The Evolution of Language Review

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The Evolution of Language ReviewThis book kept surprising me by being more than I expected. It is not another book on the evolution of language. The author states a clear purpose to avoid offering a particular theory but to instead show how the field is a very broad endeavor that needs to respect what many researchers are doing and that needs to value a wealth of testable hypotheses. That made sense but sounded vaguely tedious. But then I kept getting hooked on each chapter. Each one is a gem that could be a small book on its own that quickly, clearly, and thoroughly covers some element of the puzzle. Chapter 2 on evolution could seem like unnecessary backtracking, but the coverage makes evolutionary theory in all its latest theoretical twists seem alive again while showing how these issues about general evolution relate to language evo. Chapter 6 on everything that is known about the last common ancestor to chimps and humans really brought all the evidence together to get a sense of the issues and the researchers so that this all important starting point for language evo could be approached. It was so well done that I was shocked to realize that the whole chapter was only 15 pages. The whole book is like that even at 500 pages. It feels succinct and absorbing throughout. The wide coverage and the, no doubt, years in the making all contribute to this sense that it might be "encyclopedic" as one of the back cover reviews has it, but it is all very well crafted from the to-the-point style to the page layouts.
The author admits to being both a biologist and a linguist professionally, and this too shows. He makes a continual effort to include vocal and communicative evidence from a wide range of species to show how convergence issues and novel possibilities to test for particular facets offer important leads in the study of human language origins. He also respects and finds lessons from seemingly all linguistic traditions which felt refreshing. In the end of this broad excursion he uses the last three chapters to treat three types of theories on the evolution of language in a way where each of these theory types gets full treatment as subjects like the other chapters. Within these the contributors and the issues were examined for strengths, weaknesses, prospects, and testability possibilities. He gave his own evaluations at the level of issues within each theory type without committing to any particular theory of his own. On the one hand instead of ending up with another particular theory after reading the book, the long immersion in so many aspects and facets of language and human evolution left more an impression that the evolution of language too was a similarly multi-faceted and sweeping event. On the other hand the last chapter/book on musical protolanguage really makes this old hypothesis appealing. [This review assumes or suggests that you use Amazon's Look Inside feature to see the 14 chapters that are in themselves worthy of being basic, all-you-need-to-know books on each of these subjects.]
The book is comprehensive, well thought out at every level, easy to read, a reference point for the subject, and a future research direction for the field. Its near perfection is marred by one small, odd blemish at the very end. Even though the glossary and reference sections match well the comprehensive standards of the book itself, the index and the thoughtfully added species index are tiny - the species index laughably so given the species richness throughout.The Evolution of Language OverviewLanguage, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not?How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it directed at specialist audiences. The diversity of perspectives - from linguistics, anthropology, speech science, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology - can be bewildering. Tecumseh Fitch cuts through this vast literature, bringing together its most important insights to explore one of the biggest unsolved puzzles of human history.

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