Abstract
It is a widely shared opinion among specialists that language is an evolutionary innovation, or that it contains some key evolutionary innovations. However, such claims are not based on a correspondingly consensual concept of ‘evolutionary innovation,’ but are rather expressed on atheoretical grounds. This fact has thus far acted as an obstacle for the collaborative effort upon which the task of disentangling the evolution of this human capacity should be built. In this paper, we suggest a formal approach to the issue, based on Gunter Wagner’s recent theory of homologies and novelties. Within this new framework, we conclude that language is the human instantiation (thus an ‘homolog’) of a character widely represented in the nervous system of animals, which incorporates a number of interdependent innovative states that allows us conceptualizing it as a ‘variational modality’ of this ancient organ.
Highlights
Language evolution is a lively research topic, regarding which many diverging views coexist that mostly differ in the role they ascribe to natural selection in the evolutionary shaping of the faculty of language (FL)
Building upon prior reconstructions of the FL as a system of natural computation plus an associated array of interfaces with other cognitive systems (Hauser et al, 2002; Balari and Lorenzo, 2013), we argue that language only qualifies as an evolutionary novelty in Wagner’s weakest sense: i.e., as a Type II novelty, which means that it does not purport the introduction of a new organ—or Type I novelty
Note that there is a crucial difference between the application of formal language theory (FLT) in the Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) paradigm and the use we are making of it here: while AGL focuses on the possibility/impossibility of learning certain structural patters, we focus on the complexity of patterns already observable in a sequentially organized form of behavior
Summary
Language evolution is a lively research topic, regarding which many diverging views coexist that mostly differ in the role they ascribe to natural selection in the evolutionary shaping of the faculty of language (FL). Contrasting to this point of disagreement, a more consensual idea within the field is that the FL is a novelty with no clear correlates in non-human organisms. According to Wagner’s theory, this task entails deciphering a particular “character identity network,” understood as a system of interactive gene-related resources that interfaces between inductive signals providing positional information, on the one hand, and downstream realizer genes in charge of shaping the different homologs of the character, on the other hand. We hope the conclusions of this paper to be illustrative of the important role that language may play in helping to fine-tune a general theory of evo–devo
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