ROY D'ANDRADE

Cultural Darwinism and Language

ABSTRACT This article examines the effect of cultural selection on the development of language in humans. First, it is claimed thatdirective and expressive types of speech acts are commonly found in many animal species. Representative speech acts, on the otherhand, with the exception of animal "calls," are found primarily among humans. !t is argued that a cultural environment is a probableselective factor for the capacity to produce representative speech acts. Second, it is argued that representative speech acts, once theybecame part of language, acted as a selective factor for increased intelligence and associated greater brain size. And, finally, it is arguedthat the capacity to create representative speech acts selected for brains that could store great numbers of memory episodes and nar-ratives, as well as plan for the future. [Key words: evolution, language, cultural selection, brain, intelligence, memory]

ANUMBER OF YEARS AGO Washburn (1959) arguedthat culture was an important selective factor in hu-

man evolution. Although most anthropologists have gen-erally agreed, little has been done by cultural and psycho-logical anthropologists to expand on Washburn's point,with a few exceptions such as Geertz's 1962 essay "TheGrowth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind" (see 1973).This article is an attempt to follow Washburn's lead andconsider further the role of culture as a selective factor inhuman evolution, especially on (1) the development oflanguage and (2) the growth of the brain. More formal ar-guments for the importance of culture as a selective factorin human evolution can be found in Akoi and Feldman1987, Boyd and Richardson 1985, Calvalli-Sforza and Feld-man 1981, Durham 1991, and Laland et al. 2000.

A definition of culture is needed before presenting ar-guments. Culture, as used here, refers to the social heritageof learnings—that is, the constructs, propositions, beliefs,and techniques of doing things that people learn from eachother and by which they adapt and adjust to the externalworld and to each other. Culture has two sides. One sideconsists of a variety of external physical manifestations, in-duding actions, talk, gestures, pictures, and so on, whichaie understood to be signs. On the other side is the mentalworld of meanings and understandings. If the physicalsigns were not linked to mental meanings, there would beno way to communicate about them or pass them on to theother generations. And if the mental meaning were notlinked to physical signs, the signs would be pointless soundsand scribbles. The mental meanings of culture are variablyexternalized (some ideas are embodied in more signs thanothers), variably shared, variably Institutionalized and dis-

tributed in social roles, and variably internalized in hu-man personalities (D'Andrade 1995).

Given this definition of culture, what does it mean tosay that culture is a selective factor in human evolution?Most obviously, it means that our bodies and our psycheshave been affected by a past history of living a culturalway of life. That is, having a certain kind of body and acertain kind of psyche, with certain inbuilt emotions, de-sires, and cognitive skills, has been selected for because wehave been living in a cultural world—a cultural niche—formillions of years. In a rather different sense of the termthan is usually used, it can be said that humans are, viaevolution, "culturally constituted."

One of Washburn's (1959) examples of cultural selec-tion is the effect of tool use on the human hand. Thepoint is not whether the capacity to make tools was the re-sult of natural selection (the standard agreement is that itwas); rather, the argument is that once tool use becamepart of human culture, the fact that humans were usingtools selected for the specialized human "precision grip"—the way one holds a screwdriver—which other primateslack. Because our ancestors were part of a toolmaking cul-ture, there was an advantage to having fingers that couldhold tools and shape them with precision and strength,and this selective pressure resulted in physical changes inthe hand. Over any one generation the hand shaped tools,but over generations, tools shaped the hand.

CULTURE AS A SELECTIVE FORCE FOR THEDEVELOPMENT OF THE REPRESENTATIONALFUNCTION OF HUMAN LANGUAGE

One o! the central issues in human evolution concerns thedevelopment of language. The human brain ililtcrs from

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those of other animals in having both a greater capacityfor grammatically and semantically complex language anda great innate interest in speaking a language (Vilensky etal. 1982). This interest in talking is observed by every par-ent but can be seen in stark form in the case of childrenwho are functionally deaf but whose parents do not—forvarious reasons—have their children taught sign language.As research by Goldin-Meadow and Feldman (1977) hasdiscovered, these children develop and teach to their par-ents grammatical sign language forms that the childrendevelop by themselves, thereby bringing their parents intocommunication with them.

Obviously, for humans now living in a language-based cultural way of life, being able to talk gives individu-als an adaptive advantage. However, this does not explainhow humans came to have a language in the first place. Infact, there is an interesting problem about the selective ad-vantage of language. The problem is that many of the se-lective factors postulated for the development of languageare too general, as pointed out by Bickerton (1990) andBurling (1999a). For example, one might argue that lan-guage ability would be selected for because language in-creases the potential for cooperation, or manipulatingother creatures, or dealing with large groups. The problemwith these arguments is that, were they true, there shouldbe talking wolves, elephants, baboons, lions, and so on.These arguments make language such a good thing that itis impossible to explain why only humans have it. AsLoring Brace says about similar arguments for the advan-tages of intelligence: "One of the questions which h.as al-ways made me feel a little uneasy about arguments of thedevelopment of human intellect. . . is: If it worked so wellfor humans why did it not work for other creatures aswell? If the explanation has general value, what was thereason it only found its expression in the human line?"(1993:695).

