Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain »

Terrence W. Deacon is a professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience and the chair of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of The Symbolic Species and Mind from Matter, he lives near Berkeley, California.

"A work of enormous breadth, likely to pleasantly surprise both general readers and experts."—New York Times Book Review

David Futrelle

To those outside the immediate family, it's sometimes difficult to see the charm of the newborn child. Babies have no useful skills. They can't perform any tricks. All they seem able to do is to produce enormous amounts of noise and excrement. An observer might be forgiven for dismissing them, at this stage, as little more than exceptionally maladroit, hairless pets. But at a certain point -- unlike, say, kittens -- babies begin to speak. And then even the most cynical child-hater has to give way, for a moment at least, to a sort of wonder.

Linguists have been as puzzled by this accomplishment as the rest of us: How is it that small children, who seem so perplexed by the simple task of keeping food on a tray, can so easily pick up something as complicated as language? Many linguists, following the lead of Noam Chomsky, have argued that language is, in effect, hardwired into the brain. To Terrence Deacon, a brain researcher at Boston University and Harvard Medical School, this explanation begs a larger question. It's a bit like saying (as a character in Molière's "Imaginary Invalid" famously did) that opium induces sleep because it contains a "soporific factor." The real question is: How did we get language embedded in our heads in the first place?

In The Symbolic Species, Deacon offers a marvelously seductive, if speculative, answer. Abandoning the "chicken or the egg" debate about what came first, he suggests that language and the human brain evolved together. "From this perspective language must be viewed as its own prime mover," Deacon writes. "Modern languages, with their complex grammar and syntax, their massive vocabularies ... evolved incrementally from smaller beginnings ... and the brains that originally struggled to support simple languages were replaced by brains better suited to this awkward adaptation." Once our ancestors stumbled onto the awesome power of language, "it sent our lineage of apes down a novel evolutionary path -- a path that has continued to diverge from all other species ever since." And while our brains have adapted to language, language has itself adapted to our brains. One of the main reasons small children "appear preadapted to guess the rules of syntax correctly," Deacon suggests, is that syntax itself has adapted itself to the patterns most regularly guessed by generation after generation of children.

Although Deacon's central insight is simple and powerful, The Symbolic Species is not always clear or convincing in its details. Deacon draws on research in diverse fields, ranging from linguistics to medicine, and delves deeply into the biology of human and animal brains. Much of the book, however, is frankly conjectural, and many of Deacon's more imaginative scenarios (whether they have to do with the sex lives of Homo erectus or the possibility of man-made thinking machines) are clearly less than fully proven. And for all his understanding of language in the abstract, Deacon has some trouble making himself understood -- hiding some of his most radical conclusions in the midst of long and convoluted arguments and (like a researcher teaching signs to a recalcitrant chimp) repeating himself endlessly to little effect. Nevertheless, The Symbolic Species offers a serious challenge to scientists in a variety of fields -- and to anyone with the fortitude to plow through its 500 pages. -- Salon