Darwin and the linguists: the coevolution of mind and language, part 2. The language-thought relationship

This paper examines Charles Darwin's idea that language-use and humanity's unique cognitive abilities reinforced each other's evolutionary emergence-an idea Darwin sketched in his early notebooks, set forth in his Descent of man (1871), and qualified in Descent's second (1874) edition. Darwin understood this coevolution process in essentially Lockean terms, based on John Locke's hints about the way language shapes thinking itself. Ironically, the linguist Friedrich Max Müller attacked Darwin's human descent theory by invoking a similar thesis, the German romantic notion of an identity between language and thought. Although Darwin avoided outright contradiction, when he came to defend himself against Müller's attacks, he undercut some of his own argumentation in favor of the coevolution idea. That is, he found it difficult to counter Müller's argument while also making a case for coevolution. Darwin's efforts in this area were further complicated by British and American writers who held a naturalistic view of speech origins yet still taught that language had been invented by fully evolved homo sapiens, thus denying coevolution.     

Separated at Birth: The Interlinked Origins of Darwin’s Unconscious Selection Concept and the Application of Sexual Selection to Race

This essay traces the interlinked origins of two concepts found in Charles Darwin’s writings: “unconscious selection,” and sexual selection as applied to humanity’s anatomical race distinctions. Unconscious selection constituted a significant elaboration of Darwin’s artificial selection analogy. As originally conceived in his theoretical notebooks, that analogy had focused exclusively on what Darwin later would call “methodical selection,” the calculated production of desired changes in domestic breeds. By contrast, unconscious selection produced its results unintentionally and at a much slower pace. Inspiration for this concept likely came from Darwin’s early reading of works on both animal breeding and physical ethnology. Texts in these fields described the slow and unplanned divergence of anatomical types, whether animal or human, under the guidance of contrasting ideals of physical perfection. These readings, it is argued, also led Darwin to his theory of sexual selection as applied to race, a theme he discussed mainly in his book The Descent of Man (1871). There Darwin described how the racial version of sexual selection operated on the same principle as unconscious selection. He thereby effectively reunited these kindred concepts.     

Monkeys into Men and Men into Monkeys: Chance and Contingency in the Evolution of Man, Mind and Morals in Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies

The nineteenth century theologian, author and poet Charles Kingsley was a notable populariser of Darwinian evolution. He championed Darwin’s cause and that of honesty in science for more than a decade from 1859 to 1871. Kingsley’s interpretation of evolution shaped his theology, his politics and his views on race. The relationship between men and apes set the context for Kingsley’s consideration of these issues. Having defended Darwin for a decade in 1871 Kingsley was dismayed to read Darwin’s account of the evolution of morals in Descent of Man. He subsequently distanced himself from Darwin’s conclusions even though he remained an ardent evolutionist until his death in 1875.     

"Curiously parallel": analogies of language and race in Darwin's Descent of man. A reply to Gregory Radick

In the second chapter of The descent of man (1871), Charles Darwin interrupted his discussion of the evolutionary origins of language to describe ten ways in which the formation of languages and of biological species were 'curiously' similar. I argue that these comparisons served mainly as analogies in which linguistic processes stood for aspects of biological evolution. Darwin used these analogies to recapitulate themes from On the origin of species (1859), including common descent, genealogical classification, the struggle for existence, and natural selection, among others. Skeptical of this interpretation, Gregory Radick sees the naturalistic account of language formation in the Descent comparisons as reinforcing Darwin's idea that languages and the races of mankind have both undergone progressive development. (The opposite view was that modern-day primitive peoples had degenerated from an originally civilized condition.) Yet the details of Darwin's language-species comparisons, as well as the polemical context in which they appear, show that they were not aimed at so limited a function. Rather, they addressed issues related to species transmutation in general.     

Darwin on woman

In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, Darwin exposed the idea of sexual selection as a major principle of human evolution. His main hypothesis, which was already briefly presented in The Origin of Species, is that there exists, besides “natural selection”, another form of selection, milder in its effect, but no less efficient. This selection is operated by females to mate and reproduce with some partners that are gifted with more qualities than others, and more to their taste. At more evolved stages, sexual selection was exerted by men who became able to choose the women most attractive to their taste. However, Darwin insists, sexual selection in the human species is limited by a certain number of cultural practices. If Darwin's demonstration sometimes carried the prejudices of his times regarding gender differences he was the first who took into account the importance of sexual choices in his view on evolution, and who insisted on the evolutionary role of women at the dawn of humanity. Thus, he opened the space for a rich reflection, which after him was widely developed and discussed in anthropological and gender studies.     

