16 the Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain

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Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language

and the BrainWilliam Hans Miller

a

a12304 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 210, Los Angeles, CA 90025, e-mail:

Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article:William Hans Miller (1999) The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain,Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 1:1, 130-135, DOI:

10.1080/15294145.1999.10773254

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Jeannerod, M., Mouret , J., & Jouvet, M. (1965), Etude de

Ia mortricite oculaire au cours de Ia phase paradoxale du

sommeil chez Ie chat.

Electroenceph. Clin. Neurophys-

io1

18:554 566.

Ramon Greenberg M.D.

11 Waverly Street

Brookline MA 02146

e mail:

r m o n ~ r e e n e r g

hms.harvard.edu

The Symbolic Species: The Co Evolution Lan-

guage and the Brain

by Terence Deacon. New York:

Norton, 1997, hardcover 29.95, paperback

15.95

A few years ago the UCLA neuroanatomist and psy

chologistHarry Jerison asked, What is so great about

being smart? with the implication that in our species'

history, it is hard to conclude that our intelligence and

our capacity for complex symbol use has done us more

good than harm. What is ironic and prophetic, as Ter

ence Deacon shows us in his extraordinary text, is that

symbol use itself may be the only means available for

shifting the balance toward a kind

of

positive outcome

for ourselves, if not for the planet. The more we under

stand about the nature and origin

of

our symbolic ca

pacities, he claims, the better we can regulate our

enormous cognitive potential. He wrote his mystery

novel, as he calls it, with this goal of increasing our

understanding about how symbol reference and lan

guage came about, and ultimately,

of

who we are.

For about a year several UCLA linguists, psycho

analysts, and psychologists and I met weekly, reading,

discussing, and debating The Symbolic Species:

The Co Evolution Language and the Brain. We all

concluded that this is a profound work, remarkable

for its scholarship and extreme detail, and deserving

dedicated study. Here, I will sketch out a broad and

oversimplified overview

of

Deacon's complex evolu

tionary scenario, and then discuss a few of his essen

tial arguments.

Somewhere in our fuzzy past there were groups

of australophithescines who had already been bipedal

for some time and who could communicate with con

text-bound gestures and sounds. These foraging homi

nids lived in the savannas of eastern and southern

Africa. We can only marvel that they survived at all

in what must have been a continuously perilous envi

ronment. Except for their nascent evolutionary edge

of symbolic reference, we might very well not be here,

or might not know it. The time was about 2 million

years ago; it had taken several more million years to

get to that point from the great bifurcation that split

Book Reviews

man-to-be from the great apes. Then, something very

strange happened. A shift in cognition, specifically in

abstracting capacities and learning by logical and se

mantic categorization, began to dominate the experi

ence

of

these individuals and groups, which hitherto

had been limited by mental representations

of

stimu

lus-response associations to the mostly local context

of

rewards and punishments. Environmental events al

ways had signal value about how to react for all ani

mals, but if a new waterhole was associated with the

possibility

of

reduced thirst, the only condition that

guided the approach behavior of prehominids was the

appraisal of immediate safety. But with a doubling of

brain size in what was to be a shift from australo

pithescines to true hominids like Homo habilis (tool

man), a new condition and option became possible.

With improved cognitive hardware the hominid could

apply a system

of

divergent ideas and images based

on principled rules. Homo habilis felt the urge to ap

proach water, but instead of drinking, might con

sciously wait for an animal to drink first, then follow

the animal to see

if

the water was deadly or safe to

drink. A logical theory had been conceptualized and

tested. Many of his or her vertebrate ancestors could

learn the stimulus-response associations that, together

with instinctual responses, made survival possible. But

this hominid and his kind also could learn

the

system

of relationships of which these correlations were a

part. If this individual's logical experimentation al

lowed for survival and offspring later on, he or she

could then carry the gradually developing genetic pre

disposition for flexible rule-guided behavior into the

next generation. Remarkably, in the initial nonre

sponse, the stimulus to approach water was intention

ally used against itself. He or she delayed gratification

conditional upon reasoning, thinking, planning, vicari

ous trial-and-error, long-term memory all

of these

nonautomatic capacities. This was possible because of

a simple but effective gestural and guttural system

of

rule-based and communicated labels for objects and

actions developed within groups

of

individuals. The

neurobiological substrate for this advance in everyday

experience of early hominids was actually not new;

many primates can do a bit

of

this

if

given enough

training and exposure in a controlled setting. But for

more advanced hominids, it became a primary prob

lem-solving tool and the natural thing to do. In its

fullest developments it would provide humans with

an

unprecedented sort of autonomy or freedom from

the constraints of concrete reference.

