In M.H. Christiansen and Kirby, S. (Eds.), Language evolution (pp. 1-15). Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Language Evolution:
The Hardest Problem in Science?

Introduction

What is it that makes us human? If we look at the impact that we have had on our environment, it is hard not to think that we are in some way "special" - a qualitatively different species from any of the ten million others. Perhaps we only feel that way because it is hard to be objective when thinking about ourselves. After all, biology tells us all species are exquisitely adapted to their respective ecological niches. Nevertheless, there is something odd about humans. We participate in hugely complex and diverse types of social systems. There are humans living in almost every environment on Earth. We mold the world around us in unprecedented ways, creating structures that can be seen from space, and then going into space to see them.

One of our achievements, especially over the previous century, has been a staggering growth in our scientific understanding of the universe we live in. We are closing in on a complete unitary theory of its building blocks, and we know much about how it started. Yet despite this, our understanding of our place in this universe is far from complete. We still have only a hazy understanding of what exactly it is that makes us human.

Advances are being made, however. The cognitive neurosciences are bringing our view of the brain into focus, and the recent success of human genome sequencing gives us a recipe-book for how we are built. However, these approaches to humanity mostly show us how similar we are to other forms of life. The essence of human uniqueness remains elusive.

In this book, we contend that the feature of humanity that leads to the strange properties listed above is language. To understand ourselves, we must understand language. To understand language, we need to know where it came from, why it works the way it does, and how it has changed.

To some it may be a surprise that, despite rapid advances in many areas of science, we still know relatively little about the origins and evolution of this peculiarly human trait. Why might this be? We believe that at least part of the answer is that a deep understanding of language evolution can only come from the concerted, joint effort of researchers from a huge range of disciplines. We must understand how our brains and minds work; how language is structured and what it is used for; how early language and modern language differ from each other and from other communication systems; in what ways the biology of hominids have changed; how we manage to acquire language during development; and how learning, culture and evolution interact.

This book is intended to bring together, for the first time, all the major perspectives on language evolution, as represented by the various fields that have a stake in language evolution research: psycholinguistics, linguistics, psychology, primatology, philosophy, anthropology, archeology, biology, neuroscience, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, cognitive science, and computational linguistics. The chapters are written by the key authorities in each area, and together they cast the brightest light yet on questions surrounding the origin and evolution of language.


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