cover image Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans

Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans

Derek Bickerton. Hill & Wang, $27.5 (286pp) ISBN 978-0-8090-2281-6

Aging linguistics iconoclast Bickerton (Bastard Tongues) is best known for his studies of pidgin languages and ""protolanguage""; here, he embraces the concept of niche construction to explain the origins of language, arguing that, like any other aspect of biological evolution, language was required for survival by the species's environmental niche. Bickerton insouciantly critiques, and occasionally demolishes, his colleagues' pet theories (an entire chapter goes to the errors of Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch), arguing that language evolution cannot be separated from human evolution. The fact that captive primates can be taught symbolic language proves that capacity for language is not unique; therefore, the unique conditions of language's development must have been environmental. Bickerton believes diet was key: primarily meat eaters, proto-humans foraging for animal carcasses needed to communicate distances and locations, a system easily applied to every other aspect of their lives-inevitably shaping human evolution and environment. Bickerton's fascinating, bemusing, occasionally infuriating work follows so many challenging, intriguing avenues of exploration that the skeptics' objections-one wants to ask about, say, whale communication-will be forgotten, at least for a time.