The Truth About Language

It is time for the story of the evolution of language to be rewritten. Michael Corballis breaks tradition with the likes of Chomsky, Pinker, and Gould and shows how language was neither a great leap nor a merge of mental wires. Language, he argues, is a device for sharing our thoughts, and is not thought itself; thought evolved independently of language, and was not necessary for its later emergence. His story centers on the ability of mental time travel, that is to entertain thoughts that are not tied to the present, and the theory of mind, or the ability to read other people s minds. Language in this framework becomes a way of sharing our thoughts, of communicating about aspects of the world, exquisitely shaped to communicate about the non-present; ideas, and stories, that are housed in our minds. This involved grammar, a set of conventions by which our thinking can be put into words, so that others can share them. The main attributes of grammatical language were shaped gradually from some 2.5 million years ago, during the Pleistocene. It did not, Corballis contends, emerge in a fortuitous big bang a mere 60,000 years ago. Corballis sees the evolution of language as one of the strongest test cases for Darwin s theory of evolution by natural selection. Language evolution has been referred to as the hardest problems in science, and Corballis here offers some meaningful paths to its solution. "