A number of factors have been speculated about aspossible causes of the development of language. The argu-ment presented here focuses on cultural factors and isbased on certain assumptions: first, that language is not aunified entity but, rather, consists of a multifunctional va-riety of perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral processesand structures (Langacker 1987). Second, many languagefunctions are shared with other species. Many species canreasonably be described as having "language" if one recog-nizes that the term language is polysemous, with three ma-jor senses: (!) the sounds, words, and grammar used by acommunity (e.g., the Bantu language); (2) audibie, articu-lated, meaningful sound (e.g., human language); and (3) asystematic means of communicating ideas or feelings bymeans of signs, sounds, gestures, or marks that have un-derstood meanings (e >;, dog language) (taken from lW/>-\tcr\ Third New Intcnuitional Dictionary 1993). Thus, al-though noiihuinan species communicate primarily byiionlc iinii indexical signs rather than grammatically or-ganized verbal symbols,1 these systems ol communicationwill !>c termed here as lunguage In sense 3.

The third assumption is that the most important as-pect of any communicative system with respect to selectionis its pragmatic functions—the things that the communi-cative system can be used for and thus the effects thiscommunication system has on others. Finally, it is assumedthat the evolution of communicative systems, includingthe use of symbols and grammar, can be explained by Dar-winian selection (Pinker and Bloom 1990) and that infra-human adaptations have served the biological ground-work for the development of human language (Bates andMacWhinney 1989; Bates et al. 1989).

Pragmatic functions of human language can be classi-fied by types of speech acts. Based on analyses by Austin(1962), Vendler (1972), Searle (1975), Labov and Fanshel(1977), and others, five speech act functions have been de-scribed that appear to be universal.2 One of these is the di-rective function: people order, demand, request, beg, andso on for other people to do various things. Directives canbe direct: for example, "Give me that!"; or indirect: for ex-ample, "Would you mind passing the salt?" Directivespeech acts are widely distributed among carnivores andprimates, who use a system of signs composed of gesturesand sounds to indicate who is to do what for the speaker(Dingwall 1988; Givon 1979). Talmy Givon (1979:277), alinguist, has presented an analysis of the language of amale Belgian shepherd dog. Givon points out that this ca-nine language system is limited in its reference almost en-tirely to reference about here and now, you and 1, this onehere, and that one there. Communications are typicallyabout some action or event that the addressee is to do orproduce. Givon describes his dog as saying:

(You) give me this!(You) come with me this way!(You) Jet me out!

Not surprisingly, directives are the predominant speechact not only of primates in the wild (Dingwall 1979) butalso of primates who have been taught to use human signor token languages (Givon 1979; Miles 1990). Directivesare also the predominant speech act of early child lan-guage, with proto-imperatives occurring before ninemonths of age (Givon 1979).

Even more widely spread across the animal kingdomis another type of speech act, called expressives. In English,statements like "Ouch!" "Damn!" and so on are canonicalexpressives. Expressives dominate a baby's communica-tion during the first six months of life (Givon 1979:291)Adults are often indirect in using expressives, especiallythose that derogate others, although not so indirect thatone does not feel the sting: for example, "You might havethought of me before doing that." Givon records his dogas saying:

! tot! terrific.1I Jove you!I'm scared!!'m all excited.

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Expressives are used extensively by other mammals.The evidence concerning birds, reptiles, insects, fish, andother orders is less clear, but few people have trouble un-derstanding a puppy's whine. Of course, there can be aproblem in determining whether various animal expres-sions of emotion have conscious communicative intent.This is part of a more general problem of judging inten-tion in nonhumans. But in any case there is little doubtthat animal expressions of emotion have a communicativefunction,

It is interesting that the apes who have been taughtsign languages have been quick to understand and use theterms good and bad as expressives. Miles, who taughtAmerican Sign Language to a male orangutan, notes:

The sign DIRTY was originally used for urine or feces. . . .By 1981 [at the age of three], 70% of Chantek's communi-cations using DIRTY were for urine or feces. However, healso overextended its meaning to refer to soiled objects aswell as "bad" behavior when he was scolded. This repre-sents an overlap in meaning. When the sign BAD waslater introduced to describe disapproved behavior, Chan-tek decreased his use of DIRTY for these circumstancesfrom 29% to 10% of his communications, and he beganto use BAD instead. [1990:527]

The third, fourth, and fifth functions of speech are, sofar as 1 know, predominately human. The third function isusually called the representative function. The normal formin speech is the declarative sentence that informs some-one about something, potentially something that is notimmediately present: for example, "John found a nut treein that canyon last year." This is the what/when/where as-pect of a communicative system. "Calls," in which an ani-mal provides information about the presence of predatorsor prey or other kinds of environmental information, canbe considered a combination of representatives and direc-tives. Similarly, bee communicative systems would be an-other example of the representative function in nonhu-mans. In general, however, animal calls tend to be limitedto giving information about the here and now and usuallyalso function as directives.

