GlobalShift

A Step Closer To Discovering Our Essential Humanity

Some fifty 55 years ago, the dominant theory on human nature was still behavioral. Popular works BY psychologist B.F. Skinner suggested that language, and many other aspects of humanity, was dictated by behavioral conditioning. The environment we were born into was what bred and established language, as well as determining what kind of person we’d be.

Then the linguist Noam Chomsky (probably more known for his political views) came and revolutionized science by postulating that language has a genetic basis. Information encoded in our genes direct our brains to develop what he calls a language acquisition device (LAD), thereby making language an innate and inevitable quality of human biology. In recent lectures he’s likened this genetic basis to the biological inevitability of the human immune system.
 
In support of this theory Chomsky points out that all languages seem to exhibit similar grammatic and phonetic fundamentals starting as soon as an infant can make sentences. Even though it seems that they have not been fed enough information about language and its structure, children show a natural tendency towards correct grammar. This “poverty of stimulus” leads many to believe that children cannot be learning language and that it is, instead, built in.
 
Another (again) seeming universal quality of language is that it features recursion (a compound sentence that refers back to the subject or object, such that a finite set of words could create indefinitely long expressions). The idea is that because we are able to build such complex sentences, and understand each other when we do build those complex sentences, it must mean we all have something universally in common. To Chomsky, this is more proof that our principles of language are built into our biology.
 
If all languages do posses both principles, it may indeed signify that human’s have a code for language embedded in our genes (a sort of a priori knowledge); a theory which much of academia has embraced. Furthermore, if language does have a biological explanation, that would have huge implications to our assessments of how the brain works and what makes us human.
 
Among the many studies which seem to confirm Chomsky’s theories, I’ll only mention one. Over a decade ago, Steven Pinker studied children who were deliberately fed bad information about language and language structure. In spite of being in an environment that misused language, the children began their use of language in the same way every other child does. It took a while before the environment affected the children’s use of language. Furthermore, deaf children and children who are brought up in cultures where parents don’t speak to their babies all seem to exhibit the same fundamentals of language usage. All of this seems like strong evidence that Noam Chomsky is right.
 
However, a tiny tribe are proving to be a huge monkey wrench in gears upon which many of our modern assumptions run. The linguist Dan Everett was working as a full time missionary in 1977, when he traveled to a remote location in the Amazon Forest. That trip would change both Everett and could change much of our understanding of human nature. Instead of converting the Piraha (pronounced “Peet-aha”) tribe, the Piraha de-converted Everett. Yet Everett’s religion wasn’t the only thing being challenged, the Piraha have the most unique language ever known to mankind. Nearly everything about them is in such defiance of our modern ways of thinking that it makes describing then like trying to describe quantum mechanics to my mother (lovely lady, no disrespect mom), or most anyone for that matter. What do they have to teach us about our own humanity?