The Meme Machine

MEME–GENE COEVOLUTION 95
But what is the function? A ‘conventional neo-Darwinian’ explanation
assumes a selective advantage of having language. My question about why we
acquired language now becomes ‘what was the selective advantage of having
language?’ Without an answer to that question the existence of human language
remains a mystery.
Pinker and Bloom’s answer is that language is designed ‘for the
communication of propositional structures over a serial channel’ (1990, p. 712).
But what, then, was the selective advantage of ‘communication of propositional
structures over a serial channel’? Language would have allowed our ancestors
to acquire information and pass it on far faster than biological evolution could
achieve, giving them a decisive advantage in competition with other species,
they say. But to complete this argument we need to know what biologically
relevant information was to be passed on and why the use of propositional
structures would have helped. This they do not explain.
There have been many answers before Pinker and Bloom’s but none is
universally accepted. Some of the earliest theories revolved around hunting.
Primitive man was seen as a great hurter who needed to communicate plans for
herding prey or trapping them in particular places. In other words, we needed to
speak in order to hunt better. A more modern version comes from
palaeontologists Walker and Shipman (1996, p, 231) who suggest the function
of language was to communicate ‘places to hunt; new sorts of traps; locations of
water, good caves . . . techniques for making tools . . . or ways to make and
keep fire’. Other theories emphasised foraging – perhaps early humans needed
to communicate about the locations, nutritional value or safety of available
foodstuffs. What is not quite clear from any of these theories is why humans,
and humans alone, should have developed such a complex and neurologically
expensive solution to the problems of hunting or foraging. For example, wolves
and lions achieve clever pack-hunting strategies without grammatical language,
and bees communicate the whereabouts and value of food sources with a
specialised dance. Vervet monkeys have different warning cries for at least five
different predators, including leopard, eagles and snakes (Cheney and Seyfarth
1990) but use no grammar or propositional structures. Presumably, our innate
Universal Grammar provides advantages over these simpler systems, but there
remains the question why the advantage is so great that we can communicate
who did what to whom, why you couldn’t make it to the party, and the
advantages of the Big Bang theory over a Steady State cosmology.
Perhaps the answer (as in theories relating brain size to Machiavellian