If you're looking for a simple book to read, you should keep looking. Deacon's book, like "Guns, Germs, and Steel", starts with a disarmingly simple question (here, "Why don't animals have simple languages?"), and expands into a tour of everything scientific we have, as of now, relating to development of language. It's an almost overwhelming amount of information, but the book eases your descent into it by breaking the book down further into three questions - what precisely language is, why our biology is uniquely suited to it, and what drove us to its development to begin with.
This is a good book for students to read, because of how it touches on a number of concepts and shows an interrelation between all things - structure of the brain, structure of the body, and the demand of skills on both. The book has a definite narrative flow, and has a lively writing style that still engages attention while reading. Despite this, it's important that you be interested in the subject before reading it - there are easier ways to get into this topic than this book.
In the first part, Deacon starts to explain what language is. This is the kind of sentence you're going to see a lot of in this first section - "For the Boy Who Cried Wolf, in the fable of the same name, the indexical function of his use of the word `wolf' fails because of its lack of association with real wolves, even though the symbolic reference remains."
For readers who are unused to technical or philosophical papers, this part can be daunting because of his need to define a vocabulary - for example, the difference between an icon, an index, and a symbol. He then sets up a working definition of language that excludes animal communication and even some human communications (laughter and sobbing are nonlinguistic), but can include such things as rituals, games, and mathematical expressions. He stops to address the question of how children so easily learn language at a time in their life where they are so poor at learning other things - addressing Chomsky's theory ("the language organ"), before advancing a counter-theory; the possibility of language evolving, in the sense of Dawkin's memes, to meet the expectations of children. I found this theory, and his justification of it, interesting enough to warrant the book on its own. By the end of this part of the book, your mind is full of definitions, and questions have been answered that you didn't even know you were going to ask.
The next part is anatomy and neuroscience. Reading here is more of the caliber of "Mouse embryos lacking a working copy of [the Lim1 gene] fail to develop heads altogether, though most of the postcranial structures develop relatively normally."
Deacon makes the point that there is no simple answer to how brain size relates to intelligence - huge brains in elephants are outwitted by mere people, and the brain/mass ratio backup theory points to hamsters as superhuman intellects. Unfortunately, he then belabors this point for the next chapter. In the middle of this section of the book, there's an interesting throwback to the first section - while earlier it was asserted that animals don't have languages, this part provides a strong case for why, for many animals, spoken language is simply not possible. This part, to me, seemed more stable than the next part, which relied on brain compartmentation for the theories to work. Here, it was why animals can't learn languages and we can, explained by our adapted prefrontal cortex. Later on in the book, speaking about aphasias, he makes the point that there is no unified "language area" in the brain, but many areas that are involved in language production - this undermines his case a little with why our prefrontal cortex was the key to language's neural feasibility. There is a lot of good information in this section about the development of the brain, both in the evolutionary and maturation senses. Although the subject also requires a specialized vocabulary, the book explains it as simply as it can, and this section in particular is replete with helpful diagrams.
The final part of the book is the most philosophical, and the least evidence-backed, of the three. Here, the mood is more set by this: "Whether or not it will be viewed in future hindsight as progress or just another short-term, irreversible, self-undermining trend in hominid evolution cannot yet be predicted."
This part of the book swings from a stable-looking theory about why we as a species needed language to an unfortunate dalliance with the Chinese Room question. This is the most straightforwardly worded section of the book, requiring the least new vocabulary for new concepts, but I came out wondering how necessary this part was. Why humans are such strange animals is an interesting question, and the advent of language makes a lot of sense for why our society is so structured, but this was addressed in greater detail in Diamond's "The Third Chimpanzee." The first half of this section might make a good starting-off point for further reading, addressing such diverse topics as Baldwinian evolution, the reasons for European colonial dominance, and even the African Pygmy culture. The latter half moved away into solipsism, and maybe that appeals to you, but I found it to be muddy reading.
A lengthy footnote section follows the main text of the book, so readers might want to keep a bookmark back there to facilitate the flipping back and forth to catch all the content. If you miss out, it doesn't hurt overall comprehension of the book, but it is interesting content all the same. Further, despite the unassuming appearance, this is a book that you'll want to read with a highlighter, or notepad, close to hand, and there are parts that will require some rereading before you absorb all of the information in it. With regard to the illustrations, the more concrete the subject is, the easier the diagram will be to understand - in particular, diagrams explaining the difference between symbols and icons are difficult to understand.
This book reminded me a lot of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" in its work to synthesize many disparate pieces of information into something, and like GG&S, I think it succeeded in that endeavor. There are parts of it that are unclear or leaps in logic, but that comes from the condensing of subject into this book. Take it with a grain of salt, like you would any book that purported to explain how the brain works, but I would definitely recommend you read it.
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kikileyn
Don't buy the paperback edition!
Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on April 9, 2022
kikileyn
Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on April 9, 2022
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Dietsche
The Symbolic Species.The Co-evolution of Mind and Language
Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on May 22, 2016LORENZO PINNA
Il migliore libro sull’origine del linguaggio
Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on April 23, 2022H. A. Helfgott
Very interesting book, mediocre printing
Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on February 5, 2023Amazon Customer
language evolves with man
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 29, 2021
