhe-
sus monkeys can count to four, and cormorants usedfor fishing in China reportedly count to seven.
The list includes genes. The famous FOXP2 gene,
once called a language gene, is indeed a gene that af-
fects language—when it is mutated, it disrupts artic-
ulation—but it performs other roles as well. There is
no easy way to tease out the different effects. Genes
are critical for understanding how language evolved,
says Simon Fisher, a geneticist at the Max Planck In-
stitute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Nether-
lands, but “we have to think about what genes do.” To
put an incredibly complex process very briefly: genes
code for proteins, which then affect cells, which may
be brain cells that form neural circuits, and it is those
circuits that are then responsible for behavior. “It
may be that there is a network of genes that are im-
portant for syntactic processing or speaking profi-
ciently,” Fisher explains, “but there won’t be a single
gene that can magically code for a suite of abilities.”
The list of no-longer-completely-unique human
traits includes brain mechanisms, too. We are learn-Evolution of Language
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SOURCE: “CULTURE AND BIOLOGY IN THE ORIGINS OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTU
RE,”
BY SIMON KIRBY, IN
PSYCHONOMIC BULLETIN & REVIEW,
VOL. 24, NO. 1; FEBRUARY 2017
Graphic by Federica Fragapane
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BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
INDIVIDUAL
LEARNING
AND USE
CULTURAL EVOLUTION
LANGUAGE
Culture may STRUCTURE
ultimately
mold biological
properties
Idea
conveyed
according to
a person’s
cognitive
and other
abilities
Other
individuals
with their
own capacities
retransmit
the idea using
the emerging
language
1
2
3