In human language representatives typically involvemore complex grammatical relations than directives andexpressives. Directives normally have an understood andunstated actor and recipient: for example, "(You) bring(me) the ball"; meanwhile, expressives often have only agrammatically understood experiencer/speaker: for exam-ple, "Damn," Representatives, on the other hand, requiresubjects and objects and must distinguish who did what towhom, Representation of nonimmediate or displacedevents presents a greater demand for true symbols, for it isdifficult to use pointing—a clear indexical sign—to indi-cate what Is not there. Development of representatives, es-pecially representatives about nonimmediate events ordisplaced reference, would have greatly increased the needfor the development of grammar and true symbols (Bicker-ton 1995; Deacon 1997),

The fourth function of language is called by JohnSearle (1975), following Austin (1962), the commissive.Commissives are basically promises to do something orcommitments of some sort: for example, "I'll bring thebeer." And the fifth function of language is called the dec-larative. Declarative speech acts are a special category bywhich the speaker creates a symbolic condition of somesort (Searle 1975). The minister marries a couple by appro-priately declaring the couple married. Other common ex-amples of declaratives are "You're fired" and "I vote 'no.' "The fourth and fifth speech-act functions of languagewould have evolved later than the representative functionbecause they require making a representation to performthe promise or declaration. Interestingly, as with mostthings claimed to be being uniquely human, one can findrudimentary examples among the nonhuman primates,such as the implicit promise involved in vervet groomingbefore receiving help (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990) and tes-tes holding by male baboons apparently used to cementalliances (Smuts and Watanabe 199O).3

Most linguists consider true symbols and grammar tobe the defining and essential marks of language. Thisseems unnecessarily restrictive. That said, there is some-thing useful about the question "Why don't other crea-tures use true symbols?" Deacon (1996) has argued that itis not convincing to say that symbols are not found in thecommunicative systems of others animals because they donot need them, for to whatever degree they need a com-municative system of any kind, symbols could theoreti-cally be useful.

Deacon's argument is that the reason only humansuse arbitrary symbols is that, given the structure of the pri-mate/mammalian brain, learning arbitrary symbols is anextremely difficult task, requiring something primates justdo not do well. The problem the primate brain has inlearning symbols, according to Deacon, involves not justlearning that a sign means that one should do somethingwith some object but learning relationships among thesymbols themselves. The human brain has been uniquelyadapted to do this kind of learning, but if the learning isdevelopmentally delayed, it can be quite difficult for evena human to learn (Deacon 1996).

Susan Schaller (1995), in a fascinating study of anadult male deaf mute from Oaxaca living in Los Angeleswho could pantomime but could not use sign language,describes vividly the difficulty ol trying to teach this manto understand pure symbols. After weeks of struggle, whenhe finally made the breakthrough that the sign tor cat meanscat, he went through an extreme emotional state, demandedthe sign for numerous objects in the classroom, and wept.The emotional strength of his reaction is reminiscent ofHeien Keller's response to learning the word for water.Jean Massieu, a deaf 18th-century French 14 year old whowas taught the names of things by names drawn underpictures, Is reported to have had a similar reaction when

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he realized that names have meaning (Aitchison 1996:95-96).

However great the problems faced by our hominid an-cestors in developing an arbitrary symbol language systemthat could represent distant events, the transition waseventually made, The argument to be made here is that acultural way of life increased the fitness of individualswho were more effective at producing and understandingrepresentatives because hominid band life became organ-ized in such a way that information outside the immediateworld of the here and now came to have important value.According to this argument, a strongly cultural way of life,involving learned age and sex roles with complex learnedroutines, performed at different times and in differentplaces, fragmented the unitary here-and-now togethernessof the primate band, at the same time requiring ever morecoordination by means of environmental and social infor-mation concerning things not present. In such a world,displaced linguistic representations became the glue thatheld together the intersubjective world of the band.

Why, then, do baboons, wolves, lions, and apes nothave representative speech acts outside simple calls? Con-sider a wild dog who wishes to communicate to the rest ofthe pack: "I saw a lot of ground squirrels east of here." Thebest a dog can do is say, in its canine manner: "Come withme this way!" This is quite adequate provided the inform-ing dog can take the rest of the pack to the squirrels. Butwhen the complexity of the coordination of actionreaches a point at which "follow me" or "go that way"commands no longer suffice, representative speech isneeded to specify the directives concerning who should dowhat, when, and where. The increased importance of thefamily and the increased sexual division of labor withinfamilies increased the complexity and differentiation ofdaily routines in ancestral human groups, which in turnincreased the need for representative information. Theadaptive advantage of representative information wouldalso have been augmented by the fact that special adapta-tions necessary to exploit new environments—new tools,new behavioral routines, new strategies and deci-sions—had to be accomplished by learning and sharingnew cognitive structures, something greatly facilitated bylinguistic representations.

