Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves

‘Within a short span of time and with almost no direct instruction will have dissected the language into its minimal separable units of sound and meaning,’ writes linguist Breyne Moskowitz. ‘He will have discovered the rules of recombining sounds into words and recombining the words into meaningful sentences. Ten linguists working full-time for a decade analysing the structure of the English language could not programme a computer with a five-year-old’s ability for language.’

The aptitude of the young mind in mastering the staggering complexity of language presupposed, Chomsky argued, that humans must possess some form of highly specific ‘Language Acquisition Device’ hardwired into their brains that somehow ‘knows’ the meaning of words and the grammatical forms necessary to make sense of them. How, otherwise, can an infant know when its mother says, ‘Look at the cat!’ that she is referring to the furry four-legged creature, and not to its whiskers, or the milk it is drinking. Further, the ‘device’ must not just know what is being referred to, but the grammatical rules that permit the same ‘idea’ expressed in different ways to have the same meaning (‘John saw Mary’ conveys the same message as ‘Mary was seen by John’), but excluding meaningless variations. Further again, it transpires that children learn language in the same way, whether brought up in New Jersey or New Guinea, and acquire the same grammatical rules of ‘present’, ‘past’ and ‘future’ in the same sequence. This implies that the ‘device’ in turn must be sensitive to a Universal Grammar, common to all languages, which can pick up on the subtlest distinction of meaning.

Now, our primate cousins do not possess this ‘device’, which is why, clever as they are, they remain (in the words of the veteran chimpanzee-watcher Jane Goodall) ‘trapped within themselves’. By contrast, every human society, no matter how ‘primitive’, has a language capable of ‘expressing abstract concepts and complex trains of reasoning’. The million Stone Age inhabitants of the highlands of New Guinea, ‘discovered’ in 1930 after being cut off from the rest of the world for several thousands of years, spoke between them eight hundred different languages, each with its complex rules of syntax and grammar.

How then did the faculty of language come to colonise the human brain? ‘There must have been a series of steps leading from no language at all to language as we now find it,’ writes the linguist Steven Pinker, ‘each step small enough to have been produced by random mutation [of genes] and with each intermediate grammar being useful to its possessor.’ It is, of course, possible to imagine how language might have evolved in this way from a simpler form of communication or ‘protolanguage’, starting perhaps with gestures, moving on to simple words or phrases with a single meaning, with the rules for linking words into sentences coming later. Pinker’s intended parallel between the means by which our species acquired language and the infant’s rapid progress from burbling through words to sentences might seem plausible, in the way of all evolutionary explanations, and would indeed be reasonable if language simply ‘facilitated the exchange of information’. But, as Chomsky pointed out so persuasively, language is also an autonomous, independent set of rules and meanings that impose order, make sense of the world ‘out there’. Rules and meanings cannot evolve from the simple to the complex, they just ‘are’. The structure of sentences is either meaningful or meaningless. The naming of an object is either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. An elephant is an elephant, and not an anteater. Hence Chomsky insisted, against Pinker, that those seeking a scientific explanation for language could, if they so wished, describe it as having evolved ‘so long as they realise that there is no substance for this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief.’ This, of course, is no trivial controversy, for language is so intimately caught up in every aspect of ‘being human’ that to concede that it falls outside the conventional rubric of evolutionary explanation would be to concede that so does man.

The dispute over the evolutionary (or otherwise) origin of language remained irresoluble till the late 1980s, when the first PET scans revealed how the simplest of linguistic tasks involves vast tracts of the brain in a way that defies any simple scientific explanation. Here every mode of language, thinking about words, reading and speaking them, is represented in different parts. The prosaic task of associating the word ‘chair’ with ‘sit’ generates a blizzard of electrical activity across the whole surface of the brain. Further, those scanning investigations revealed how, in the twinkling of a second that it takes to speak or hear a word, the brain fragments it into its constituent parts through four distinct modules concerned with spelling, sound (phonology), meaning (semantics) and articulation. These ‘modules’ are in turn then further subdivided ad (virtually) infinitum. The perception of sound, for example discriminating between the consonants ‘P’ and ‘B’, is represented in twenty-two sites scattered throughout the brain. There is something absolutely awe-inspiring in supposing we understand a word like ‘elephant’ only after it has been parsed in this way. And then, to compound it all, the brain must simultaneously while ‘parsing’ elephant also comprehend its meaning in its entirety, for the constituent symbols can really only be understood within the context of the whole word.

