Evolutionary science has long viewed language as, basically, a fortunate accidenta crossing of wires that happened to be extraordinarily useful, setting humans apart from other animals and onto a trajectory that would see their brains (and the products of those brains) become increasingly complex.
But as Michael C. Corballis shows in The Truth about Language, its time to reconsider those assumptions. Language, he argues, is not the product of some big bang 60,000 years ago, but rather the result of a typically slow process of evolution with roots in elements of grammatical language found much farther back in our evolutionary history. Language, Corballis explains, evolved as a way to share thoughtsand, crucially for human development, to connect our own mental time travel, our imagining of events and people that are not right in front of us, to that of other people. We share that ability with other animals, but it was the development of language that made it powerful: it led to our ability to imagine other perspectives, to imagine ourselves in the minds of others, a development that, by easing social interaction, proved to be an extraordinary evolutionary advantage.
Even as his thesis challenges such giants as Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould, Corballis writes accessibly and wittily, filling his account with unforgettable anecdotes and fascinating historical examples. The result is a book thats perfect both for deep engagement and as brilliant fodder for that lightest of all forms of language, cocktail party chatter.
It is time for the story of the evolution of language to be rewritten. Michael Corballis breaks tradition with the likes of Chomsky, Pinker, and Gould and shows how language was neither a great leap nor a merge of mental wires. Language, he argues, is a device for sharing our thoughts, and is not thought itself; thought evolved independently of language, and was not necessary for its later emergence. His story centers on the ability of mental time travel, that is to entertain thoughts that are not tied to the present, and the theory of mind, or the ability to read other peoples minds. Language in this framework becomes a way of sharing our thoughts, of communicating about aspects of the world, exquisitely shaped to communicate about the non-present; ideas, and stories, that are housed in our minds. This involved grammar, a set of conventions by which our thinking can be put into words, so that others can share them. The main attributes of grammatical language were shaped gradually from some 2.5 million years ago, during the Pleistocene. It did not, Corballis contends, emerge in a fortuitous ?big bang a mere 60,000 years ago. Corballis sees the evolution of language as one of the strongest test cases for Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. Language evolution has been referred to as the hardest problems in science, and Corballis here offers some meaningful paths to its solution.