The neurobiological cause and consequence for

this symbolizing capacity, according to Deacon, is the

property of an expanded prefrontal cortex (PFC) in


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Book Reviews

higher primates and especially in man, which itself is

but a part of the unbroken continuity between human

and nonhuman brains. But back to our hominid an

cestors. When that semiotic boundary between local

(iconic and indexical) context control of behavior and

arbitrary (symbolic) conditional responding was sur

mounted on a regular basis, the hominid line, nearly

suddenly in geological time, applied symbol use

to

the

expansion of communication, complex speech, and

then full grammar-based language. These adaptations

further enhanced the existing primate dorsal-heavy

hominid cortex and its subtle perceptual biases that

could now generate the kinds of sounds and rules re

quired for a social system of communicatedmeanings.

But language and the rules (grammar) were never in

trinsic to the human brain; the only intrinsic factor

was the perceptual-learning bias. Language existed

then and now as a social phenomenon or as

memes [T]he brain co-evolved with respect

to language, but language has done most of the adapt

ing. So for this strange new way

of

communicating,

grammar was essential for later complex language, but

was its consequence, not its intrinsic cause.

On the way to developing full language, problems

of male provisioning, fidelity promises (marriage), and

group cohesion were solved, giving hominids like ar

chaic Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis the

edge they needed to successfully compete and continue.

(Andbecausewe re here and they are not,

we

canprob

ably assume some kind of brain-over-brawn superior

ity, althoughDeacon thinks Neanderthals were

so

equal

to us in intelligence that the difference was probably

that

of

sheer numbers or plague survival.)

The brain, language, and culture of today, so ho

mogeneous in all the important ways, all developed

by oevolution Natural selection did most of the work

to produce the australopithescines, up to 2-plus million

years ago. But then the new trick of symbolization

and abstraction produced an overpowering adaptation,

reasoning and planning ahead, that changed the selec

tional context itself within which natural selection was

operating. In the case of brain and behavior, this new

type of selection, called Baldwinian, was no longer

, natural or simply Darwinian. Hominid selection

became directed by constrained actions. Thus greater

symbol use selected for greater PFC size, which ex

panded auditory-verbal capacities, which selected for

greater symbolization, and so on. For example, the

midbrain reticular areas, especially the limbic-peria

queductal gray circuits, allow only indirect cortical

motor control over the 30 to 40 primate calls that com

municate indexical signals

of

danger, food, and other

131

social transactions. With increased motor and prefron

tal cortex in hominids due to the sequential demands

of nonsymbolic gestures and speech, manual dexter

ity, and social interactions, adjacent cortical areas

gradually assumed direct control over the subcortical

arousal anatomy and behavioral sequences. This new

cortical displacement of neural connections became

both the cause and a consequence

of

the increasing use

of

vocal symbolization. This advance in turn improved

communication, putting further adaptive pressure on

the development

of

an even greater variety of vocal

ization, resulting in the innervation

of

the tongue from

the hypoglossal nucleus and a descended larynx, faster

consonated speech, and more complex vocal social

interaction (such as the ability to employ subtle decep

tive speech). At present we have sobbing, sudden

laughter, gasping, groans, and sighs as remnants of

subcortical control by midbrain structures; in other

cases after about age 3 we have the option to volunta

rily (cortically) regulate our vocalizations. This dy

namic circular neurobehavioral causality is

coevolution and runaway symbolization. Every im

provement altered the neurological and external envi

ronmental forces that then selected for a more

successful genetic host. This manner

of reasoning is

how Deacon can claim this strange thought: I suggest

that an idea changed the brain. But Baldwinian logic

sorts it out:

The

remarkable expansion of the brain

that took place in human evolution and indirectly pro

duced pre-frontal expansion was not the cause of sym

bolic language but the consequence

of

it.

