Adam’s Evolutionary Journey, pt. 2

Genesis hints that language, empathy, and morality hold the keys to human uniqueness.
What does science say? Can the ‘fall’ be historical?

Listen or Read. Your Choice.

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The first steps toward human language required walking on two legs. In four-legged animals, breathing and running are synchronized to one breath per stride as the thorax braces for the impact of the front legs. Weightlifters do the same when they hold their breath before hoisting the bar. Bipedalism not only allowed the larynx to descend, it relieved the thorax of its support function while running, which allowed our early ancestors to coordinate their breathing, running, and vocalizing.  Human speech and laughter would have been impossible if Ardipithecus ramidus had not stood upright almost four-and-a-half million years ago. [1]

Human language involves two kinds of sharing. First, everyone must agree what words mean and how to use them, and second, we must agree that the information we share is truthful. Without meeting both conditions, human languages could not function. Human languages are thus socially shared symbolic systems that rely upon cooperation for their use. This seems to create a problem for the evolutionary explanation of the development of language. Isn’t evolution based on survival of the fittest – the natural selection of individuals or their genes? The evolution of language doesn’t seem to fit that pattern, since language relies on cooperation rather than competition.

Human cooperation seems even more difficult to explain when compared to the social lives of other primates. The basic building blocks of primate society are deception, manipulation, and social status/power. [2] If human language arose under those conditions, we would expect it to facilitate more complex forms of deception and manipulation. What we would not expect, according to linguist and psychologist Michael Tomasello, is a communication system that relies on sharing and has as its basic motivation “the desire to help others by providing them with the information they need.” [3] Perhaps it’s our understanding of evolution that needs amendment.

Human language involves two kinds of sharing. First, everyone must agree what words mean and how to use them, and second, we must agree that the information we share is truthful.

Besides language, two other unique features of human social lives rely on cooperation. The first is “intersubjectivity,” which is an umbrella term for a suite of capacities that require joint action, a joint frame of reference, or empathy. [4] To work together in joint action, people must agree on a shared goal, which involves a bit of “mind reading” that other primates can’t duplicate. Furthermore, chimps don’t hold up objects for other chimps to consider, but people will say things like, “Look at that beautiful sunset.” When we use joint frames of reference such as this to share our experiences or emotions with another person, it goes by the name of “empathy.”

Morality is the second feature of human sociality that relies on cooperation. For morality to exist, people must agree what constitutes “right” or “wrong” behavior, establishing a joint frame of reference, and they must agree what to do when those standards are violated, which requires joint action. Where does language come into play? Even the earliest expressions of human morality relied on “shared values” and “joint action.” It’s hard to imagine a group of any size reaching consensus on guilt or punishment without symbolic communication. [5]

Who was the first speaker of words? Scientists must rely on indirect evidence, but biologically speaking, Homo erectus possessed the necessary physical attributes for speech. [6] Notably, erectus also is credited with a host of “firsts” that point in the same direction, and all are related to a dramatic increase in brain size. These include shortened birth intervals, delayed maturation, sexual division of labor, and, more importantly, social cooperation in the feeding and care of infants, which allowed mothers to share the “metabolic cost” of childbearing with others in the group. [7] Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy credits this transition to cooperative breeding with radically altering our ancestors’ interpersonal relations. Sharing the duties of parenthood laid the groundwork for the cooperative aspects of language and intersubjectivity. [8]

The most intriguing evidence of erectus’ speech capability comes from Pleistocene trade networks. While both chimpanzees and early hominins had a similar home-range radius of 13 km, about 1 million years ago raw material transfers suddenly extended from 13 km up to 100 km, which implies cooperation and trade with neighboring groups. When chimps or other primates encounter a strange male near their territory, a confrontation is inevitable, whether a display of aggression or physical violence. The existence of trade therefore implies both lessened aggression and an improved method of communication at this stage of human evolution. [9]

Seeking to understand this transition, linguist and developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello spent his career studying the differences between primate and human communication, particularly how human infants acquire language. Among primates, vocalizations are inborn, but gestures are learned. Their communication is dyadic (one-to-one) and mainly consists of requesting specific behaviors from others. Chimps don’t hold up objects for other chimps to consider, nor do they point at things to draw attention to them. Human communication, on the other hand, is entirely learned. More significantly, it is triadic and referential, focused on sharing information and psychological states with others. [10] Such drastic change does not happen overnight.

