Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (137 page)

Finally, Cavalli-Sforza attempted to answer two of the most fascinating questions of all – when did language first appear, and was there ever a single ancestral language, a true mother tongue? We saw earlier that some palaeontologists believe that the Neanderthals died out about 28,000 years ago because they did not have language. Against that, Cavalli-Sforza points out that the region in our brains responsible for language lies behind the eye, on the left side, making the cranium slightly asymmetrical. This asymmetry is absent in apes but present in skulls
of Homo habilis
dated to 2 million years ago. Furthermore, our brain case ceased to grow about 300,000 years ago, and so on this basis it seems that language might be older than many palaeontologists think.
³⁸
On the other hand, studies of the way languages change over time (a rate that is known, roughly) points back to between 20,000–40,000 years ago when the main superfamilies split. This discrepancy has not been resolved.

Regarding the mother tongue, Cavalli-Sforza relies on Greenberg, who claims that there is at least one word that seems to be common to all languages. This is the root word
tik.

For the Indo-European languages, those stretching from western Europe to India, Greenberg’s approach has been taken further by Colin Renfrew, the Cambridge archaeologist who rationalised the effects of the carbon-14 revolution on dating. Renfrew’s aim, in
Archaeology and Language
(1987), was not simply to examine language origins but to compare those findings with others from archaeology, to see if a consistent picture could be arrived at and, most controversially, to identify the earliest homeland of the Indo-European peoples, to see what light this threw on human development overall. After introducing the idea of regular sound shifts, according to nation–

Renfrew went on to study the rates of change of language and to consider what the earliest vocabulary might have been. Comparing variations in the use of key words (like
eye, rain,
and
dry),
together with an analysis of early pottery and a knowledge of farming methods, Renfrew examined the spread of farming through Europe and adjacent areas. He concluded that the central homeland for the Indo-Europeans, the place where the mother tongue, ‘proto-Indo-European,’ was located, was in central and eastern Anatolia about 6500
BC
and that the distribution of this language was associated with the spread of farming.
⁴⁰

The surprising thing about all this is the measure of agreement between archaeology, linguistics and genetics. The spread of peoples around the globe, the demise of the Neanderthals, the arrival of humanity in the Americas, the rise of language, its spread associated with art and with agriculture, its link to pottery, and the different tongues we see about us today all fall into a particular order, the beginnings of the last chapter in the evolutionary synthesis.

Against such a strong research/empirical background, it is not surprising that theoretical work on evolution should flourish. What
is
perhaps surprising is that writing about biology in the 1980s and 1990s became a literary phenomenon. A clutch of authors – biologists, palaeontologists, philosophers – wrote dozens of books that became best-sellers and filled the shelves of good bookshops, marking a definite change in taste, matched only by an equivalent development in physics and mathematics, which we shall come to in a later chapter. In alphabetical order the main authors in this renaissance of Darwinian studies were: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Niles Eldredge, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Pinker, Steven Rose, John Maynard Smith, and E. O. Wilson. The group was known collectively as the neo-Darwinists, and they aroused enthusiasm and hostility in equal measure: their books sold well, but Dawkins at one point, in 1998, was described as ‘the most dangerous man in Britain.’
⁴¹
The message of the neo-Darwinists was twofold. One view was represented by Wilson, Dawkins, Smith and Dennett, the other by Eldredge, Gould, Lewontin and Rose. Wilson himself produced two kinds of books. There was first, as we have seen,
Sociobiology,
published in 1975,
On Human Nature
(1978), and
Consilience
(1998). These books all had in common a somewhat stern neo-Darwinism, centred around Wilson’s conviction that ‘the genes hold culture on a leash.’
⁴²
Wilson wanted above all to bridge C. P. Snow’s two cultures, which he believed existed, and to show how science could penetrate human nature so as to explain culture: ‘The essence of the argument, then, is that the brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly.’
⁴³
Wilson believed that biology will eventually be able to explain anthropology, psychology, sociology, and economics, that all these disciplines will become blended in ever closer ways. In
On Human Nature
he expanded on
Sociobiology,
with more aspects of human experience that could be explained in adaptive terms. He described, for example, the notion of hypergamy, the practice of females marrying men of equal or greater wealth and status; he pointed to the ways in which the great civilisations around the world, although they were not in touch with each other, developed similar
features often in much the same order; he believes that chronic meat shortages may have determined the great religions, in that as early man moved away from game-rich areas, the elites invented religious rules to confine meat-eating to a religious caste; and he quotes the example of inmates in the Federal Reformatory for Women, Alderson, West Virginia, where it has been observed that the females form themselves into family-like units centred on a sexually active pair who call themselves ‘husband’ and ‘wife,’ with other women being added, known as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters,’ and older inmates serving as ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles.’ He points out that male prisoners never organise in this way.
⁴⁴
Wilson’s chief aim all the way through his work was to show how the cultural and even ethical life of humanity can be explained biologically, genetically, and though his tone was cheerful and optimistic, it was uncompromising.