This argument says that there are certain kinds of in-formation that only representative speech acts can com-municate effectively. These are not things like how tomake tools or how to do pack hunting, which can belearned by direct observation and participation. For learn-ing such things, representatives convey no huge advan-tage. But what, when, and where knowledge about eventsincurring outside one's own observational world can onlybe effectively loiiiinuiiiuteil by representations (see Bick-erton 1990).

Civon (1979) has .in interesting discussion ot how thesocial organization of wild canines and pongkls fits theirspec-ill ait forms. He points out that their social groupsform small worlds in which most individuals know the

others intimately and there is a shared model of the worldThere is no occupational differentiation, and there arerelatively small sex differences in activity. General skillsare acquired by all adult members as a product of experi-ence, The home range usually stays constant for relativelylong periods in an individual's life. In such a world there isa shared universe of knowledge in which likely actions areobvious to everyone. In general, each individual can inferaccurately most of the emotions, goals, and other internalstates of other members of the group. Givon points outthat under such conditions there is little need for repre-sentative speech acts because what, when, and where areknown by immediate experience. The major task for com-munication is the instigation of action by direct means ofdirectives or indirectly through expressives,

What this argument does not explain is how therecame to be a cultural way of life with role specializationand a complex division of labor in the first place. Standardtext explanations (Haviland 1994; Lewin 1984) say that adeveloping complex of tool manufacture, tool use, andspecialized hunting and scavenging pushed hominidgroups in the direction of greater division of labor andmore emphasis on marital and family relationships. Thiscomplex required learned cultural adaptations to the open-ing of new ecological niches. The usual placement of thisniche is the East African savanna, although forest-edgeand interlacustrine sites would also seem to be good possi-bilities.

In sum, the argument presented here about the evolu-tion of language has the following form:

1. Most primates and other mammals live in predomi-nantly here-and-now worlds in which their lan-guages, containing primarily directives and expres-sives, are adequate for the social coordination ofaction. These animals produce few representativespeech acts outside of simple calls because they donot need them and, if taught human languages, stillpredominantly produce only directives and expres-sives.

2. To account for the development of human lan-guage, one must account for the development ofrepresentative speech acts that have the capacity torepresent the world outside the known here andnow. For this to have happened, there must havebeen a point in human evolution when producingrepresentations of things outside the known hereand now began to be advantageous for individualreproductive success. It is likely that this would oc-cur with the development of a cultural way oflife—that is, with the need to coordinate learnedroutines with complex environmental and socialinformation about things and events not present.

It is not assumed here that hominids first had to de-velop a large brain before they could learn a language thatused representatives. Apes can be taught enough symboliclanguage by humans to form linguistic representative-

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Pepperberg (1987) successfully taught an African grey par-iot to use spoken language to request, identify, and evencount objects, as well as to make verbal judgments aboutdifference and similarity, The "trick"—if it can be calledthat—for both Pepperberg teaching Alex and the Rum-baughs teaching Austin, Sherman, and Kanzi, is the use ofnaturalistic training procedures that stress the pragmaticsof language and the modeling of the activities of anothercreature. The idea of symbolic reference is not obvious tomost creatures and needs careful tuition. However, the ca-pacity for symbolic reference is already there in the apeand some parrots; it does not require another thousandcubic centimeters of brain.

One can say that in focusing on the conditions thatwould select for the use of representative speech acts, thereally important things about the differences between hu-man and nonhuman language have been overlooked. Onemight argue that what needs to be accounted for in evolu-tionary terms is the use of speech sounds as symbols(Brandon and Hornstein 1986) or the development ofgrammar and the capacity to produce an infinite numberof utterances (Pinker and Bloom 1990). These are impor-tant problems but not the problem being addressed here.The problem here is to find an explanation for the differ-ing uses of language. The fact that we have evolved to dowhat we do with language by means of the larynx, produc-ing speech sounds, requiring a relatively complex gram-mar, is a different level of problem and requires a differentlevel of explanation. Unless speech sounds, true symbols,and grammar did something adaptive, they would nothave been selected for in the first place.

There are other explanations of the evolution of lan-guage, such as the idea that human language developed asa means of social and emotional grooming (Dunbar 1993)or as a result of the Machiavellian potentialities that lan-guage brings (Bryne and Whiten 1988). However, the ideathat language developed as a means of social grooming ig-nores the fact that primates already have a well-developedand complex language for doing exactly this, which Burl-ing (1999b) calls "gesture-calls." Gesture-calls includesounds (grunts, laughs, screams), gestures, body postures,and facial expressions. In humans, the gesture-call systemand the symbol-grammar system operate simultaneously.Human and ape primates are both masters of the gesture-call system. The Dunbar hypothesis successfully predictsthe spectacular human gesture-call system. (Watch two oldfriends at a reunion, or two academics in an argument, ora French mime having his heart broken.) But the Dunbarhypothesis does not predict our representation-makinglanguage system.

