To the extent that FLN is species-specific and evolutionarily discontinuous,
its existence presents a barrier to studies of language evolution. Below I will
argue that the FLN/FLB dichotomy is an illusion and that Merge also had an
evolutionary precursor, as already implicated in Figure 9.3.
4 Fallacy of continuity (anthropomorphism)
So suppose every component of human language is evolutionarily continuous
with some cognitive faculties which can be found in the animal kingdom. Human
language is unique not in any of its constituents but in their combination. This
conforms to the general picture of biological evolution in which a novel trait
appears as a result of recombination of old traits and is good news for every
evolutionary linguist endeavoring to understand the evolution of human language
in a naturalistic way on a par with other instances of evolution.
It is for this reason that studies of animal cognition, communicative or not,
play an important role in today’s evolutionary linguistics. Now we read reports
after reports of a wide range of animals, not limited to primates, mammals and
birds, having mental/cognitive faculties to a greater or lesser degree which
were once believed to be monopolized by humans (see, for example, Stoop
et al. 2013 for the surprising observation that Drosophila’s courtship behavior
is grammatically more complex than human language).
It is important to note that these reports, to the extent that they are correct,
do not conflict with our understanding that language is a uniquely human trait.
As just mentioned, the uniqueness of human language lies in its combination
of distinct modules and not in any one of these modules taken in isolation
(including Merge, I believe). Instead, these studies offer an invaluable asset
to the development of evolutionary linguistics in that they help us investi-
gate how this species-specific faculty of language may have evolved from what
kind of non-species-specific faculties through the process of recombination and
reorganization.
This much said, we need to realize that some human faculty X and its animal
counterpart Y, no matter how closely they are evolutionarily linked, are not the
same after all and that any gap, however small, which may exist between X and
Y is the key to understanding species-specificity. We know that higher primates
like chimpanzees have rudimentary forms of conceptual capacity and a theory of
mind, and we study these in order to see how these mental faculties may have
evolved in the hominin lineage. So far, so good. But troubles begin when one
goes further and believes that chimpanzees’ theory of mind (X) is the same as
the humans’ (Y), or that studies of the evolution of Y can safely be replaced
by studies of the evolution of X.
The fallacy of continuity, or anthropomorphism, has been very dangerous
in comparative cognitive/psychological studies, so that as early as 1903 C. L.
Morgan published a caveat against such an anthropomorphic bias (see Buckner
20 13): “In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of
higher psychological processes, if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes
146 Koji Fujita