Moral Darwinism: Ethical evidence for the descent of man

Could an ethical theory ever play a substantial evidential role in a scientific argument for an empirical hypothesis? InThe Descent of Man, Darwin includes an extended discussion of the nature of human morality, and the ethical theory which he sketches is not simply developed as an interesting ramification of his theory of evolution, but is used as a key part of his evidence for human descent from animal ancestors. Darwin must rebut the argument that, because of our moral nature, humans are essentially different in kind from other animals and so had to have had a different origin. I trace his causal story of how the moral sense could develop out of social instincts by evolutionary mechanisms of group selection, and show that the form of Utilitarianism he proposes involves a radical reduction of the standard of value to the concept of biological fitness. I argue that this causal analysis, although a weakness from a normative standpoint, is a strength when judged for its intended purpose as part of an evidential argument to confirm the hypothesis of human descent.     

Built for speed,not for comfort. Darwinian theory and human culture

Darwin believed that his theory of evolution would stand or fall on its ability to account for human behavior. No species could be an exception to his theory without imperiling the whole edifice. The ideas in the Descent of Man were widely discussed by his contemporaries although they were far from being the only evolutionary theories current in the late nineteenth century. Darwin's specific evolutionary ideas and those of his main followers had very little impact on the social sciences as they emerged as separate disciplines in the early Twentieth Century. Not until the late twentieth century were concerted, sophisticated efforts made to apply Darwinian theory to human behavior. Why such a long delay? We argue that Darwin's theory was rather modern in respects that conflicted with Victorian sensibilities and that he and his few close followers failed to influence any of the social sciences. The late Twentieth Century work takes up almost exactly where James Baldwin left off at the turn of the century.     

Curious parallels and curious connections--phylogenetic thinking in biology and historical linguistics

In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin observed "curious parallels" between the processes of biological and linguistic evolution. These parallels mean that evolutionary biologists and historical linguists seek answers to similar questions and face similar problems. As a result, the theory and methodology of the two disciplines have evolved in remarkably similar ways. In addition to Darwin's curious parallels of process, there are a number of equally curious parallels and connections between the development of methods in biology and historical linguistics. Here we briefly review the parallels between biological and linguistic evolution and contrast the historical development of phylogenetic methods in the two disciplines. We then look at a number of recent studies that have applied phylogenetic methods to language data and outline some current problems shared by the two fields.     

Was Darwin a creationist?

Throughout the Origin of Species, Darwin contrasts his theory of natural selection with the theory that God independently created each species. This makes it seem as though the Origin offers a scientific alternative to a theological worldview. A few months after the Origin appeared, however, the eminent anatomist Richard Owen published a review that pointed out the theological assumptions of Darwin's theory. Owen worked in the tradition of rational morphology, within which one might suggest that evolution occurs by processes that are continuous with those by which life arises from matter; in contrast, Darwin rested his account of life's origins on the notion that God created one or a few life forms upon which natural selection could act. Owen argued that Darwin's reliance on God to explain the origins of life makes his version of evolution no less supernatural than the special creationist that Darwin criticizes: although Darwin limits God to one or a few acts of creation, he still relies upon God to explain life's existence.     

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Naturalist: Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Bleek, Friedrich Müller and the Meaning of Language

Ernst Haeckel was convinced that the origin of language was the keyto understand human evolution. The distinguished slavist AugustSchleicher was his original inspiration on that matter but hiscousin Wilhelm Bleek was the deciisive source for his views of human language. Bleek lived in Southern Africa, studied Xhosa andZulu, and had the rare opportunity to learn the bushman languagewhich, with its characteristic clicks, suggested the form of theoriginal human language in its evolution from ape-like sounds.Haeckel's view of anthropology based on cultural elements ratherthan physical characters alone was shared by other scholars includingthe Vienna-based Friedrich Mueller who applied Haeckel's approachin his studies during the voyage of the Habsburg ship ``Novara.' Haeckel's anthropological views were heavily entangled with contemporaryconceps of race so that he and Mueller related different languages todifferent human groups both from a cultural and racial angle. Suchracialist attitude presented obvious political implications which allauthors mentioned denied vehemently. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Race and language in the Darwinian tradition (and what Darwin's language-species parallels have to do with it)

What should human languages be like if humans are the products of Darwinian evolution? Between Darwin's day and our own, expectations about evolution's imprint on language have changed dramatically. It is now a commonplace that, for good Darwinian reasons, no language is more highly evolved than any other. But Darwin, in The descent of man, defended the opposite view: different languages, like the peoples speaking them, are higher or lower in an evolutionarily generated scale. This paper charts some of the changes in the Darwinian tradition that transformed the notion of human linguistic equality from creationist heresy to evolutionist orthodoxy. Darwin's position in particular is considered in detail, for there is disagreement about what it was, and about the bearing of a famous paragraph in the Descent comparing languages and species.     

