Chapter 13 "LANGUAGE IS A

HUMAN INSTINCT"[Steven Pinker:] 

I call language an "instinct," an admittedly quaint term for what other cognitive scientists have
called a mental organ, a faculty, or a module. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which
develops in the child spontaneously without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed
without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is
distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. (One
corollary is that most of the complexity in language comes from the mind of a child, not from
the schools or from grammar books.) All this suggests that language is caused by dedicated
circuitry that has evolved in the human brain. It then raises the question of what other aspects
of the human intellect are instincts coming from specialized neural circuitry.

[…]

My work concentrates on what science has discovered about language since 1950. In
answering those questions, other questions repeatedly come up. Why is the hockey team in
Toronto called the Maple Leafs instead of the Maple Leaves? Why do we say, "He flied out to
center field" in baseball — why has no mere mortal ever "flown out" to center field? Why do
immigrants labor with lessons and tapes and homework and English classes, while their four-
year-old kids learn the language so quickly that they can make fun of their parents'
grammatical errors? What language would a child speak if he was raised by wolves? I also look
at what we know about how language works, how children acquire it, how people use it, and
how it breaks down after injury or disease of the brain.

I unify this knowledge with three key ideas. One responds to the fact that what people do
know about language is often wrong. The view of language that suffuses public discourse —
that people assume both in the sciences and in the humanities — is that language is a cultural
artifact that was invented at a certain point in history and that gets transmitted to children by
the example of role models or by explicit instruction in schools. The corollary is that now that
the schools are going to pot and people get their language from rock stars and athletes,
language will steadily deteriorate, and if current trends continue we're all going to be grunting
like Tarzan. I argue instead that language is a human instinct.

The second idea comes from the following: If language is a mental organ, where did it come
from? I believe it came from the same source as physical organs. It's an adaptation, a product
of natural selection in the evolution of the human species. Depending on how you look at it,
this is either an incredibly boring conclusion or a wildly controversial conclusion. On the one
hand, most people, after hearing evidence that language is an innate faculty of humans , would
not be surprised to learn that it comes from the same source that every other complex innate
aspect of the human brain and body comes from — namely, natural selection. But two very
prominent people deny this conclusion, and they aren't just any old prominent people, but
Stephen Jay Gould, probably the most famous person who has written on evolution, and Noam
Chomsky, the most famous person who has written on language. They've suggested that
language appeared as a by-product of the laws of growth and form of the human brain, or
perhaps as an accidental by-product of selection for something else, and they deny that
language is an adaptation. I disagree with both of them.

The third idea comes from the question, "Why should we be so interested in the details of
language in the first place?" Language is interesting because, of course, it's distinctly human,
and because we all depend on it. For centuries, language has been the centerpiece of
discussions of the human mind and human nature, because it's considered the most accessible
part of the human mind. The reason people are likely to get exercised by technical
disagreements over the proper syntax of relative clauses in Choctaw, say, is that everyone has
an opinion on human nature, and lurking beneath such discussions of language is the belief
that language is the aspect of science where human nature is going to be understood first.

If language is an instinct, what does it say about the rest of the mind? I think the rest of the
mind is a set of instincts as well. There's no such thing as intelligence, a capacity for learning,
or a general ability to imitate role models. The mind is more like a Swiss Army knife: a large set
of gadgets, language being one of them, shaped by natural selection to accomplish the kinds of
tasks that our ancestors faced in the Pleistocene.

[…]