Yet symbols themselves are not inherited and are

nowhere in the brain, even though there is a thresh

old below which symbolic processes are not possi

ble. Symbols evolve socially within the community

of

symbol users and are then borrowed as needed by

all. What is inherited is the capacity for plasticity to

change the circumstances

of

evolution and within life

time adaptations. The personal capacities for symbol

formation itself are also overbuilt for fail-safe learning

by natural and Baldwinian selection, to provide for

extreme cases

of

conceptual problem solving. Ergo

our ability to perform tasks like differential equations

which no H. habilis or H. erectus ever needed to solve.

Ergo our capacities for employing symbols to be con

scious

of

a personal self (subjectivity), the experience

of others consciousness (empathy and manipulation),

and fears of purposelessness and death. For symbol

ization is the means of justifying great acts of inhu

manity and kindness, and of religious solutions for

fears, and for comprehending symbolizing itself, as in

self-reflective consciousness. Deacon says it best:


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3

The

best and worst of what it means to be human

arose with the dawn of symbolic abilities. Thus sym

bolic reference underlies everything we consider

human: [T]he computational demands

of

symboliza

tion not only was the major source of selection pres

sures that could have produced the peculiar

restructuring of our brains, they are likely also the

indirect source for the selection pressures that initiated

the prolonged evolution

of

an entire suite of capacities

and the propensities that now constitute our language

instinct. And, selection for anything that benefited

this prerequisite function would have been constant

and intense throughout, including severe reproduc

tive costs in cases of failure to acquire symbols.

But this tidy narrative, like the journey of man

from there to here, gets quickly convoluted. The trail at

times is downright thready,

as

Deacon pursues lines of

logic, neo-Darwinism, molecular genetics, cell popula

tion dynamics, practically the whole history of neuro

science, comparative psychology, neural networks,

paleoanthropology, personal fancy, and more on the

way to building his massive case for the new phyla,

Homo symbolicus. Profound questions are raised in ev

ery chapter, andanswers are suggestedthat quickly pro

voke even more difficult questions. But Deacon

is

relentless. Happily, all the themes and subroutines in

this book revolve back on Deacon s three overarching

questions about man s unique cognitive style and lan

guage. These issues, which also constitute Deacon s

goals andwhich were anticipated by the opening narra

tive, are: What are the differences in the ways humans

and prehominids and animals reference information

and communicate in groups? Why do animals have so

much difficulty overcoming the barrier to symbolic ex

perience and communication? How do humans func

tion with symbols so easily and so early in life?

The first issue introduces the sine qua non for

understanding Deacon s book. He recounts the work

of

the late nineteenth century logician-philosopher

Charles Peirce in defining symbols and describing

symbolic referencing as the apex of cognitive evolu

tion

so

far. Peirce (1994) was concerned with the ways

we

find

meanings in a hierarchy

of

increasingly ab

stract references to objects, relations of objects to each

other, and to the family of concepts that are referen

tially based on these real-world foundations. In this

semiotic system, icons referred to the surface com

monalities between objects and the real things to

which they refer. Thus a statue of the

Buddha

really

looks like him. Indexes, on the other hand, stand in

dynamic causal relationships to their point of refer

ence and always refer to the associations, correlations,

Book Reviews

and implications for action that link them back to their

icons; the statue is thus also an indexical sign or signal

for certain kinds of behaviors and attitudes. And

fi-

nally, symbols refer to indexes and other symbols that

exist by arbitrary, conceptual and stable rules of inter

pretation within a group

of

individuals. Here the Bud

dha statue evokes the same rule-based meanings for

all those who share its conceptual relevance.

