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

for biology, not for linguistics. “What followed in theories of language acquisition,” said A. Charles Catania, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, “was closer to creationism than any other part of psychological research.”
    So, while Chomsky did publicly discuss the utility of language, whenever he mentioned evolutionary theory, it was mostly to discourage its value as a solution to the origins of language. He said, reasonably enough, that you can’t assume that all traits are selected for. In one of his most concrete statements on the topic, he wondered aloud whether a genetic mutation might have been responsible for the property of discrete infinity, which he considered fundamental to language.
    As far back as 1973 critics had complained that “the notion advanced by Chomsky among others, that a language system could have come into existence suddenly, as the result of a ‘mutation,’ seems simplistic and hardly more plausible than the idea that language is a gift of the gods.” 34 Yet Chomsky in no sense advanced this argument; he merely suggested it. His most damning evaluation of the idea that language was an adaptation was that it was “hard to imagine a course of selection that could have resulted in language.”
    Such was his eminence that when Chomsky said things like it’s “hard to imagine,” it was taken to be a truth about the intractable nature of the problem rather than the limits of imagination. It is a testament to his rhetorical skills and the depth of his influence that a strong case could be so widely inferred from his highly qualified statements on the topic.
    Against the backdrop of Chomsky’s rather pointed lack of interest, the problem of language evolution remained for most of the twentieth century the domain of the occasional crackpot and a few brilliant and determined mavericks. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh belongs to the second group. While the consensus in linguistics and most of psychology was that language was a monolithic trait that only humans possessed, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh was busy trying to teach another species how to use it.

2. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
     
    I t’s no exaggeration to say that Chomsky entered the academic scene with a crash, announcing his interests in such a compelling way that generations of scholars fell into lockstep with him. Yet despite his dominance, islands of research have sprung up independent of his school of thought. For the last few decades, ape language research has been one such island.
    Social, affectionate, emotional, and smart, apes need other apes, just as humans need other humans. This seems obvious enough in the twenty-first century, but it is relatively recent knowledge, the fruit of painstaking observation by primatologists like Jane Goodall. 1 The notion that human intelligence was a unique phenomenon started to break down in a very small way with the birth of primatology. The field’s findings have become so ingrained in popular consciousness that it’s now very hard to believe that as recently as fifty years ago we knew virtually nothing about apes and other primates. The years that Goodall and her colleagues spent patiently watching them in the wild yielded powerful insights, not just into the lives of other primates but also into how like them we are.
    Robert Sapolsky, a longtime observer of baboons (which are in the monkey family and therefore more distantly related to humans than apes are), draws attention to the similarity of our emotional and cognitive lives in his description of a mother baboon’s mishap:
 
    One day, as she leapt from one branch to another in a tree with the kid in that precarious position, he lost his grip and dropped ten feet to the ground. We various primates observing proved our close kinship, proved how we probably utilized the exact same number of synapses in our brains in watching and responding to this event, by doing exactly the same thing in unison. Five female baboons