Genes, brains and language: would someone please pull the brakes?

Abstract regarding the proposed theme: How has recent research in evolutionary biology and psychology affected our perceptions of cultural productions?


The scientific study of the origin of language has recently been the subject of some major paradigm shifts. To begin with, instructionist accounts were overthrown by selectionist ones (Pinker & Bloom, 1990). Secondly, recent genetic discoveries such as, on the one hand, the FOXP2 gene (Lai et al. 2001, Enard et al., 2002), presumably correlated with speech, and on the other hand, MICROCEPHALIN (MCPH1) (Evans et al., 2005; Woods et al. 2005) and ASPM (MCPH5) (Mekel Bobrov et al. 2005), both responsible for brain growth, are for the first time in history hinting at the varying ways in which cultural and cognitive behaviour can be traced back to our evolutionary past (Balter et al, 2005). Not only did the discovery of these genes immediately put some of the long standing theories about language and the brain to rest. It also got obvious, that although all these genes are the target of positive selection, a mere selectionist approach will not suffice to deal with the complex issue of how genes, gene products and brain growth relate to cultural behaviour such as language or social cognition.
Things even get more complicated because of disciplinary boundaries that need to get crossed by the scholars involved. The different jargon used by neurologists, linguists, geneticists and evolutionary biologists, leads to confusions and dangerous misinterpretations, and whats even worse, reflexivity on this matter, in general, is lacking.
Philosophy of biology and evolutionary epistemology could play an important role here. If anything, philosophy of science is about introducing reflexivity on the one hand and on the other, it aims at synthesizing different points of view. Traditionally, culture and its most studied product, language, have been studied from within anthropology, linguistics, sociology, psychology, neurology and philosophy. Evolutionary biology and genetics have only recently taken language as a topic of scientific investigation as well. The most pertinent question that awaits a philosophical, reflexive answer is therefore the following: How exactly is it that a gene can be related to a certain (cultural) behaviour, and how does this affect other classic domains that explain that behaviour?
Answering this question is bringing evolutionary epistemology (Gontier, 2006a,b,c,d) to bear on these different fields, by investigating how the units and levels of selection debate can be introduced to allow not only the study of different levels of language evolution but also the scientific domains that best capture these levels.


References


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