The Machiavellian potentiality of speech as an evolu-tionary account fails to explain how deceit could increaseadaptive fitness unless language representatives were al-ready present. One cannot lie about the cat being on themat unless one can say that the cat is on the mat. So,agaln, the problem comes back to the question of how

representatives evolved, The cultural selection hypothesispresented here is certainly not a complete explanation ofthe development of human language, but it is a contenderbecause it attends to the question of why selection oc-curred among human ancestors and not the other pri-mates and also relates directly to the major difference be-tween humans and apes in the use of language.

LANGUAGE AS A SELECTIVE FORCE FOR INCREASINGBRAIN SIZE

However it happened, once the representative function oflanguage had been sufficiently developed, a new factor ofcultural selection came into effect, With language to trans-mit knowledge to others, knowing a great many things be-came a real possibility. Without representative language,most knowledge dies with each individual. Language makespossible an advantage in having brain structures large enoughto store hundreds of thousands of items because it makes learn-ing from other brains effective and efficient. And in a culturalworld, an individual who knows very large amounts of in-formation has an advantage over an individual who doesnot.

So far as 1 have been able to discover, language as afactor of cultural selection and a cause of the large humanbrain has been rarely discussed in the literature. In asearch for past formulations of this hypothesis, 1 did dis-cover that a similar point had been made by Darwin inThe Descent of Man:

A great stride in the development of the intellect will havefollowed, as soon as the half-art and half-instinct of lan-guage came into use; for the continued use of languagewill have reacted on the brain and produced an inheritedeffect; and this again will have reacted on the improve-ment of language. As Mr. Chauncey Wright (1870) haswell remarked, the largeness of the brain in man relatively[sic] to his body, compared with the lower animals, maybe attributed in chief part to the early use of some simpleform of language—that wonderful engine which affixessigns to all sorts of objects and qualities, and excites trainsof thought which would never arise from the mere im-pression of the sense, or if they did arise could not be fol-lowed out. [1871:173]

The point is also made by George Miller (1981) in a discus-sion of the expansion of association areas in the humanbrain compared with those in other primates. He suggeststhat the expansion functioned to increase the neural tis-sue available for memory and that this was selected for be-cause there was "something worth remembering":

What could this have been? We can never know for sure,but clearly the information in our mental lexicon—not tomention our mental encyclopedia—could not be stored inanything less than a prodigious memory.... Why didlarger memories suddenly become so valuable? Languageacts both as a medium by which the information mowsfrom one brain to another and as a medium by whichInformation within a single brain is processed through ver-bal reasoning and planning. As Darwin succinctly says,language "excites trains of thought which would neverarise from the mere Impression of sense, or if tliev did artsecould not be followed." Verhops \y»nholic rowimimhiifi<vt

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came first, then the large brain followed because it enhancedthe selective advantage of those who could communicate sym-bolically. (1981.108, emphasis added]

Gibson and Jessee also present a similar hypothesis:In the human species language serves as perhaps the pri-mary mechanism for the social transmission and verifica-tion of factual information. Thus, irrespective of whetherexpansion of the limbic circuits played an integral role inthe evolution of the neural substrates of language, expan-sion of these regions were integral for mastering the factual in-formation transmitted by language. [1999:203, emphasisadded]

Undoubtedly, others have said similar things. It is interest-ing, however, that this rather obvious effect of language isnot often discussed in the literature. My suspicion is thatthis is because language is a cultural phenomenon and notnormally considered a part of natural selection. Groupsize, diet, or gait seem more like "real" explanatory factorsto many people because they are simple physical things,whereas language is not.

Gibson and Jessee (1999) also stress that absolutebrain size is probably the best simple predictor of primatecognitive skills, rather than various brain-body size ratios.Brain size, they point out, is highly correlated with neuro-nal density, the ratio of dendritic connections to neurons,and the complexity of dendritic branching. Gibson andJessee say:

