The world of Science (with a capital S), after flirting with the Humanities during the French Theory era, has now returned to its materialistic purity, understanding the course of human history in terms of technology… and genetic mutation.
I
In the June 28 issue of New Scientist, the British Scientific American /Science News, we find an article entitled “How to think about…” that purports to give us the scientific lowdown on a dozen terms, ranging in technicity from Quasiparticles and Quantum Superposition to Mindset and Friendship.
And as expected, the non-impact of GA on the scientific discussion of the origin of human language is nicely displayed in Colin Barras’ “How to think about… Language,” the very first entry in the series.
We learn at the outset that, contrary to what we might think, animals can communicate all sorts of things without language, “from culture [?] to emotions and even morality [??].” Why then did humans alone take the trouble to evolve this complex system of representation?
The author offers—and then rejects—a preliminary answer on p. 31-2:
Psychologist Shimon Edelman . . . thinks language’s magical power . . . may have emerged 1.7 million years ago, when ancient humans began making stone hand-axes that are beyond the ability of non-human animals to reproduce.
But about a decade ago . . . Shelby Putt of Illinois State University . . . tasked 24 volunteers with learning to make hand-axes from an expert who either talked them through the process or merely made the tools in the volunteers’ presence . . . . Surprisingly, both methods were effective.
So why then do we have language? The author suggests that the use of language “as a tool for communicating with others” may be secondary:
A third way to think about the evolution of language focuses almost exclusively on the way it can help individuals “talk” to themselves and organize their thoughts to undertake complex tasks.
According to some, including the linguist Noam Chomsky, this is what drove the evolution of language . . . . Instead, these researchers think language emerged as recently as 70,000 years ago [!!], perhaps simply because of a random genetic mutation that prompted brain rewiring.
And the author concludes:
Truth be told, there is still little consensus about quite how language arose. But if Chomsky and his ilk are right, if it didn’t involve magic, it might at least have involved a little luck.
So, to sum up, (1) we don’t need language to communicate “culture . . . emotions and even morality”; (2) nor do we need it to teach others how to make hand-axes. Indeed, as we are told the great Chomsky believes, it may well be the mere result of a “random genetic mutation”—in other words, not a necessary feature of humanity—that allows us to “talk to [our]selves.”
Thus, presumably, the source of the greatness of human culture that lets us send rockets to the moon (etc., etc.) is not really something our species needed to survive. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but language was born out of wedlock.
I don’t think I need insist on a comparison of this explanation to GA’s originary hypothesis. And yet it is offered not merely on Mr. Barras’ authority, but on that of Noam Chomsky and the entire linguistic and scientific community.
II
Two issues later, the July 12 New Scientist includes another relevant piece, this time a feature on pp. 38-41 by Jonathan R. Goodman, entitled “The enemy within,” presented as a “Big Idea” about the foundations of humanity.
Where the previous piece discussed language as only tenuously linked to the needs of human society, in this one, language is merely one among a complex of features associated with our “cognitive sophistication.” Goodman follows Richard Wrangham’s argument in The Goodness Paradox (Pantheon, 2019; see Chronicle 614) that humans “domesticated themselves” by overthrowing the “large angry dominants that ruled over their social groups.” But we were not thereby liberated from the “enemy within” that lives in each one of us as a desire to dominate his fellows. Goodman’s book, entitled Invisible Rivals: How we evolved to compete in a cooperative world, calls the resulting “practices, behaviours and institutions to maximize cooperation and thwart our Machiavellian tendencies,” by analogy with the immune system that protects us against cancer and other diseases, our “cultural immune system.” And not unimportantly, the first such institution he mentions is religion.
As I pointed out in the aforementioned Chronicle a propos of Wrangham’s argument, there is no sense in which language occupies a privileged position in this “immune system,” let alone its very center. Indeed, for Wrangham, it is rather our invention of weapons that was the primary stimulus to “domestication.” (Similarly, Eric Jacobus’ If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take on Violence [2025], likewise attributes to our ancestors’ growing ability to use deadly force the stimulus that led us to become fully human.)
Thus “becoming human” is not dependent, as some have put it, on “crossing the Rubicon” that separates animal communication from language—which, as Terrence Deacon pointed out in The Symbolic Species (Norton, 1997), is located in a different part of the brain from animal signals. Nor is religion, seen as “promot[ing] cooperation” within our “immune system” presented as in any way dependent on language—or to put this more incisively, sacrality/deferral as the common element of both language and religion goes without mention.
Goodman’s final message is that:
A small proportion of people at the most competitive end of the spectrum will always try to game society. We must work together to stay one step ahead of humanity’s opportunistic nature. Without beliefs, norms and a proper understanding of human nature, we are at the mercy of our selfish biological heritage. Evolution has made us this way, but we can learn to overcome it. (41)
At this point, one would have expected Goodman to refer back to our “cultural immune system”—but this metaphoric reference to what is essentially an unconscious mechanism would have exposed the weakness of his analogy, obliging him to articulate the relationships between, for example, language and religion—in a word, to perform the intellectual operations that, to my knowledge, only Generative Anthropology has not only deemed necessary but actually carried out.
III
Finally, I must point out, notably to those who have accepted René Girard’s late-in-life thesis in Evolution and Conversion (Continuum, 2008) that GA is a “Social Contract Theory,” that in fact what in GA drives the transition from animal to human and from signaling to language (and religion) is precisely the “Girardian” phenomenon of mimetic desire.
When I insist that language follows the old formula of Invention is the mother of necessity, I am referring explicitly to Girard’s point, as revealed in his masterpiece Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque—published during my first year at Hopkins in 1961—that the great novels of early modern Europe understood human life as centered on the problem of overcoming mimetic desire.
For the greatness of Girard’s book resides less in its value as “literary criticism” than in revealing that great literature is great because—like religion—it confronts humanity’s greatest problem, the one that, indeed, we discovered language out of the need to solve. Whence his choice to end the book with Alyosha’s promise of salvation in The Brothers Karamazov.
Girard’s refusal to see GA as an extension of his original intuition about mimetic desire reflected his suspicion of French Theory, which, following the Hopkins conference in 1966, had predominantly turned its back on his way of thinking to fetishize deconstruction, a creature of philosophy and linguistics indifferent to religion. Hence Girard remained throughout his life opaque to my efforts to elucidate the origin of language.
And indeed it is only since his death in 2015 that I have come to recognize the virtual equivalence between the Derridean concept of différance, which inserts language between desire and appropriation, and the sacred, which makes us consciously renounce our original act of appropriation, thereby converting its aborted gesture into a sign.
No doubt René would not have been convinced by this equivalence, and in any case it is too late to try. But I would hope his loyal followers will not make the mistake of using his discussion in his 85th year with two anthropologists as a reason to turn their backs on Generative Anthropology.