If erectus spoke words, did he possess language as we know it? No. The first words most likely developed from gestures such as pointing, which also are the first informative gestures that children make. [11] Linguist Sverker Johansson argues that language evolution followed a similar path to childhood language acquisition. [12] It began with single words and progressed to a two-word stage, which has structure but not syntax. Children don’t acquire a fully modern grammar until the age of 5, and they don’t understand metaphoric thought—the basis of higher-order thinking—until they are 8-10 years old. Erectus may have spoken, but it was a proto-language that lacked symbolic reference. Full symbolicity, with its emphasis on relations between symbols, is not vital at the one- and two-word stages when symbols are processed one at a time. [13]

The first words most likely developed from gestures such as pointing, which also are the first informative gestures that children make.

Drawing upon developmental psychology, archaeologist Steven Mithen came at the questions of human language and creativity from a different direction, seeking an answer in the evolution of the mind itself. [14] Mithen observed that until the age of two, children’s minds are like general-purpose learning tools, but from 2-5 they seem to rely on specialized learning modules. Following this period of modularity, the domains begin to be integrated to allow a seamless flow of information in the mind—a state Mithen calls “cognitive fluidity.” The psychologist Paul Rozin credits this integration of domains with making creative thought possible. Where knowledge previously had been trapped in one domain, novel thoughts now could arise by forging links across domains.

According to Mithen’s hypothesis, human evolution followed a similar path to childhood development. Early Homo had a modular mind, like other primates, [15] with domain-specific cognitive skills devoted to tool-making, the natural environment, and the social environment—all overlaid by a “domain-general” intelligence for problem-solving. Among chimps, social intelligence is a discrete domain. It’s easy to identify when a chimp is engaged in social behavior and when it isn’t. On the other hand, the social intelligence of modern humans recognizes no such boundaries. Amazonian foragers think of the forest as parent. The Inuit consider the polar bear an ancestor. Totemism and anthropomorphism indicate that the social and natural worlds are no longer discrete domains of thought.

Mithen attributes the religious impulse to this “mixing up” of domains, an analysis that would please the apostle Paul. Morna Hooker, in her exegesis of Romans 1, observed that idolatry springs from “this confusion between God and the things which he has made.” [16] Likewise, James Dunn notes the “obviously deliberate echo of the Adam narratives” in Paul’s sequence of events and comments that “it was Adam who above all perverted his knowledge of God and sought to escape the status of creature, but who believed a lie and became a fool and thus set the pattern (Adam = man) for a humanity which worshiped the idol rather than the Creator.” [17]

But … now we are getting ahead of ourselves.

The final piece of the biological puzzle was our globular braincase. [18] While all other hominins had an elongated braincase, that of anatomically modern humans is shaped like a globe. Both Neanderthal and sapiens infants are born with nearly identical elongated braincases, but in the first year of life, the rapid growth of the modern human infant’s parietal lobe, cerebellum, and frontal pole reshapes the skull into our distinctive pattern. [19] The changes in shape and neural connectivity associated with globularity resulted in a “language-ready brain” by creating “the ability to form complex, cross-modular thoughts.” [20] Recalling a mental image of a woman or a fish doesn’t require integration. Thinking of a mermaid does.

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Jane Goodall famously described chimpanzee society as “order without law.” [21] She said this after documenting several brutal incidents of infanticide and cannibalism. There were no consequences for the perpetrators, since chimps have no conceptual category for what they had witnessed. Ultimately, they ignored what happened and returned to their business.