In the second strand of his work, particularly in
Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species
(1984), Wilson’s aim was to show that humankind’s bond with nature can help explain and enrich our lives as no other approach can.
⁴⁵
Besides arguing that biophilia may explain aesthetics (why we like savannah-type landscapes, rather than urban ones), why scientific understanding of animal life may enrich the reading of nature poems, why all peoples have learned to fear the snake (because it is dangerous; no need to invoke Freud), he takes the reader on his own journeys of scientific discovery, to show not only how intellectually exciting it may be but how it may offer meaning (a partial meaning admittedly) for life. He shows us, for example, how he demonstrated that the size of an island is related to the number of species it can bear, and how this deepens our understanding of conservation.
Biophilia
struck a chord, generating much research, which was all brought together ten years later at a special conference convened at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts in August 1992. Here, more systematic studies were reported which showed, for example, that, given a choice, people prefer
unspectacular
countryside landscapes in which to live; one prison study was reported that showed that prisoners whose cells faced fields reported sick less often than those whose cells faced the parade ground; a list of biota that produce psychosomatic illness (flies, lizards, vultures) was prepared, and these were found to be associated with food taboos. The symposium also examined James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which had been published in 1979 and argued that the whole of the earth biota is one interregulated system, more akin to physiology than to physics (i.e., that the gases of the atmosphere, the salinity and alkalinity of the oceans, are regulated to keep the maximum number of things alive, like a gigantic organism). Biophilia was an extension of sociobiology, a less iconoclastic version which didn’t catch on to the same extent.
⁴⁶

Second only to Wilson in the passion with which he advances a neo-Darwinian view of the world is Richard Dawkins. Dawkins won the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1987 for his 1986 book
The Blind Watchmaker,
and in 1995 he became Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. His other books were
The Extended Phenotype
(1982),
River out of Eden
(1995), and
Climbing Mount Improbable
(1996), with
The Selfish Gene
being reissued in 1989. There is a relentless quality about
The Blind
Watchmaker,
as there is about many of Dawkins’s books, a reflection of his desire once and for all to dispel every fuzzy notion about evolution.
⁴⁷
One of the arguments of the antievolutionists is to say: if evolution is a fact, why aren’t there intermediate forms of life, and how did complex organisms, like eyes or wings, form without intermediate organisms also occurring? Surely only a designer, like God, could arrange all this? And so Dawkins spends time demolishing such objections. Take wings: ‘There are animals alive today that beautifully illustrate every stage in the continuum. There are frogs that glide with big webs between their toes, tree-snakes with flattened bodies that catch the air, lizards with flaps along their bodies, and several different kinds of mammals that glide with membranes stretched between their limbs, showing us the kind of way bats must have got their start. Contrary to the Creationist literature, not only are animals with “half a wing” common, so are animals with a quarter of a wing, three quarters of a wing, and so on.’
⁴⁸
Dawkins’s second aim is to emphasise that natural selection really does happen, and his technique here is to quote some telling examples, one of the best being the cicadas, whose life cycles are always prime numbers (thirteen or seventeen years), the point being that such locusts reach maturity at an unpredictable time, meaning that the species they feed on can never adjust to their arrival – it is mathematically random! But Dawkins’s main original contribution was his notion of ‘memes,’ a neologism to describe the cultural equivalent of genes.
⁴⁹
Dawkins argued that as a result of human cognitive evolution, such things as ideas, books, tunes, and cultural practices come to resemble genes in that the more successful – those that help their possessors thrive – live on, and so will ‘reproduce’ and be used by later generations.

Daniel Dennett, a philosopher from Tufts University in Medford, near Boston, is another uncompromising neo-Darwinist. In
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
(1995), Dennett states baldly, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space, time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’
⁵⁰
Like Wilson and Dawkins, Dennett is concerned to drum evolutionary theory’s opponents out of town: ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea is reductionism incarnate.’
⁵¹
His book is an attempt to explain how life, intelligence, language, art, and ultimately consciousness are, in essence, no more than ‘engineering problems.’ We haven’t got there yet, when it comes to explaining all the small steps that have been taken in the course of natural selection, but Dennett has no doubt we will some day. Perhaps the heart of his book (one heart anyway; it is very rich) is an examination of the ideas of Stuart Kauffman in his 1993 book
The Origins of Order: Self-Organisation and Selection in Evolution
.
⁵²
Kauffman’s idea was an attack on natural selection insofar as he argued that the similarity between organisms did not necessarily imply descent; it could just as easily be due to the fact that there are only a small number of design solutions to any problem, and that these ‘inherent’ solutions shape the organisms.
⁵³
Dennett concedes that Kauffman has a point, far more than any others who offer rival
theories to natural selection, but he argues that these ‘constraints over design’ in fact only add to the possibilities in evolution, using poetry as an analogy. When poetry is written to rhyme, he points out, the poet finds many more juxtapositions than he or she would have found had he or she just been writing a shopping list. In other words, order may begin as a constraint, but it can end up by being liberating. Dennett’s other main aim, beyond emphasising life as a physical-engineering phenomenon, shaped by natural selection, is to come to grips with what is at the moment the single most important mystery still outstanding in the biological sciences – consciousness. This will be discussed more fully later in this chapter.