Charles Darwin's debt to malthus and Edward Blyth

Conclusion It is not justifiable to accuse Darwin of conscious or unconscious plagiarism. This charge is contrary to the historical evidence and to the extensive information that we have about his character. When Darwin listed the writers on the origin of species by natural selection before himself, he did not mention Blyth, and this omission did not disturb the cordial relations between Darwin and Blyth. Blyth continued to supply Darwin with information which Darwin used in his later publications with due acknowledgment to Blyth. For example, in The Descent of Man, Darwin cited Blyth: Mr. Blyth, as he informs me, saw Indian crows feeding two or three of their companions which were blind.⁶³ Blyth felt no resentment. If he did, he would have so informed Darwin. Blyth did not regard himself as in any sense a predecessor of Darwin and he certainly did not resent Darwin as a plagiarizer of himself. Moreover, Darwin went to a great deal of trouble to find his own predecessors and to give them proper credit.⁶⁴ After Darwin had completed his work on natural selection, he wrote a letter to the Reverend Baden Powell in which he clearly showed recognition of the contribution of others to his own work:No educated person, not even the most ignorant, could suppose I mean to arrogate to myself the origination of the doctrine that species had not been independently created. The only novelty in my work is the attempt to explain how species became modified, and to a certain extent how the theory of descent explains certain large classes of facts; and in these respects I received no assistance from my predecessors.⁶⁵ *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402011 00002     

Methods of ethics and the descent of man: Darwin and Sidgwick on ethics and evolution

Darwin’s treatment of morality in The Descent of Man has generated a wide variety of responses among moral philosophers. Among these is the dismissal of evolution as irrelevant to ethics by Darwin’s contemporary Henry Sidgwick; the last, and arguably the greatest, of the Nineteenth Century British Utilitarians. This paper offers a re-examination of Sidgwick’s response to evolutionary considerations as irrelevant to ethics and the absence of any engagement with Darwin’s work in Sidgwick’s main ethical treatise, The Methods of Ethics. This assessment of Sidgwick’s response to Darwin’s work is shown to have significance for a number of ongoing controversies in contemporary metaethics.     

Darwin's artificial selection analogy and the generic character of "phyletic" evolution

This paper examines the way Charles Darwin applied his domestic breeding analogy to the practical workings of species evolution: that application, it is argued, centered on Darwin's distinction between methodical and unconscious selection. Methodical selection, which entailed pairing particular individuals for mating purposes, represented conditions of strict geographic isolation, obviously useful for species multiplication (speciation). By contrast, unconscious selection represented an open landmass with a large breeding population. Yet Darwin held that this latter scenario, which often would include multiple ecological subdistricts and thus partial isolation, was better suited for speciation than were isolated conditions. At the same time, many passages in Darwin's writings that apparently portrayedphyletic evolution exclusively (these including references to unconscious selection), actually applied to speciation as well, for phyletic change in a single district could constitute a local manifestation of a larger common-descent pattern. This generic use of "phyletic" change was reflected in Darwin's deployment of the unconscious selection analogy in his published writings as well as in his dispute with Moritz Wagner over the necessity of geographic isolation for speciation. We can thus understand Darwin's otherwise puzzling declaration in The Origin of Species that unconscious selection was 'more important' than the methodical approach.     

1 July 1858: what Wallace knew; what Lyell thought he knew; what both he and Hooker took on trust; and what Charles Darwin never told them

At the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, using only an extract from Charles Darwin's unpublished essay of 1844, and a copy of a recent letter to Asa Gray in Boston, argued successfully that Darwin understood how species originate long before a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace outlining his own version of the theory of evolution arrived at Darwin's home. That letter from Ternate in the Malay Archipelago, however, was not the first letter Darwin received from Wallace. This article will contend that two of the three letters Wallace sent Darwin between 10 October 1856 and 9 March 1858 arrived much earlier than Darwin recorded, thereby allowing him time to assess Wallace's ideas and claim an independent understanding of how the operation of divergence and extinction in the natural world leads strongly marked varieties to be identified as new species. By the time of the Linnean meeting Darwin's new ideas had filtered into his letters and ‘big’ species book, despite the absence of any independent evidence from the natural world to justify his constant insistence to have been guided only by inductive reasoning. © 2013 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2013, 109 , 725–736.     

