Derek Bickerton's book is a neat and logical effort to explain the origin and evolution of human language, one of the most complex and intricate problems in science, as the author himself argues. The book revolves around an enigmatic issue, alluded to by Shakespeare's King Lear: ‘allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's life as cheap as beast's', part of which makes up the title of the present book. Bickerton starts off his ontogenetic account by posing a question, already made by the founders of the theory of evolution by natural selection Wallace and Darwin: why do only human beings acquire cognitive abilities and a type of language far more advanced than what the human species actually needs in order to survive? Bickerton's challenge is to explain this without resort to divine intervention, a mistaken conclusion arrived at by Wallace.
Bickerton does a meticulous job in trying to disentangle this cumbersome issue. The author relies on traditional theories of ‘evo-devo’, aka theories about the evolution of the species and of embryonic and cellular development, to build up his own theory about the evolutionary side to human language. He argues that ‘syntacticized language’ is an end product that cannot have emerged unexpectedly at a single point in time without substantial brain changes. Bickerton holds that language universals and later syntacticized language emerged in our ancestors' brain as a consequence of foraging, recruitment, displaced communication, and eventual protolanguage, brought about by the challenges of survival issues. Thus, his position regarding the emergence of syntax differs from that of Noam Chomsky, for whom brain events in Universal Grammar and language evolution were random, and not triggered by the environment's hazards.
A key point made by Bickerton in his language theory is the existence of an ‘ecological problem’ or ‘social problem’ related to fundamental nutritional needs that must have triggered enhanced communication in pre-humans, causing behavioral adaptation and genetic mutation. The author argues that fully fledged language was a long process, the result of the challenges posed by the ecological problem of wild food gathering, which according to Bickerton, required ‘displacement’, the ability to use a type of communicative behavior that refers to a situation beyond the present moment, which in turn led to symbolism, which led to the emergence of words and semantic associations, to a later stage of concatenation of units (protolanguage) and eventually to a fully syntacticized language, which ultimately allowed for ‘offline thinking’, in which current actions and the topic of current thinking are different.
Consequently, human language as it is nowadays, is the eventual result of a gradual interplay of natural selection, neural reorganization, and acculturation playing a determining role in the ontogenesis of our ancestors during millions of years. Human language is rooted in our ancestors' courage to go beyond mere survival. Bickerton's book made an ancestral-like decision to take the path less traveled by, the difficult challenging road of accounting for language origin, evolution, and acquisition.