It is one thing to try to work out how the brain processes a single word (and that is baffling enough), quite another to extrapolate from such findings to try to imagine the same processes as they apply to a sentence, with its structure of ‘subject-verb-object’ and numerous subsidiary clauses. Move into the real world, with its ceaseless conversation, and the problem becomes insuperable. What sort of brain processes, one might ask, must be involved when a group of football fans convening in the pub before a match discuss their team’s prospects for the coming season – drawing on a vast storehouse of knowledge and judgement of the form of previous seasons, the strengths and weaknesses of their players, and assessments of the performance of their rivals. How do they pluck from the storehouse of their memories the right words, or conjure from the rules of syntax and grammar the correct sequence with which emphatically to argue their opinion? How does the electrical firing of the neurons in their brains represent words and capture the nuance of their meanings?

And so? ‘Language flows so readily, that it is easy to assume it must be simple.’ But language only appears simple because it has to be so. There would, after all, be little point in humans acquiring this novel and powerful mode of inserting their thoughts directly into the minds of others if it took many years to get the hang of, and was difficult to use. But that apparent simplicity is, as already noted, a mark of language’s profundity, concealing the inscrutable complexities of brain function that make it appear to be so.

The major legacy of linguistics and neuroscience in the past few decades has been to reveal the complexities concealed behind that apparent simplicity while drawing attention at the same time to how the faculty of language requires major changes in every aspect of the functioning of the brain: a massive increase in its memory capacity so as to be able to store that vocabulary of forty thousand words, together with the provision for their near-instant recall; a profound deepening of the mind’s emotional repertoire with its feelings of sympathy and affection; the powers of reason; the moral distinction between right and wrong; and the imaginative intelligence with which poets and writers express themselves in unique ways.

The opportunity to reflect further on such matters will come later, but for the moment we must briefly return to contrast the conventional evolutionary portrayal of the origins of that ‘totally unprecedented entity’ Cromagnon man with how, in the light of the above, they now appear to be. To be sure, that steadily expanding brain over the preceding several million years, with its much enhanced neuronal firepower predisposed to those higher intellectual attributes, particularly language, and thus that cultural explosion of technical innovations and artistic expression. But that much-expanded brain by itself does not explain the phenomenon of language, nor why the evidence for its undoubted ‘benefit’ of being able to think, act and make sense of the world should have emerged so late and so suddenly. Why did the brain continue to expand in size for those millions of years when the ‘pay-off’ was so slight, and the attendant hazards of obstructed labour and dependent offspring so large? And this conundrum becomes yet more puzzling now we know that language is not just some bolt-on addition to the primate brain, but occupies large areas of it, and required the massive extension of those other attributes of mind, such as memory and intelligence, on which it depends.

Here neither of the two proposed evolutionary scenarios – that language evolved ‘early’ or ‘late’ – is convincing. The proponents of the ‘early’ scenario infer (quite rightly) that it must have taken millions of years for so complex a system to have evolved – all the way back to Turkana Boy’s people, Homo erectus, and beyond. Why then, one might ask, did he exhibit so little evidence of the ‘culture’ that language makes possible? The ‘late’ theorists claim language to be unique to Homo sapiens, the spark that lit the cultural explosion that separates him from his nearest relatives – but that would presuppose that it evolved over the mere 100,000 years since his emergence from Africa. This dispute cannot be resolved, but it serves the useful purpose of drawing attention to our profound ignorance: we no longer have the vaguest inkling of what caused the ‘switch to be thrown’ to inaugurate that first and most astonishing of all civilisations. Thirty-five thousand years on, we humans can draw on a vast treasure house of the cumulative knowledge and technology of the many civilisations that have had their moment in the sun, the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and so on. The genius of the Cromagnons, with their passion for art and wittily decorated spear-throwers, is that they had to work it all out for themselves.

This then is the riddle of the Ascent of Man: how and why twenty or more distinct species of hominid should, over a period of several million years, have undergone that wholescale anatomical transformation required for standing upright, and then followed it up with acquiring that prodigiously sized brain whose potential to comprehend the workings of the universe appears so disproportionate to the needs of the life of a hunter gatherer. It seems obvious that man’s sophistication and intelligence would have conferred some biological advantage, but all living things – birds, bats, dolphins and so on – have their own highly specialised sort of intelligence, different from our own, but which nonetheless maximises their chances of survival. The question, rather, as the biologist Robert Wesson puts it, is why the human brain should come with those striking mental powers, such as the capacity to compose symphonies or to solve abstruse mathematical theorems, that ‘are not of the kind likely to be rewarded by numbers of descendants’.