Without fully symbolic language, moral knowledge is impossible. Animals cannot conceive of abstract ideas such as good or evil. Because they lack language, they are morally neutral. Among human beings, every culture recognizes an age of maturity when children are initiated into adult society and held responsible for their actions. Younger children, being immature, are exempt. Societies don’t jail toddlers when they break the law; only a mature person can be morally culpable. Thus, there are three moral categories of sin and guilt: Adult, Child, and Animal.

How did humanity transition from innocent animal to guilty adult? What might that evolutionary history have looked like?

The first signs of symbolic reference appear at Blombos cave in South Africa between 100-130 ka (thousand years ago) in the form of ochre for body decoration and shell beads worn as jewelry and placed in graves. [22] Concurrently, trade networks, which had extended no more than 100 km for almost a million years, suddenly expand to 300 km. [23] Judging by these indications, the transition from proto-language to language has occurred. A shell worn around the neck now could represent something—social status or tribal identity.

Speculating on their interior lives, these early humans probably resembled children between the ages of 5-7. They have acquired the basics of syntax, but they don’t quite grasp metaphoric thought. They experience the same internal, emotional lives as adults, but they cannot analyze their feelings or categorize their behaviors into a “moral code.” Mature human morality is rooted in our capacities to symbolize and generalize to an abstract category. Cognitive neuroscientist Peter Tse explains, “The birth of symbolic thought gave rise to the possibility of true morality and immorality, of good and evil. Once acts became symbolized, they could now stand for, and be instances of, abstract classes of action such as good, evil, right, or wrong.”  [24]

Without fully symbolic language, moral knowledge is impossible. Animals cannot conceive of abstract ideas such as good or evil.

While humanity had acquired modern grammar 100,000 years ago, there remained another step toward fully symbolic, modern language. There’s a vast gulf between a symbolic representation of something concrete (capable of being perceived by the senses) and an abstract concept, which has no material substance. The linguistic theory of Embodied Cognition attempts to explain how language arose from gestures, but it struggles mightily to explain the appearance of abstract nouns. [25] How did they arise?

Early humanity’s symbolic language remained rooted in the material world because they had not yet developed a lexicon of abstract words. Lacking that vocabulary, they could feel what was right and wrong, but they could not articulate reasons for their moral judgments. Research in both childhood and adult psychology has documented the same phenomena. Such instinctive, common reactions are the forerunners of abstract moral concepts. Routinely, we judge a situation by our “gut reaction” to it, and only afterward do we apply moral reasoning to justify those initial feelings. [26]^–[27] Early humans had the same gut reactions that we do; they simply lacked the vocabulary to express their moral emotions or reason abstractly about them. Humanity was like a young child.

How long did this situation persist? Computer simulations of linguistic evolution suggest the right conditions to generate instability and novelty are small populations under stress. [28] The same holds true in biology, where novelties are far more likely to become fixed in small populations. [29] Such a situation arose in the H. sapiens population around 75,000 years ago. [30]^–[31] Following the explosion of the Toba super-volcano, South Africa gradually became more arid, and a shrinking population of humans gravitated toward East Africa in search of dwindling food supplies. [32] Since modern language and moral codes are universal throughout human cultures, these must have been present before humanity departed the Levant about 10,000 years later on its worldwide journey of expansion. [33] On the best evidence, therefore, sometime between 65-75 ka, humanity developed the lexicon of abstract ideas, and with it, the knowledge of good and evil.

On top of everything else, the same process granted us the ability to fully share our thoughts, experiences, and emotions with another person—a type of communication we learned to call “love.” Intention-reading, which Tomasello credits with providing the evolutionary motivation to speak, involves not just a shared frame of reference, but an inborn instinct to share our psychological state with others. [34] A performative such as “I apologize” seeks such a shared state. We aren’t satisfied by the utterance of the words unless we believe the speaker truly feels sorry.

Since Aristotle first stated the obvious, everyone has recognized that humans primarily learn by mimesis (imitation)—a process that also goes by the name of ‘social learning.’