Darwin's explanation of races by means of sexual selection

In Darwin's Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore contend that "Darwin would put his utmost into sexual selection because the subject intrigued him, no doubt, but also for a deeper reason: the theory vindicated his lifelong commitment to human brotherhood" (2009: p. 360). Without questioning Desmond and Moore's evidence, I will raise some puzzles for their view. I will show that attention to the structure of Darwin's arguments in the Descent of Man shows that they are far from straightforward. As Desmond and Moore note, Darwin seems to have intended sexual selection in non-human animals to serve as evidence for sexual selection in humans. However, Darwin's account of sexual selection in humans was different from the canonical cases that Darwin described at great length. If explaining the origin of human races was the main reason for introducing sexual selection, and if sexual selection was a key piece of Darwin's anti-slavery arguments, then it is puzzling why Darwin would have spent so much time discussing cases that did not really support his argument for the origin of human races, and it is also puzzling that his argument for the origin of human races would be so (atypically) poor.     

Darwin's beautiful notion: sexual selection and the plurality of moral codes

One of the explicit objectives of Darwin's Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was to explain cultural differences seen in human beings. Such an explanation, Darwin believed, was to rest upon an understanding of sexual selection. I examine the role that the beautiful plays within the mechanism of sexual selection as it works to differentiate isolated groups. It is suggested that an examination of the relationship between sexual selection and artificial selection--a relationship mediated by the beautiful--will illuminate key issues of the Descent as well as contemporary debates regarding the relationship between evolution and ethics. The beautiful, originally rooted in sexual selection, can become de-coupled from sexual selection and utilized in some selective process which is conscious.     

Darwin's species category realism

Ever since Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published, the received view has been that Darwin literally thought of species as not extra-mentally real. In 1969 Michael Ghiselin upset the received view by interpreting Darwin to mean that species taxa are indeed real but not the species category. In 1985 John Beatty took Ghiselin's thesis a step further by providing a strategy theory to explain why Darwin would say one thing (his repeated nominalistic definition of species) and do another (hold that species taxa are real). In the present paper I attempt to take this line of interpretation to a new level. Guided by the principle of charity, I provide and analyze a considerable amount of evidence from Darwin's mature writings (both private and published) to show that (contra Ghiselin and Beatty) Darwin did not simply accept the species delimitations of his fellow naturalists but actually employed, repeatedly and consistently, a species concept in a thoroughly modern sense, albeit with an implicit definition, a concept uniquely his own and fully in accord with his theory of evolution by natural selection. This implicit concept and definition is carefully reconstructed in the present paper. A new strategy theory is then provided to account for why Darwin would define species (both taxa and category) nominalistically on the one hand but delimit species realistically on the other.     

Choosy But Not Chaste: Multiple Mating in Human Females

When Charles Darwin set out to relate his theory of evolution by natural selection to humans he discovered that a complementary explanation was needed to properly understand the great variation seen in human behavior. The resulting work, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, laid out the defining principles and evidence of sexual selection. 1 In brief, this work is best known for illuminating the typically male strategy of intrasexual competition and the typically female response of intersexual choice. While these sexual stereotypes were first laid out by Darwin, they grew in importance when, years later, A. J. Bateman, in a careful study of Drosophila mating strategies, noted that multiple mating appeared to provide great benefit to male reproductive success, but to have no such effect on females. 2 As a result, female choice soon became synonymous with being coy, and only males were thought to gain from promiscuous behavior. However, the last thirty years of research have served to question much of the traditional wisdom about sex differences proposed by Darwin and Bateman, illuminating the many ways that women (and females more generally) can and do engage in multiple mating.     

The "sensational" power of movement in plants: A Darwinian system for studying the evolution of behavior

Darwin's research on botany and plant physiology was a landmark attempt to integrate plant movements into a biological perspective of behavior. Since antiquity, people have sought to explain plant movements via mechanical or physiological forces, and yet they also constructed analogies between plant and animal behavior. During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, thinkers began to see that physiochemical explanations of plant movements could equally apply to animal behavior and even human thought. Darwin saw his research on plant movements as a strategic front against those who argued that his theory of evolution could not account for the acquisition of new behavioral traits. He believed that his research explained how the different forms of plant movement evolved as modified habits of circumnutation, and he presented evidence that plants might have a brain-like organ, which could have acquired various types of plant sensitivity during evolution. Upon publication of The Power of Movement in Plants, his ideas were overwhelmingly rejected by plant physiologists. Subsequently, plant biologists came to view the work as an important contribution to plant physiology and biology, but its intended contribution to the field of evolution and behavior has been largely overlooked.