Taken together, these findings indicate that overall brainsize in primates is a significant predictor of many neuralparameters potentially related to cognition, learning, orsensorimotor skills. Although other factors may yet befound that are equally predictive of overall behavioral ca-pacity, at the present time absolute brain size and/or thesize of many neural components that strongly correlatewith absolute brain size appear to have the greatest pre-dictive value.... [A]ny explanation of the evolution ofhuman language or cognitive skills must eventually cometo terms with these size variations. [1999:200-201]Exactly what happens to the structure and processes

of the human brain as it increases from 300 or so cubiccentimeters to over 1,300 cubic centimeters is still a mat-ter of active research. It used to be thought that humanbrains differed from ape brains in having greater frontallobes. However, recent work by Semendeferi and her asso-ciates using Magnetic Resonance Imaging has found thathuman frontal lobes have the same proportions as thoseof other great apes relative to total brain size (Semendeferiand Damasio 2000). The relative size of the temporal lobeseems to have increased slightly, while the cerebellum de-creased slightly. Within the relatively constant sizes ofthese largo areas Semendeferi finds enlargement of specificneural areas fur humans, especially area 10 of the frontaliobe, which is involved in abstract thinking and planning.The medloilorsal and anterior primipai nuclei of thetlialauuis, Important in attention and (mling information,hiivc also enlarged noticeably in humans. For both hu-mans and bonohos the or!>itofrontal lortices, which .noinvolved in emotional processing, ,ne highly diversified(Aitiistiong I*>82; Semcndetrii In press) Thus, the human

brain did not just increase in size; significantly increasedspecializations of cortical and subcortical areas are also im-portant.

Deacon (1997), considering the controversy aboutwhether increase in brain size causes increase in intelli-gence, points out that the general cognitive strategies ofsmall-brained animals differ from those of large-brainedanimals. In general, smaller animals with smaller brainsmust be quicker to control limbs, and their decision mak-ing must be more streamlined because their high metabo-lic rates and minimal energy reserves offer little leeway inforaging activities, defending against predators, and mat-ing activities. Also, the short lifetimes of small animals de-crease the amount of time for learning and demand morereliance on preprogrammed behavior. More specifically withrespect to the effects of increasing brain size, although in-creasing brain size normally increases the number of neurons,the number of connections among neurons must increasegeometrically to maintain a constant level of connectional in-tegration. This becomes an impossibility when consider-ing increases of millions or billions of neurons, as in thecase of hominid development. This problem is met pri-marily by differentiation of function; however, differentia-tion requires more long-distance connections to integratefunctional areas and, hence, a slowing down of responses.Deacon says:

Thus, even if size confers greater information-canying ca-pacity, these gains may be balanced by significant costs inother areas of function.... But reduced processing speedsand loss of integration of function may not be prohibitiveprices to pay for increased discrimination and storage ca-pacities, so long as its large size also shields the organismfrom the need to produce rapid learning and responses.[1997:163]

The argument presented here is not that the great in-crease in brain size was driven solely or even primarily byrequirements of greater intelligence, although, even withmodern humans, brain size is significantly correlated(around .40) with intelligence (Wickett et al. 2000). Rather,the argument made here and presented in more detail be-low is that the major selective pressure was to increase theamount of knowledge or expertise that could be stored byan individual (Skoyles 1999). There seems to be agreementthat larger brain size is a requirement for such storage. Un-doubtedly, selective pressure for increased skills of manykinds—tool use, throwing, weaving, and so on—would haveadded increased pressure on brain expansion.

According to the hypotheses presented above, thelarge increase in human brain size and the subcorticalchanges that occurred between australopithecines and ar-chaic Homo sapiens would have happened as representa-tive speech acts became a part of language. Lieberman, ina review of the fossil evidence, concludes that "Homoerectus clearly possessed manual, cognitive, and probablylanguage abilities commensurate with increased brainsize" (1998:81). For Neanderthals (and, by extension, otherarchaic sapiens) Uebernun (1998:137) concludes that they

D'Andrade • Cultural Darwinism and Language 229

had vocal tracts that are intermediate between those ofmodern humans and apes, He states:

The Neanderthals, who had vocal tracts that were inter-mediate between ours and the ape-australopithecinemodel,.. illustrate the continuity of evolution and theadaptive value of speech. Their speech was less efficientand "dear" than ours; they represent an intermediatestage in the evolution of human speech. Neanderthalsmust also have possessed the neural circuits andneuroanatomical structures that regulate speech produc-tion and that are implicated in human language and cog-nition, [1998:141-142]

Lieberman suggests that the roots of human languagereach all the way back to the australopithecines. He citesthe work of Gordon Hewes, who thought that the earliestform of protolanguage used manual gestures, facial expres-sions (grins, lip protrusion, etc.), and posture. The Lieber-man/Hewes position is similar to that of Burling concern-ing gesture-calls. Lieberman (1998:84-85) links such agestural protolanguage to australopithecines in part be-cause of the close connection between the brain mecha-nisms that control precise manual motor movements andspeech production (see also Calvin and Bickerton 2000).

According to the account being presented here, thedevelopment of language, like the growth of the humanbrain, was a long, slow, million-plus-year process, movingfrom the gestural calls of apes, to the development of aprotolanguage among Homo erectus, and then finally tothe development of modern language with symbols andgrammar during the period of increased encephalizationcharacteristic of archaic sapiens. With some variation, thisappears to be the consensus position of most current theo-rists of language evolution (King 1999). The particular hy-pothesis presented here is that increase in language capac-ity and use, driven by the selective pressures involved incoordinating a cultural way of life, increased the potentialof gaining knowledge from the brains of others, which in-creased the selective pressure for a larger brain to increasethe effectiveness of cognitive processing and the size ofmemory storage, which then in turn increased the capac-ity for an even more culturally based way of life.

