The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language by Christine Kenneally Page A

and in turn influence their students. In this way, an academic lineage is created. Chomsky has been a prolific father; his heirs have gone forth and multiplied. The 1988 four-volume Cambridge survey of linguistics describes, for the most part, Chomskyan linguistics.
    Says Steven Pinker, “The bulk of modern linguistic work has dealt with problems or phenomena that Chomsky noted.” Still, even though Chomsky has had a powerful influence on other sciences, they have had a notorious lack of influence on him. All theories of language evolution in the last decade, as well as most ideas about language and the brain, are usually characterized as for or against him.
    It’s ironic that Chomsky, who began his career striking a blow against totalitarian ideas in the form of Skinner and who also happens to be one of the best-known radical-left figures in politics, is now himself a figure of totemic power. For decades, his name appeared in the synopses of conferences, the papers of students, and the articles of academics with all the frequency and duty that portraits of the leader appear in the classrooms of third-world dictatorships. 29
    How does one man inspire both blistering rage and religious devotion? There is little evidence to suggest that Chomsky has sought to create the sociological marvel that is his career. Academics who are familiar with him will—without exception—describe the way he insists that he is a minor figure with little real influence.
    It is Chomsky’s legend rather than any rationale that he advanced that stifled language evolution research during the latter half of the twentieth century. His public comments on the topic have mostly been cryptic. In his book Language and Mind he wrote, “It is perfectly safe to attribute this development [of innate mental structure] to ‘natural selection,’ so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena.” 30
    In the same book, Chomsky went on to wonder how many possible alternatives to transformational, generative grammar exist for an animal that evolved in the way humans did. Perhaps none exist, or only a few. If this were the case, he said, “talk about the evolution of language capacity is beside the point.” 31
    In the 1980s Chomsky acknowledged that language must have given us some kind of evolutionary advantage but its origins were more likely to have been accidental than the result of slow evolutionary change. “We have no idea, at present,” he said, “how physical laws apply when neurons are placed in an object the size of a basketball, under the special conditions that arose during human evolution.” 32
    Certainly no one knew whether language was a function more of physics than of behavior or biology. Instead of resulting from adaptation and selection, language may have arisen as a by-product of a very complex mental machine. But at the time, few people engaged in any meaningful way with the idea. As a result, when confronted with this kind of Chomskyan koan, almost no one took the question of adaptation any further. 33
    Having stripped away all of the untidy bits of language as “performance,” Chomsky defined language as an idealized, perfect, and elegant system. The brain, on the other hand, he said, was messy. How did something so messy develop something so perfect? It was a mystery, he said, one that was, for the time being, insoluble.
    If it were true that language was perfect and that it simply emerged from our highly complex mental organization, Chomsky has also said, such a development does not make much sense with what we know about physical systems. Biology just doesn’t work like that. Indeed, biological evolution is a haphazard, junkyard kind of process where traits are not intelligently designed from scratch, but rather, new tools are built over old ones. This conundrum was, in Chomsky’s view, a problem