The further subsidiary and related riddle is why, for the best part of 150 years, the scientific orthodoxy has prevailed that we know the answer, at least in principle, to that riddle of the Ascent, when, as the palaeontologist Ian Tattersall acknowledges, ‘we have only the dimmest perception of how that dramatic history unfolded’. It has taken just a few pages to draw out the contradictions, at every turn, in the prevailing scientific certainty of ‘natural selection’ as the driving force of the Ascent of Man. There is, of course, no more self-evident truism than that nature ‘selects’ the strong and the fit at the expense of the weak and less than perfect. But that mechanism, by the same logic, can scarcely be invoked to account for standing upright and that massively enlarged brain which, by rights, should have so gravely compromised the survival prospects of those distant ancestors. There is nothing obscure in the observations outlined above: the anatomical implications of the upright stance and the obstetric hazards of that enlarging brain are well documented. Yet there is not the slightest hint in standard evolutionary texts or in the graphic museum displays of the Ascent that they might be problematic – while those who might think so are derisively dismissed, as we have seen, as ‘stupid, ignorant or insane’.

Most people get by well enough without the slightest inclination to speculate about their origins – and if they do, there is much consolation in that reassuring image first captured by Thomas Huxley of our onward and upward ascent. Still, it is surprising how that history of our origins becomes instantly so much more fascinating and intriguing the moment one reflects, for example, on the marvels of the composite integrity of the human skeleton, or the hidden complexities of grammar that can nonetheless be grasped by a two-year-old child. This discrepancy between the beguiling simplicities of the evolutionary theory and the profundity of the biological phenomena it seeks to explain is very striking. Its claims can never be ‘put to the test’ of experimental verification, as there is no way of telling one way or the other whether the process of natural selection really does account for those extraordinary biological events millions of years ago. The standard evolutionary explanation is, in short, irrefutable – or was irrefutable, until the uncompromising verdict of the genome projects, where the random genetic mutations that might set us apart from our primate cousins, mice, flies or worms are nowhere to be found.

It can, admittedly, be very difficult to see what all this might add up to, but clearly the ramifications of those seemingly ‘disappointing’ outcomes of the New Genetics and the Decade of the Brain run very deep indeed. We need to know why we have been seduced into supposing that science knows so much more than is clearly the case – and that means exploring further that seemingly unbridgeable gap between those two ‘Orders of Reality’ to seek out the forces that might conjure the beauty and complexity of the natural world from the monotony of those chemical genes, and the richness of human thought and imagination from the electrical activity of the brain.

But for that we need a yet broader, more Olympian perspective still, to take the full measure of the scope (and limits) of scientific knowledge as so recently revealed, and of how, paradoxically, those ‘disappointing’ outcomes turn out to reveal profound truths about the nature of genetic inheritance and the human mind, so long concealed from view.

There is no better way to start than through that most fruitful insight into the nature of things that comes with the experience of ‘wonder’, whose dual meaning those Cromagnons would instinctively have appreciated. They would have ‘wondered at’ the pervasive beauty and integrity of the natural world, inferring there was a greater significance to their existence than they could know. They would have responded, too, to the human imperative to ‘wonder why’, seeking out in the regularity of the movement of the stars and the diversity of form of living things those causes, patterns and explanations of the natural world that are ‘the beginning of all knowledge’.

3 The Limits of Science 1:The Quixotic Universe

‘The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.’

G.K. Chesterton

The world is so full of wonder, it is a wonder we do not see it to be more so. Every dawn the ‘undeviating and punctual’ sun rises on the horizon to flood our lives with the light and warmth that drive the great cycle of organic life – thirty million times more natural energy in a single second than that generated by manmade power stations in a whole year. And punctually at dusk, its setting brings the day to a close with a triumphant explosion of purple, red and orange streaked across the sky. ‘Of all the gifts bestowed upon us,’ wrote the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, ‘colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.’ Those limitless nuances of colour and light that suffuse our daily lives mark too the procession of the seasons, a constant reminder of the profound mystery of self-renewing life.

And there is nothing so full of wonder as life itself, the more so now we know that the vital actions of even the humblest bacterium, smaller by far than the full stop at the end of this sentence, involve the concerted action of thousands of separate chemical reactions, by which it transforms the nutrients absorbed from soil and water into the energy and raw materials with which it grows and reproduces itself. But life there is, and marching down through the ages in such an abundance of diversity of shape, form, attributes and propensities as to encompass the full range and more of what might be possible. And what variety! ‘No one can say just how many species there are in these greenhouse-humid jungles,’ writes naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough of the forests of South America.

There are over forty different species of parrot, over seventy different [species of] monkeys, three hundred [species of] humming birds and tens of thousands of [species of] butterflies. If you are not careful, you can even be bitten by a hundred different kinds of mosquito … Spend a day in the forest, turning over logs, looking beneath bark, sifting through the moist litter of leaves and you will collect hundreds of different kinds of small creatures: moths, caterpillars, spiders, long-nosed bugs, luminous beetles, harmless butterflies disguised as wasps, wasps shaped like ants, sticks that walk, leaves that open wings and fly … One of these creatures at least will almost certainly be undescribed by science.