This two-cycle positive feedback loop appears to havedriven brain size to the physical limits of the human body.Davidson (1999) speculates that the increase in staturefrom Australopithecus to Homo (from 1.05-1.40 meters to1.75 meters) was brought about primarily by the need toaccommodate a larger head. Greater cortical area withinthe skull was created by the in-folding of the corticalsheet. New physical adaptations provided this larger brainwith energy temperature regulation, Adaptation in thestructure of the female pelvis also had to occur. The mod-wn human brain continues to grow greatly after birth, re-quiring a long period of physical immaturity, All of theseadaptations have had costs, And despite these adaptations,the human Infant skull is still so large that humans sufferlong, painful, and dangerous childbirths. This mosaic of

highly directional change is indicative of very strong selec-tive pressure (Gibson and Jessee 1999).

The argument presented here contrasts with the argu-ment that humans have big brains and language becausebig brains and language give a creature greater intelli-gence. Such an argument faces Brace's objection—it doesnot explain why all animals do not have genius-level IQsand giant heads. On evolutionary grounds, one assumes thatdifferent species of animals have just as much language as theyneed, and if they somehow had a human speech devicegrafted into their brains and larynxes, they would only saywhat they already communicate quite effectively. My cat,for example, would say, "Let me o u t . . . . Well, I don'tknow if I want to go out. Maybe 1 want to come in. No, Iwant to got out. Well, I will just sit here while I decide, soleave the door open." In fact, this is what my cat does saywithout words. Animals already say quite well all that theyhave to say; it is just that we have not specialized in listen-ing. Because they do not use arbitrary symbols as their pri-mary units of communication and do not specialize inrepresentative speech acts, we self-servingly deny thatthey have language and thereby deny that they, too, aresaying something (Savage-Rumbaugh 1999).

MEMORYA further point to make is that cultural selection did notjust make the brain big—it made it good at certain thingsand not so good at others. That is, the specifics of our hu-man cognitive capacities have been culturally selected.This raises the question: Which cognitive things are we hu-mans good at? It used to be thought that humans weregreat symbol processors—excellent at things like formallogic, which is reasoning with uninterpreted symbols, like([A = > B] = > C) = > (A = > C). However, when computerscame along, it turned out it was easy to write programsthat could do symbol processing much better than hu-mans. In the 1960s computer programs were written thatproved all the theorems of Russell and Whitehead's Prin-cipia Mathematica in a few seconds. So although humansare better at pure symbol processing than any other carb-on-based form of life on this planet, we are not even in thesame league with desktop computers. We just looked goodbefore computers because we had no competitors.

However, computers are not good at everything. Hu-man's brains are good at lots of things that computers atpresent are not—such as rendering a visual scene intothree-dimensional objects and coordinating physical move-ments with these objects. However, this ability was notculturally selected for. Dogs are as good as or maybe betterthan humans at catching flying Ftisbees. What, then, arethe human cognitive capacities that have been selected forby a cultural way of life?

One of the things hum.ins are very good at is recili.The vocabularies of nonhuinan primates who have beentaught either sign or token languages turn out to be very-small, with a maximum of ,i lew hundred words. The human

230 American Anthropologist • Vol. 104, No, 1 • March 2002

capacity seems to be 100 times larger. Nagy and Anderson(1984) estimate that printed school English contains be-tween 25,000 and 50,000 words. Miller (1996), in a reviewof the problem of estimating vocabulary size, estimatesthat the average high school student has learned 60,000words and superior students may know twice as many.Even more impressive than our word memory is our enor-mous memory for events, for what happened in our pasts,and for what other people have said to us.

The issue is not just the ability to retain a sensory im-pression—that someone has done something nice for oneor that something tastes nice. With just one appropriatelydistinctive event, most animals will remember whether toapproach or avoid a person or object. With respect to thiskind of memory store we are probably not much betterthan other mammals. But humans can—more or less atwill—recall an enormous number of specific episodes: forexample, the day my car broke down Bill went out of hisway to give me a lift and took me to the grocery store, andwe talked about the bad weather and so on. Humans canalso remember a huge number of knowledge facts—namesof people, number facts, word meanings, the things thatare on trivia tests, and so on—which is called declarativeknowledge. Dudai (1997), a neuroscientist who studiesmemory, estimates that the total number of retrievableitems in human declarative memory is somewhere be-tween 100,000 and 500,000 items. Unfortunately, there isnot any hard comparative species data on extensiveness ofmemory,4 but the great difference between humans andapes with respect to learning vocabulary indicates that hu-mans are, in all likelihood, one or two orders of magnitudebetter than other animals with respect to episodic memoryand declarative knowledge.