The final connection between language and morality is the way that humans learn. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously compared language to game that we learn by observing as it is played and inferring the rules. In coining the metaphor of the language-game, Wittgenstein “meant to bring into prominence the fact that the ‘speaking’ of language is part of an activity, or form of life.” [35] In other words, our language is embedded in our manner of living, and we learn a “form of life” in the same way and at the same time as we learn to communicate, by learning to make value judgments about the “rightness” of a thing. While we are discovering what makes a particular expression “right” or “wrong” for a given situation, we simultaneously are learning “right” and “wrong” behaviors for our community. Subsequent research has borne out Wittgenstein’s insight. As moral philosopher and psychologist Susan Dwyer says, “Moral competence develops through a process analogous to language acquisition. Any systematic explanation of human moral competence must be grounded in a clear sense of the capacities that children possess at various points in development.” [36]

Since Aristotle first stated the obvious, everyone has recognized that humans primarily learn by mimesis (“imitation”)—a process that also goes by the name of “social learning.” In his research on childhood language acquisition, Tomasello noted that “1-year-old infants use their newly emerging skills of intention understanding not only to predict what others will do, but also to learn from them how to do things conventionally in their culture.” [37] It’s our capacity for social learning that allows children to absorb such a vast amount of information in such a short time, and this same ability also forms the basis of human culture—knowledge passed from generation to generation. From cradle to grave, human beings reflect the speech and behavior—both good and evil—of the people around us and model it to the next generation as a form of life. On the grand scale of history, this becomes human language, traditions, and culture—all accomplished by “enculturation,” yet another name for mimesis.

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In Parts 1 and 2 of Adam’s Evolutionary Journey, I reviewed the biblical and scientific narratives of human origins. In Part 3, I’ll pull these strands together to see what science and Scripture have to say to one another.

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[1] Robert R. Provine, “Laughter as an Approach to Vocal Evolution: The Bipedal Theory,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 24, no. 1 (2017): 238-244; and C. Owen Lovejoy et al., “The pelvis and femur of Ardipithecus ramidus: the emergence of upright walking,” Science 326.5949 (2009): 71-71e6.

[2] Satoshi Hirata, “Chimpanzee Social Intelligence: Selfishness, Altruism, and the Mother–Infant Bond.” Primates 50, no. 1 (2009): 3-11.

[3] Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2008): 191. See also Tomasello et al, “Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28, no. 05 (2005), doi:10.1017/s0140525x05000129.

[4] Jordan Zlatev, “The co-evolution of human intersubjectivity, morality and language” in The Social Origins of Language, eds. D. Dor, C. Knight, and D. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 249-266.

[5] Zlatev, “The co-evolution of human intersubjectivity.”

[6] Bruce Bower, “Evolutionary Back Story: Thoroughly modern spine supported human ancestor,” Science News, Volume 169, No. 15, May 6, 2006, p. 275.

[7] Susan C. Antón, Richard Potts, and Leslie C. Aiello, “Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective,” Science 345, no. 6192 (2014).

[8] Sarah B. Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

[9] Ben Marwick, “Pleistocene exchange networks as evidence for the evolution of language,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13, no. 1 (2003): 67-81.

[10] Michael Tomasello, Constructing a Language: A Usage-based Theory of Language Acquisition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005): 8-42.

[11] Cathal O’Madagain et.al., “The origin of pointing: Evidence for the touch hypothesis,” Science Advances 5, no. 7 (2019): eaav2558.s

[12] Sverker Johansson, Origins of language: Constraints on hypotheses Vol. 5. (John Benjamins Publishing, 2005): 240-241.

[13] Marwick, “Pleistocene exchange networks.”

[14] Steven J. Mithen, “The Early Prehistory of Human Social Behaviour: Issues of Archaeological Inference and Cognitive Evolution,” in Evolution of Social Behaviour Patterns in Primates and Man, eds. W. Runciman, J.M. Smith, and R.I.M. Dunbar (Oxford University Press, 1996), 145-177.

[15] Federica Amici et al., “A Modular Mind? A Test Using Individual Data from Seven Primate Species,” PLoS ONE 7, no. 12 (2012).