And the millions of species with which we share the planet themselves represent a mere 1 per cent of those that have ever been, each form of life the opportunity for a further myriad of subtly different variations on a theme. Why should the extraordinary faces of the bat family, whose near-blindness should make them indifferent to physical appearances, nonetheless exhaust the possibilities of the design in the detailed geometry of their faces? Why should the many thousands of species of birds yet be so readily distinguishable one from the other by their pattern of flight or the shape of their wing, the colour of their plumage or the notes of their song?

But birds, as the American naturalist Frank Chapman once observed, are ‘nature’s highest expression of beauty, joy and truth’, whose annual migration exemplifies that further recurring mystery of the biological world, those idiosyncrasies of habits and behaviour that defy all reason – like the Arctic tern, that every year traverses the globe, setting out from its nesting grounds in northern Canada and Siberia, winging its way down the coasts of Europe and Africa to the shores of the Antarctic, only to turn round and return northwards again: a round journey of twenty-five thousand miles that takes them eight months, flying twenty-four hours a day. How swiftly they fly, how confidently across the pathless sea at night!

And while we might rightly wonder how the Arctic tern knows how to navigate by the stars, it seems almost more wonderful still that the salmon should find its way from the depths of the ocean back to the same small stream from whence it set out, detecting through its highly developed sense of smell the waters of its spawning ground; or that the common European eel should cross the Atlantic twice, first from its breeding grounds off the North American coast to the rivers of Europe – and then back again. ‘The number of [such] admirable, more or less inexplicable traits that one might cite is limited not by the inventiveness of nature,’ writes biologist Robert Wesson, ‘but rather by the ability of scientists to describe them.’ There are, he points out, an estimated twenty thousand species of ant, of which only eight thousand have been described. So far biologists have got round to studying just one hundred of them in depth, each of which has its own unique, bizarre pattern of behaviour – such as ‘the female of a parasitic ant which on finding a colony of its host, seizes a worker, rubs it with brushes on her legs to transfer its scent making her acceptable to enter the host colony’. How did there come to be such sophisticated and purposive patterns of behaviour in such minute creatures?

And yet that near-infinite diversity of life is permeated by an underlying unity, where everything connects in the same web of self-renewing life. The rain falling on the mountains feeds the springs that fill the streams. Those streams become rivers and flow to the sea, the mists rise from the deep and clouds are formed, which break again as rain on the mountainside. The plants on that mountainside capture the rainwater and, warmed by the energy of the sun, transform the nutrients of the soil, by some extraordinary alchemy, into themselves. A grazing animal eats that same plant to set up another complex web of connections, for it in turn is eaten by another, and its remains will return to the earth, where the microbes in the soil cannibalise its bones, turning them back into their constituent chemicals. And so the process of reincarnation continues. Nothing is lost, but nothing stays the same.

Wheels within wheels; and across that vast landscape of living things, from the highest to the lowest, the survival and prosperity of man is yet, as J. Arthur Thomson, Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen University reminds us, completely dependent on the labours of the humble earthworm, without whose exertions in aerating the dense, inhospitable soil there could never have been a single field of corn.

When we pause to think of the part earthworms have played in the history of the earth, they are clearly the most useful of animals. By their burrowing, they loosen the earth, making way for the plant rootlets and the raindrops; by bruising the soil in their gizzards they reduce the mineral particles to more useful forms; they were ploughers before the plough. Five hundred thousand to an acre passing ten tons of soil every year through their bodies.

So, the world ‘will never starve for want of wonders’, the more so for knowing and wondering how the sky above and the earth below and ‘all that dwell therein’ – including the human mind, with its powers of reason and imagination – originated as a mass of formless atoms in that ‘moment of singularity’ of the Big Bang fifteen billion years ago.

The poet William Wordsworth, seeking to catch the enfolding delight of that sky above and earth below, called it ‘the sublime’,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky,

A spirit that impels and rolls through all things.

The feelings evoked by nature and ‘the sublime’ were, for the American poet Walt Whitman as for so many poets and writers, the most powerful evidence for a hidden, mystical core to everyday reality.

‘There is, apart from mere intellect,’ he wrote, ‘a wondrous something that realises without argument an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space of the whole of this multifariousness we call the world; a sight of that unseen thread which holds all history and time, and all events like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter.’

That sublime nature has always provided the most powerful impetus to the religious view, its celebration a central feature of all the great religions. For the German theologian Rudolph Otto (1869–1937), the ‘sublime’ was a ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’: both awesome, in whose presence we feel something much greater than our insignificant selves, and also fascinating, compelling the human mind to investigate its fundamental laws.