Why should such an ability be selected for? Accordingto cultural selection theory, language created a new possi-bility that created a new advantage—having lots of knowl-edge. One of the major sources of human knowledge is ourpersonal memories. Once language capacities have devel-oped, it becomes possible to share our stores of memoryand become experts (Skoyles 1999). This makes havingrelevant memories something of value—a resource thatgives an individual selective advantage. And having thislarge memory makes it possible to remember the memo-ries that other people have told one: the kinds of thingsthere are in the world, how to do things, what is likely tohappen, and the old stories—the myths, tales, family tra-ditions, and local lore that people everywhere recount.

Memory is "looking back" to the past. Humans arealso notable for their forward memories—that is, theirability to look forward to the future, to plan ahead, to an-ticipate what will happen, to predict and develop elabo-rate scenarios of what may be. This, too, seems to be a cog-nitive capacity that is distinctively human. It is not thatother i matures <.io not do planning; they obviously do. ItIs just that we do it ever so much more than other crea-tures. It Is inleresting that persons with Alzheimer's andother people with extreme memory problems also have

problems imagining the future; they typically seem unableto conceive that the future will not be just like the presentand they are generally unable to plan beyond looking for-ward to already established routines. Again, once languagedeveloped, it became possible to share plans, so having amind that can both plan and store other people's plans aswell as one's own becomes a resource. To the extent thatlanguage makes possible extensive planning, and to theextent that more extensive planning increases adaptive-ness, the human brain would again be affected, becomingan even better thinking engine, as Darwin suggested.

It is argued here that the distinctive human capacitiesto talk, to remember, and to plan are all part of a packagecreated by cultural selection. The advantages of talking,sharing memory, and making plans, central to and se-lected by a cultural way of life, are factors that formed thelarge brains we now have, brains that also give us a naturalfascination with stories and a great love of gab and brainsthan can store a huge amount of exactly this kind of stuff.

It may distress some anthropologists that claims suchas these are not based on direct observation of behavior.But, obviously, this is not possible when trying to recon-struct evolutionary history. Claims about evolutionaryhistory are sometimes called "just so" stories. Just so. Butsome stories fit the facts we have in hand better than oth-ers.5 Although we may never know for sure which story isbest, this is not because there is no true story. The truestory is what happened. The problem here is an ancientone. Once we had the capacity to create stories, we hadthe problem of trying to decide which stories are true. Onesophisticated form of this endeavor is called "science,'just so stories and all (D'Andrade 1986).

ROY D'ANDRADE Department of Anthropology, University ofCalifornia, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093

NOTESAcknowledgments. Helpful comments by Daniel Fessler, Paul Kay,Don Tuzin, Katerina Semendeferi, Melford Spiro, and Marc Swartzare gratefully acknowledged. I particularly wish to thank JamesMoore, who added greatly to my understanding of human evolu-tion and its debates.1. A sign is something that stands for something else for some-body. Icons stand for things because they resemble them. InAatsstand for things because of their connection to them; the connec-tion can be causal, spatial, or temporal. Symbols stand for things byvirtue of a purely conventional or arbitrary association betweenthe physical sign and the meaning of the sign (Peirce 1940).2. This classification of speech acts has its critics (see Lapore andVan Gullck 1991). The general thrust of these criticisms is thatSearle has not given a fully satisfactory philosophical account ofhow It Is that speech acts are accomplished (what it "really means'to make a promise, for exampie). So far as i know, there are no crit-ics who hold that people do not product different kinds of speechacts. Also, none of the critics that I am aware of has disputed theclaim that principled and useful distinctions can be made amongdirectives, expre$sivc\ representatives, and declarations. It is note-worthy that these five funciioru can be reliably coded in naturalInteraction (D'Andrade and Wish 1985) and have shown gw*tvalue in the analysis of the pragmatic use ot language (Labo» andFanshel 1977).

D'Andrade • Cultural Darwinism and Language 231

3. These nice examples were suggested by an anonymous re-viewer.4. In a persona! communication, Dudai (February 10, 2001) re-ported that he was not aware of systematic cross-species compara-tive research concerning the size of Jong-term memory. For exam-ple, in a collection of chapters on memory in animals and humansedited by Andrew Mayes (1983) there are no estimates of the size oflong-term memory for any of the species mentioned. Dudai haspointed out that part of the problem Is the difficulty of measuringthe capacity of long-term memory without a defined output suchas song or storage sites. For birds, Dudai (1989) estimates that somespecies know several hundred songs.5. For those who have heard that the correspondence theory oftruth is not philosophically sound and feel perplexed about this, itmay be of interest that Searle has written a straightforward andpowerful analysis of this issue, found in chapter 9 of his The Con-struction of Social Reality (1995). Searle finds Strawson's and David-son's doubts about Austin's argument that "statements are true ifand only if they fit the facts" (1995:219) to be unwarranted andpresents a compelling argument that Austin is right.

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