Peirce himself went to great lengths to establish

a 10-level hierarchy of transitions from the most iconic

reference (like the feeling

of redness )

all the way

to the highest symbolic level of logical syllogistic ar

guments. For simplicity Deacon chose to discuss only

the icon, index, and symbol. But given that one of the

most difficult problems in the book is the attempt to

explain the transition from indexical to symbolic func

tioning in early humans, it might have helped his case

if Deacon could have included more

of

the transitional

steps that Peirce defined.

Deacon s second and third goals are an under

standing

of

just this transitional puzzle: to comprehend

why nonhuman primates have so much trouble get

ting it, getting beyond immediately context-bound

stimulus-response cognition, and grasping the rules

that make possible generalization based on logic

(which grammar-based language requires). Many

pages are spent on this question, largely referring to

the work of Savage-Rumbaugh (1986) and the Yerkes

Primate group. We learn that a few well-trained and

human-family raised chimps have shown some symbol

use,

as

in limited learning

of

American Sign Lan

guage. At least two Bonobo (pigmy) chimps have

learned signed language implicitly by observing their

parents trained. Oddly, these young Bonobos use their

language more naturally and better than others who

have had much more explicit training. (Available vid

eotapes of the brightest and best animals show skills

more dramatic than even Deacon describes, as in one

chimp signing to another, totally using symbol-based

lexicon, that she would like different food or nonfood

objects to be given or used in specific ways.) Here,

the animal s behavior is based on the communication

of

shared rule-governed arbitrary logical categories

and their specific labels similar to humans between 2

and 3 years of age. Of course, there is a lot more to

a 3-year-old human s cognition--ehimps don t ask a

lot of why

questions-but

the most symbol-minded

chimps are still very impressive.

The point

is

that with the right setup and enough

preparation, some nonhuman primates can operate at

the symbolic, not just indexical conditioned-associa

tion level. Deacon believes that if he can find out just


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Book Reviews

how chimps do it, he may have a clue to how humans

achieved symbolic functioning, which is our crucial

antecedent to rule-based grammatical language. This

discovery would obviate the need for positing an in

trinsic, built-in universal grammar module,

a

la Chom

sky, to explain the origin

of

human language. It is in

this discussion that Deacon reveals his antipathy for

a saltationist position, and his preference for a model

of gradualism and continuity in species evolution.

So what made the difference for humans? The

key to the discovery of symbol reference seems to be

a counterintuitive cognitive leap or trick. The very

same cognitive style, categorization by associative (in

dexical) learning, that defined successful adaptation

for many species for millions

of

years, had to be situa

tionally negated in order for higher logical categoriza

tion to occur at all. It works something like this: To

discover an abstract rule, you must apprehend that the

surface associations that define your reality must be

ignored, and then apprehend that a more abstract uni

fying principle exists that can categorize many objects

and events within an overarching system of logic. La

bels for indexical, practical living must always relate

back to the iconic re l world. But symbolic labels

can be anything you want, as long as they are members

of a family of commonly accepted concepts that give

meaning to each of the member labels or lexicon. So

an abstract, flexible rule must be grasped. It

is

very,

very hard for chimps to get a rule if an immediate

reward compels attention and action. Consider two

piles

of

candy, one large and one small. The pile you

piGk will be given to your competitor, the remaining

one is yours. It sounds easy: Pick the small one. But

small children and nonhuman primates, and patients

with certain PFC damage, repeatedly pick the large

pile, even though the rule has been demonstrated

many times. Now try this with an older child with a

healthy PFC or a chimp, both

of whom have learned

to respond to symbolic labels of pile size to help selec

tively suppress attention to the immediate token-object

associations. Voila We have logical rule-guided be

havior and delay of gratification, the step from which

the leap is taken to symbolic functioning.

As

Deacon

notes, [L]ike the chimps, hominids were forced to

learn a set of associations between signs and objects,

repeat them over and over, and eventually unlearn the

concrete association in favor of

a more abstract one.

What does this have to do with grammar-based lan

guage? Apply the new arbitrary rule-making capacity

to the subject and verb elements of your pragmatic,

holistic vocabulary, get everybody doing it, and you

have a symbolic language, even

if

rudimentary.