[16] M.D. Hooker, “Adam in Romans I,” New Testament Studies 300 (1959-60).

[17] James D.G. Dunn, Romans 1-8, Word Biblical Commentary 38A (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1988): 53. Although this theme cries out for further exploration, it would exceed the bounds of this essay.

[18] Cedric Boeckx and Antonio Benítez-Burraco, “The shape of the human language-ready brain,” Frontiers in Psychology 5, no. 282 (2014).

[19] Philipp Gunz et al., “A uniquely modern human pattern of endocranial development: Insights from a new cranial reconstruction of the Neanderthal newborn from Mezmaiskaya,” Journal of Human Evolution 62, no. 2 (2012): 300-313.

[20] Boeckx and Benitez-Burraco, “The language-ready brain.”

[21] Jane Goodall, “Order without law” in Law, Biology and Culture: The Evolution of Law, eds. M. Gruter and P. Bohannan (San Diego: Ross-Erikson Publishers, 1982), 50-62.

[22] Derek Hodgson, “Decoding the Blombos engravings, shell beads and Diepkloof ostrich eggshell patterns,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24, no. 1 (2014): 57-69; Francesco d’Errico et.al, “Nassarius kraussianus shell beads from Blombos Cave: evidence for symbolic behaviour in the Middle Stone Age,” Journal of Human Evolution 48, no. 1 (2005): 3-24.

[23] Marwick, “Pleistocene exchange networks.”

[24] Peter Ulric Tse, “Symbolic Thought and the Evolution of Human Morality,” in Moral Psychology, ed. W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 269-297.

[25] Anna M. Borghi et al., “The Challenge of Abstract Concepts,” Psychological Bulletin 143, no. 3 (2017).

[26] Karen Pine and Dave Messer, “The development of representations as children learn about balancing,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 21, no. 2 (2003): 285-301. See also Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, “Coming to Language: Wittgenstein’s Social ‘Theory’ of Language Acquisition” in Essays on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. Volker Munz (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2010).

[27] Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814-834. See also Haidt, “The moral emotions” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, eds. R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 852-870.

[28] Marwick, “Pleistocene exchange networks.” See also Simon Kirby, “Syntax Without Natural Selection: How Compositionality Emerges from Vocabulary in a Population of Learners” in The Evolutionary Emergence of Language, eds. Chris Knight et al., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 303-323.

[29] Ian Tattersall, “What Happened in the Origin of Human Consciousness?” The Anatomical Record 276B, no. 1 (2004): 19-26.

[30] Alwyn Scally and Richard Durbin, “Revising the Human Mutation Rate: Implications for Understanding Human Evolution,” Nature Reviews Genetics 13 (2012): 745-753. Revising the mutation rate pushed previous estimates of the human population bottleneck from ~63 ka to ~75 ka.

[31] Lucie Gattepaille, Torsten Gunther, Mattias Jakobsson, “Inferring Past Effective Population Size from Distributions of Coalescent Times,” Genetics 204, no. 3 (2016): 1191-1206. See also W. Amos and J. I. Hoffman, “Evidence That Two Main Bottleneck Events Shaped Modern Human Genetic Diversity,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277, no. 1678 (2009): 131-137.

[32] Saioa López, Lucy Van Dorp, and Garrett Hellenthal, “Human Dispersal Out of Africa: A Lasting Debate,” Evolutionary Bioinformatics 11, no S2 (2015).

[33] Donald Brown, “Human Universals, Human Nature & Human Culture,” Daedalus 133, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 47-54.

[34] Michael Tomasello et al, “Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28, no. 05 (2005).

[35] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1968), §23.

[36] Susan Dwyer, Bryce Huebner, and Marc D. Hauser, “The Linguistic Analogy: Motivations, Results, and Speculations,” Topics in Cognitive Science 2, no. 3 (2009): 486-510.

[37] Tomasello et al, “Understanding and sharing intentions.”

Tagged as: Language Evolution, Evolution of morality, Empathy and cooperation in evolution.