| Abstract | [Introduction]
Man’s life is diverse. The range of habitats, natural and man-made, to which he has adapted is incomparably wider than that of nay other species. This is so because man evolved capacities for rapid cultural evolution to augment the lengthier biological processes of adaptive radiation. These capacities have permitted him to create new and unpredictable patterns of behavior in the face of both old and new contingencies. The nature of these capacities is unknown. But we can be sure that language is among them, and that an understanding of its biology would take us a long way toward understanding the history of man and the earth during the past 10,000 years.
Unfortunately, “the development of human speech represents a quantum jump in evolution comparable to the assembly of the euracryotic cell” (Wilson 1975:556). Whatever the lost links in phyletic evolution since the first hominids diverged from the apes, presently living species offer few analogies and even fewer homologies with language. In fact, the most fruitful approaches to its biology seem to be those that have been followed for many years by developmental psycholinguists (for review, see Brown 1973; Dale 1976; Ferguson & Slovin 1973) and by students of neurophysiology (e.g., Lenneberg 1967; Lenneberg & Lenneberg 1975: Whitaker & Whitaker 1976): first, study of its ontogeny, with particular attention to similarities within and across language communities; second, study of its pathology in childhood and adult aphasia.
The present chapter makes no attempt to review the vast resulting literature. Instead it undertakes to examine critically several tempting analogies with language in the great apes and in the song learning of oscine birds. Analogies often have the heuristic value of leading us to look at familiar facts from a fresh viewpoint. Moreover, they may be instructive even if they prove to be false. |
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