33

Later, Deacon shows how humans created vari

ous rituals that served to consolidate the symbol-sym

bol, symbol-real world links that made full language

possible. That in turn made group cohesion possible,

which made for social complexity pressures and re

sulting brain expansion. But Deacon's unique contri

bution to this literature, which he sprinkled throughout

the technical and philosophical chapters, in his discov

ery of the mechanisms of symbol discovery itself. His

theory answers, in a real way, all

of

his goals. It shows

how humans are special in our use of, and enslavement

by symbols, and why no other species came to do this

naturally. It also explains the adaptive problems that

were solved (and caused) by symbol use, putting hu

mans at the top

of

the food and technology chain.

Many important problems remain, however, and

Deacon is especially thorough in his explanation of

the brain-structure issue. Many primates have com

plex social group standards and the neurobiology to

support this. Why didn' t other species evolve the

structures for natural symbol discovery? Convergent

data generally have pointed to the PFC. And here is

one problematic area of the book: Deacon leans very

hard on the premise of an oversized human PFC to

account for human symbolization. But other careful

studies, by H Jerison (1997) and

H

Damasio's (Sem

endeferi, m s i o ~ Frank, nd Van Huesen, 1996)

group, seem convincing that the human PFC is about

the right volume for a primate with our bodies and

total brain size. Yet, the functions of the PFC, and

neuropathological studies, make it very tempting to

put the structural basis

of

symbolic function in the

PFC. In fact, shortly after Deacon's book was re

leased, a study by Stephen Wise,

E

A Murray, and

C

R Gerfon (1996) clearly demonstrated a PFC as

cending axis for abstract conditional responding,

which is present in many primates but most delineated

in humans. So Deacon's general emphasis on the PFC

is supported, but more work is needed to sort out the

functional specialization and connectivity versus ex

cessive volume controversy.

The study

of the particulars of human cognitive

evolution will always be

l ~ k i n

in physical evidence,

and will thus always be best understood as a choice

of

narratives. Who has the best story? It is common

to hear that we are the product of an interwoven causal

chain: extra-arboreal bipedalism, left hands freed for

tool making, gesturing, and accurate throwing, requir

ing a bigger brain. The bigger brain required an imma

ture birth, with greater sensitivity to postnatal

environment. This created pressures for social cohe

sion and problem solving, requiring complex language


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34

and culture and still larger brains. Deacon s narrative,

which denies none of the above, includes the notion

that bigger brains needed a meat diet and therefore

needed male provisioning and fidelity contracts (re

quiring rituals and delay of gratification symbols that

overcame immediate needs for philandering). This is

surely part

of

the story. I prefer a narrative that ad

dresses the early hominid s short, fear-dominated life.

Such a story would have early presymbols like safety

and danger signs becoming ritualized into anxiolytic

vehicles like superstition and special tokens and then

an animistic belief system with its own lexicon. I like

this because it seems earlier than the marriage con

tract. But who knows? No one can solve this puzzle,

so we look for cogent logic and the available physical

evidence for the best narrative. Deacon s emphasis is

strongest in its logic after some symbol capacity was

already present, because he can explain how symbol

mediated behavioral flexibility enabled hominids to

occupy niches that other animals could not. Our ances

tors therefore out competed and out survived and out

reproduced our competitors because

of

our behavioral

flexibility; symbolic reference is with us now because

it worked better than the extinct alternatives.

Havingdone the hardworkofmaking andbuilding

an extremely compelling case for the how and when of

symbolic reference, Deacon is now free to speculate

about what all this means. For example, he sees no rea

son why symbolizing creatures could not build sym

bolizing conscious artifacts, since reflective

consciousness is synonymous with the process

of

shar

ing symbols with oneself and others (empathy). Also,

Deaconbelieves that an algorithmfor constructing such

an artifact is close at hand. Others are less optimistic.

For example, Andy Clark

Being There: Putting Brain

Body and the World Together Again

1998) suggests

that human cognition, including symbols, is hopelessly

dependent on bodily states (including affect) and

wideware influences from an orchestrating environ

ment. This would mean that an artifact with disembod

ied cognition, no matter how smart, would be

forever handicapped in its consciousness

of

self and

others experience. But this remains to be seen.

