SILENT PARTNERS
Eugene Linden
New York: Times Books,
1986
GAVAGAI!
Or the Future History of the Animal Language Controversy
David Premack
Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1986
APE LANGUAGE
From Conditioned Response to Symbol
E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
New York: Columbia University Press,
1986
NIM
Herbert S. Terrace
New York: Columbia University Press,
1986
Two coeds met a frog on the campus. "Kiss me," the frog said, "and I'll turn into a psychologist." One of the girls picked him up and tucked him in the pocket of her jeans. "Aren't you going to kiss it?" the other asked. "No, a talking animal is really worth something."
- Anonymous
Konrad Lorenz, who in 1973 was awarded the Nobel Prize for his studies of animal behavior, concluded his book The Foundations of Ethology with an appendix concerning Homo sapiens. He professes there to "share Noam Chomsky's opinion that syntactic language is based on a phylogenetic program evolved exclusively by humans." Some of his terms, however, require amplification.
First of all, by "humans" Lorenz does not mean only members of the species Homo sapiens, to which we belong. He intends to include all our predecessors in the genus Homo, beginning - so far as paleontologists now know - with a species the late Louis Leakey has dubbed Homo habilis, a creature that seems to have emerged from the australopithecine line in East Africa around two million years ago, and rather abruptly at that.
Further, what does Lorenz mean by a "syntactic language"? And, more generally, what does the term "language” denote - or, more accurately, not convey - in this context? Most laymen (and perhaps some scientists too) might argue that the essential purpose of language is to enable people to communicate with one another. However, the same Chomsky with whom Lorenz opted to associate his opinion has also pointed out "that either we must deprive the notion 'communication' of all significance, or else we must reject the view that the purpose of language is communication." This provocative statement needs to be considered form several points of view: How did ancient men and women communicate with one another; and, if language did not emerge as an adaptation for purposes of communication, what could its function, one that merited such undeniable evolutionary success, have been?
Ancient men and women communicated - that is, exchanged messages - within and between their societies
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