Deacon also explores theextremesensitivity

of

the

newly expanded brain region, the PFC, that contributes

so much to symbolic reference. He notes that the very

PFC connections that make possible symbolic refer

encedo sobecause of recently evolved extraprojections

to this area, but without the reciprocal matching of

down flow regulation of limbic activation connections

from the PFC. This conflict between relative symbol

ization and overempowered emotionality makes us

Book

Reviews

constantly vulnerable to minor chemical variations and

pathological dysregulation, and accounts for currently

popular compounds like SSRls that facilitate PFC regu

latory functions. In other words, our symbolization is

clearly adaptive, but is unstable and very vulnerable to

runaway (obsessive), and blocking (alexythymia, anti

sociality) conditions that compromise effective symbol

use in a complex lifestyle.

Symbol use also makes us all extraordinary pos

sessors of virtual reality. Many animals have a kind

of contextual vicarious trial and error, but only hu

mans spin scenarios far from the field

of

action, plan

ning glorious, destructive and mostly mundane deeds.

Deacon understands that we are hopelessly enslaved

by this compulsion to find meaning in everything, for

better or worse.

Of course we think

of

ourselves as

far more than John McCrone s

The Ape that Spoke

(1991), but there is no guarantee that symbolization

will keep us special for very long. S

J

Gould (1993),

for example, reminds us that in geological time the

symbolic species is potentially just the fragile tip

of

a

twig on the evolutionary tree

of

life.

Deacon has clearly moved the scientific study of

symbolic reference and human intelligence several

steps forward. Has he done the same for understanding

language origins? Here is where the debate will con

tinue-happily because Deacon has added a fresh co

evolutionary approach-and because somany linguists

and psychologists are already committed to a position

as to

whether language is innately modular in the hu

man brain or not. Our group found Deacon s position

that language is nonmodular and nonintrinsic convinc

ing overall. We also liked his admitted personal at

traction to heresy and naturally rebellious nature

in investigating such an overheated subject. The re

viewer Robert Berwick gave Deacon a batting average

of

.400, based on Deacon s great explanation

of

the

brain but his failure to convince Berwick, a salta

tionist, that language developed continuously in the

environment and brain together. I guess we would give

Deacon a much higher batting average based on the

achievement of

his original goals.

When we finally ended our formal study

of

Dea

con s book (there will be no end to its influence on our

thinking about the evolution of brain and language) we

ran out

of

words to describe Deacon s remarkable

achievement. It was like facing an important problem

you never thought you would be able to solve and then

somehow thinking it through, close to transparency. Our

applied linguists thought Deacon s perspective on lan

guage

is

an important bridge in the debate, and our psy

choanalysts (who care more about how the mind works


7/7

Book Reviews

or

doesn t

work) talked about neuroscience and their pa

tient care with a fresh and deeper awareness of brain be

havior relations. None

of

us, however, will ever think

the same way about what makes our species special.

References

Clark, 1998),

Being There: Putting Brain Body and

World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gould, S J 1993), Full House. New York: Random House.

Jerison, H J 1997), Evolution of prefrontal cortex. In:

Development

of

Prefrontal Cortex Evolution Neurobiol-

ogy and Behavior. Baltimore, MD: Paul

H

Brookes.

McCrone,

J

1991), The p That Spoke: Language and

the Evolution

of

the Human Mind.

New York: William

Morris.

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Pierce, C 1994), In:

Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic

Anthropology

ed.

R

J Parmentier. Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press.

Savage-Rumbaugh, E

S

1986),

Ape Language: From

Conditioned Response to Symbol.

New York: Columbia

University Press.

Semendeferi, K., Damasio, H., Frank, R.,

Van Huesen,

G

1996), The evolution

of

the frontal lobes: A volu

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William Hans Miller

12304 Santa Monica Blvd. Suite 210

Los Angeles 90025

e mail: [email protected]

Documents

16 the Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain