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Crafty_Dog:
An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong
 
By NICHOLAS WADE
NY Times
Published: October 31, 2006
Who doesn?t know the difference between right and wrong? Yet that essential knowledge, generally assumed to come from parental teaching or religious or legal instruction, could turn out to have a quite different origin.



Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals? feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart of human morality.

Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, ?Moral Minds? (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind.

People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision generated subconsciously.

Dr. Hauser presents his argument as a hypothesis to be proved, not as an established fact. But it is an idea that he roots in solid ground, including his own and others? work with primates and in empirical results derived by moral philosophers.

The proposal, if true, would have far-reaching consequences. It implies that parents and teachers are not teaching children the rules of correct behavior from scratch but are, at best, giving shape to an innate behavior. And it suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior.

Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying ?that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.? Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.

The moral grammar too, in Dr. Hauser?s view, is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society ? do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don?t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don?t cheat, steal or lie.

But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different weights to the elements of the grammar?s calculations. Thus one society may ban abortion, another may see infanticide as a moral duty in certain circumstances. Or as Kipling observed, ?The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Katmandu, and the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.?

Matters of right and wrong have long been the province of moral philosophers and ethicists. Dr. Hauser?s proposal is an attempt to claim the subject for science, in particular for evolutionary biology. The moral grammar evolved, he believes, because restraints on behavior are required for social living and have been favored by natural selection because of their survival value.

Much of the present evidence for the moral grammar is indirect. Some of it comes from psychological tests of children, showing that they have an innate sense of fairness that starts to unfold at age 4. Some comes from ingenious dilemmas devised to show a subconscious moral judgment generator at work. These are known by the moral philosophers who developed them as ?trolley problems.?

Suppose you are standing by a railroad track. Ahead, in a deep cutting from which no escape is possible, five people are walking on the track. You hear a train approaching. Beside you is a lever with which you can switch the train to a sidetrack. One person is walking on the sidetrack. Is it O.K. to pull the lever and save the five people, though one will die?

Most people say it is.

Assume now you are on a bridge overlooking the track. Ahead, five people on the track are at risk. You can save them by throwing down a heavy object into the path of the approaching train. One is available beside you, in the form of a fat man. Is it O.K. to push him to save the five?

Most people say no, although lives saved and lost are the same as in the first problem.

Why does the moral grammar generate such different judgments in apparently similar situations? It makes a distinction, Dr. Hauser writes, between a foreseen harm (the train killing the person on the track) and an intended harm (throwing the person in front of the train), despite the fact that the consequences are the same in either case. It also rates killing an animal as more acceptable than killing a person.
---------

Many people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, Dr. Hauser says, a sign that it is being made at inaccessible levels of the mind. This inability challenges the general belief that moral behavior is learned. For if people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, how can they teach it?

Dr. Hauser began his research career in animal communication, working with vervet monkeys in Kenya and with birds. He is the author of a standard textbook on the subject, ?The Evolution of Communication.? He began to take an interest in the human animal in 1992 after psychologists devised experiments that allowed one to infer what babies are thinking. He found he could repeat many of these experiments in cotton-top tamarins, allowing the cognitive capacities of infants to be set in an evolutionary framework.

His proposal of a moral grammar emerges from a collaboration with Dr. Chomsky, who had taken an interest in Dr. Hauser?s ideas about animal communication. In 2002 they wrote, with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch, an unusual article arguing that the faculty of language must have developed as an adaptation of some neural system possessed by animals, perhaps one used in navigation. From this interaction Dr. Hauser developed the idea that moral behavior, like language behavior, is acquired with the help of an innate set of rules that unfolds early in a child?s development.

Social animals, he believes, possess the rudiments of a moral system in that they can recognize cheating or deviations from expected behavior. But they generally lack the psychological mechanisms on which the pervasive reciprocity of human society is based, like the ability to remember bad behavior, quantify its costs, recall prior interactions with an individual and punish offenders. ?Lions cooperate on the hunt, but there is no punishment for laggards,? Dr. Hauser said.

The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far greater moral weight than happenings far away, Dr. Hauser believes, since in those days one never had to care about people remote from one?s environment.

Dr. Hauser believes that the moral grammar may have evolved through the evolutionary mechanism known as group selection. A group bound by altruism toward its members and rigorous discouragement of cheaters would be more likely to prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes for moral grammar would become more common.

Many evolutionary biologists frown on the idea of group selection, noting that genes cannot become more frequent unless they benefit the individual who carries them, and a person who contributes altruistically to people not related to him will reduce his own fitness and leave fewer offspring.

But though group selection has not been proved to occur in animals, Dr. Hauser believes that it may have operated in people because of their greater social conformity and willingness to punish or ostracize those who disobey moral codes.

?That permits strong group cohesion you don?t see in other animals, which may make for group selection,? he said.

His proposal for an innate moral grammar, if people pay attention to it, could ruffle many feathers. His fellow biologists may raise eyebrows at proposing such a big idea when much of the supporting evidence has yet to be acquired. Moral philosophers may not welcome a biologist?s bid to annex their turf, despite Dr. Hauser?s expressed desire to collaborate with them.

Nevertheless, researchers? idea of a good hypothesis is one that generates interesting and testable predictions. By this criterion, the proposal of an innate moral grammar seems unlikely to disappoint.

Crafty_Dog:
Looking at Flipper, Seeing Ourselves
By FRANS de WAAL
Published: October 9, 2006
Atlanta

NO one blinks when a celebrity is called "vacuous" or a politician a
"moron" - but when headlines screamed that dolphins are "dimwits" and
"flippin' idiots," I was truly shocked. Is this a way to talk about an
animal so revered that there are several Web domain names that include
"smart dolphin"?

This is not to say that one should believe everything about them. For
example, their supposed "smile" is fake (they lack the facial musculature
for expressions), and all we seem to have learned from chatting "dolphinese"
with them is that lone male dolphins are keenly interested in female
researchers.

Nevertheless, it's going too far to say that dolphins are dimwits. Yet this
is the claim of Paul Manger, a South African scientist who says that
dolphins' relatively large brains are due simply to preponderance of fatty
glial cells. These glia produce heat, which allows the brain's neurons to do
their job in the cold ocean.

Based on this observation, Professor Manger couldn't resist speculating that
the intelligence of dolphins and other cetaceans (like whales and porpoises)
is vastly overrated. He offered gems of insight, such as that dolphins are
too stupid to jump over a slight barrier (as when they are trapped in a tuna
net), whereas most other animals will. Even a goldfish will jump out of its
bowl, he noted.

If we skip the technicalities - such as that glial cells are not simply
insulation, that they add connectivity to the brain, and that humans, too,
have many more glial cells than neurons - the question remains why the
prospect of animal intelligence sets off such controversy. Could it be that
the huge size of the dolphin brain, which exceeds ours by 15 percent or
more, threatens the human ego? Are we to ignore the billions and billions of
neurons that dolphins do possess?

The goldfish remark reminded me of a common strategy of those who play down
animal intelligence. They love to "demonstrate" remarkable cognitive feats
in small-brained species: if a rat or pigeon can do it, it can't be that
special. Thus, some pigeons have been trained to use "symbolic
 communication" by pecking a key marked "thank you!" that delivered food to
another pigeon. And they have also been conditioned to peck at their own
bodies in front of a mirror, supporting the claim that they are
 "self-aware."

Clearly, pigeons are trainable. But is this truly comparable to the actions
of Presley, a dolphin at the New York Aquarium, who, without any rewards,
reacted to being marked with paint by taking off at high speed to a distant
part of his tank where a mirror was mounted? There he spun round and round,
the way we do in a dressing room, appearing to check himself out.

What is so upsetting to some people about the closeness between animal and
human intelligence, or between animal and human emotions, for that matter?
Just saying that animals can learn from each other, and hence have
rudimentary cultures, or that they can be jealous or empathic is taken by
some as a personal affront. Accusations of anthropomorphism will fly, and we'll
be urged to be parsimonious in our explanations. The message is that animals
are no humans.

That much is obvious. But it is equally true that humans are animals. Is it
so outlandish, from an evolutionary standpoint, to assume that if a
large-brained mammal acts similarly to us under similar circumstances, the
psychology behind its behavior is probably similar, too? This is true
parsimony in the scientific sense, the idea that the simplest explanation is
often the best. Those who resist this framework are in "anthropodenial" -
they cling to unproven differences.

Since Aristotle, humans have known that dolphins are incredibly social. Each
individual produces its own unique whistle sound by which the others
recognize him or her. They enjoy lifelong bonds and reconcile after fights
by means of "petting." The males form power-seeking coalitions, not unlike
the politics of chimpanzees and humans. Dolphins also support sick
companions near the surface, where they can breathe. They may encircle a
school of herring, driving the fish together in a compact ball and releasing
bubbles to keep them in place, after which they pick their food like fruit
from a tree.

In captivity, dolphins are known to imitate the gait and gestures of people
walking by, and to outsmart their keepers. One female dolphin that was
rewarded with a fish for every piece of debris she managed to collect from
her tank managed to con her trainers into a bounty of snacks. They
discovered she had been hiding large items like newspapers underwater, only
to rip small pieces from them, bringing these to her trainer one by one.

There are tons of such observations, which is why most of us believe in
dolphin intelligence - glia or no glia. It also explains why the slaughter
of dolphins, as still occurs every year in Japan, arouses such strong
emotions and controversy.

Still, I must admit that the whole dolphin affair has also offered me some
fresh insights. From now on, if I find my goldfish thrashing on the floor, I
will congratulate him before dropping him back into his bowl.

Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University, is the author
of "Our Inner Ape."

Body-by-Guinness:
Once this is sequenced it'll be interesting to compare and contrast it to the human genome:


Scientists Create Neanderthal Genome

Wednesday, 8th November 2006, 19:06
Scientists are reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals - the close relations of modern man.

The ambitious project involves isolating genetic fragments from fossils of the prehistoric beings who originally inhabited Europe to map their complete DNA.

The Neanderthal people were believed to have died out about 35,000 years ago - at a time when modern humans were advancing across the continent.

Lead researcher Dr Svante Paabo, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said: "This would be the first time we have sequenced the entire genome of an extinct organism."

But the prospect of using the genome to produce a living Neanderthal has been ruled out.

A popular caricature portrays Neanderthals as beetle-browed brutes - but this is far from the truth, reports New Scientist.

"Neanderthals were sophisticated stone-tool makers and made razor-sharp knives out of flint," said Dr Richard Klein, an anthropologist at Stanford University, California.

"They made fires when and where they wanted and seem to have made a living by hunting large mammals such as bison and deer."

Neanderthals also buried their dead, which, fortunately for researchers, increases the odds of the bones being preserved.

"By sequencing their entire genome we can begin to learn more about their biology," said Dr Eddy Rubin, a geneticist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Walnut Creek, California.

The genetic questions could also solve the biggest mystery of all - why did Neanderthals die out while modern humans went on to conquer the globe?

Dr Paabo and colleagues pioneered the genetic study of Neanderthals by extracting and decoding fragments of
mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from the bones of the original specimen, discovered in 1856 in the Neander Valley in Germany.

The mtDNA Dr Paabo sequenced suggested humans split from Neanderthals about 500,000 years ago - which fits neatly with the fossil record. It also suggested Neanderthals did not interbreed with our ancestors.

Dr Paabo's team have selected two Neanderthal specimens to work on based on the fact both have "clean" DNA that is
relatively uncontaminated.

One is a 38,000-year-old fossil from Vindija, Croatia. The other is the original specimen, which, despite being
extensively handled, has unusually clean DNA in its right upper arm bone.

During its lifetime the individual lost the use of its left arm after breaking it and had to rely on the right arm - causing the bones to grow thicker and denser than usual.

After death this shielded the DNA from contamination. The researchers are also hunting for new specimens that can be sampled before other people get their hands on them.

They have so far sequenced about a million base pairs of nuclear DNA from the Croatian fossil and hope to publish a draft of the whole genome in two years.

"It is definitely possible to sequence the entire genome from such well-preserved specimens," said Dr Eske Willerslev, an expert in ancient DNA at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

"Perhaps the biggest difficulty will be verifying the sequences obtained are genuinely from the Neanderthal genome and not a contaminant - as so much of it will be identical to the human genome."

The genome is sure to fuel the particularly intense controversy that has surrounded a
much-vaunted aspect of human uniqueness - language.

"There's been a debate going for more than 30 years about the speech capabilities of Neanderthals," says Dr Philip
Lieberman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

"It's clear from the fossil record and comparisons with modern humans that Neanderthals could speak."

But the prospect of the genome providing the blueprint for resurrecting a living "Jurassic-Park-style" Neanderthal is unlikely.

Dr Paabo said: "We would be able to create a physical Neanderthal genome but we will not be able to recreate a Neanderthal - even if we wanted to."

Body-by-Guinness:
2:00 13 November 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi


A mother?s diet can change the behaviour of a specific gene for at least two subsequent generations, a new study demonstrates for the first time.

Feeding mice an enriched diet during pregnancy silenced a gene for light fur in their pups. And even though these pups ate a standard, un-enriched diet, the gene remained less active in their subsequent offspring.

The findings could help explain the curious results from recent studies of human populations ? including one showing that the grandchildren of well-fed Swedes had a greater risk of diabetes.

The new mouse experiment lends support to the idea that we inherit not only our genes from our parents, but also a set of instructions that tell the genes when to become active. These instructions appear to be passed on through ?epigenetic? changes to DNA ? genes can be activated or silenced according to the chemical groups that are added onto them.

Gene silencer

David Martin at the Children?s Hospital Oakland Research Institute in California, US, and colleagues used a special strain of genetically identical mice with an overactive version of a gene that influences fur colour. Mice with the AVY version of this gene generally have golden fur.

Half of the mice were given a diet enriched with nutrients such as vitamin B12 and zinc. These nutrients are known to increase the availability of the ?methyl? chemical groups that are responsible for silencing genes. The rest of the mice received a standard diet.

The pups of mice on the standard diet generally had golden fur. But a high proportion of those born to mice on the enriched diet had dark brown fur.

Martin believes that the nutrient-rich maternal diet caused silencing of the pups? AVY genes while they developed in the womb.

Passed down

Intriguingly, even though all of the pups in this generation received a standard diet, those that had exposure to a high-nutrient diet while in the womb, later gave birth to dark-coated offspring. Their control counterparts, by comparison, produced offspring with golden fur.

This shows that environmental factors ? such as an enriched diet ? can affect the activity of the AVY gene for at least two generations, the researchers say.

?The results make it clear that a nutritional status can affect not only that individual, but that individual?s children as well,? says study member Kenneth Beckman.

Skin colour

Beckman notes that the AVY gene is linked to weight and diabetes risk. He adds that there is some evidence that a related gene in humans might affect skin colour ? but it is unknown if it also affects weight.

Even though humans may have a similar gene, they should not make dietary changes based on the results of the mouse experiment, researchers stress. ?It would be irresponsible to make any prescriptions about human behaviour based on these findings,? says Martin.

An earlier Swedish study which used historical data of harvests in Sweden, found that a youngster had a quadrupled risk of diabetes if their grandfather had good access to food during his own boyhood (see Grandad's diet affects descendants' health).

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0607090103)

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Body-by-Guinness:
So broad in scope it seems misfiled; Dalrymple is becoming one of my favorite essayists.

The Gift of Language -

Theodore Dalrymple

No, Dr. Pinker, it?s not just from nature.

Now that I?ve retired early from medical practice in a slum hospital and the prison next door, my former colleagues sometimes ask me, not without a trace of anxiety, whether I think that I made the right choice or whether I miss my previous life. They are good friends and fine men, but it is only human nature not to wish unalloyed happiness to one who has chosen a path that diverges, even slightly, from one?s own.

Fortunately, I do miss some aspects of my work: if I didn?t, it would mean that I had not enjoyed what I did for many years and had wasted a large stretch of my life. I miss, for instance, the sudden illumination into the worldview of my patients that their replies to simple questions sometimes gave me. I still do a certain amount of medico-legal work, preparing psychiatric reports on those accused of crimes, and recently a case reminded me of how sharply a few words can bring into relief an entire attitude toward life and shed light on an entire mental hinterland.

A young woman was charged with assault, under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, on a very old lady about five times her age. Describing her childhood, the young accused mentioned that her mother had once been in trouble with the police.

?What for?? I asked.

?She was on the Social [Security] and working at the same time.?

?What happened?? I asked.

?She had to give up working.? The air of self-evidence with which she said this revealed a whole world of presuppositions. For her, and those around her, work was the last resort; economic dependence on state handouts was the natural condition of man.

I delighted in what my patients said. One of them always laced his statements with proverbs, which he invariably mangled. ?Sometimes, doctor,? he said to me one day, ?I feel like the little boy with his finger in the dike, crying wolf.? And I enjoyed the expressive argot of prison. The prison officers, too, had their own language. They called a loquacious prisoner ?verbal? if they believed him to be mad, and ?mouthy? if they believed him to be merely bad and willfully misbehaving.

Brief exchanges could so entertain me that on occasion they transformed duty into pleasure. Once I was called to the prison in the early hours to examine a man who had just tried to hang himself. He was sitting in a room with a prison officer. It was about three in the morning, the very worst time to be roused from sleep.

?The things you have to do for Umanity, sir,? said the prison officer to me.

The prisoner, looking bemused, said to him, ?You what??

?U-manity,? said the prison officer, turning to the prisoner. ?You?re Uman, aren?t you??

It was like living in a glorious comic passage in Dickens.

For the most part, though, I was struck not by the verbal felicity and invention of my patients and those around them but by their inability to express themselves with anything like facility: and this after 11 years of compulsory education, or (more accurately) attendance at school.

With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion. Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly. Everything was on the tip of their tongue, rarely or never reaching the stage of expression out loud. They struggled even to describe in a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most abstractions were closed to them.

In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantage?a disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs, from their housing and health care to their income and the education of their children. I would find myself dealing on their behalf with those bureaucracies, which were often simultaneously bullying and incompetent; and what officialdom had claimed for months or even years to be impossible suddenly, on my intervention, became possible within a week. Of course, it was not my mastery of language alone that produced this result; rather, my mastery of language signaled my capacity to make serious trouble for the bureaucrats if they did not do as I asked. I do not think it is a coincidence that the offices of all those bureaucracies were increasingly installing security barriers against the physical attacks on the staff by enraged but inarticulate dependents.

All this, it seems to me, directly contradicts our era?s ruling orthodoxy about language. According to that orthodoxy, every child, save the severely brain-damaged and those with very rare genetic defects, learns his or her native language with perfect facility, adequate to his needs. He does so because the faculty of language is part of human nature, inscribed in man?s physical being, as it were, and almost independent of environment. To be sure, today?s language theorists concede that if a child grows up completely isolated from other human beings until the age of about six, he will never learn language adequately; but this very fact, they argue, implies that the capacity for language is ?hardwired? in the human brain, to be activated only at a certain stage in each individual?s development, which in turn proves that language is an inherent biological characteristic of mankind rather than a merely cultural artifact. Moreover, language itself is always rule-governed; and the rules that govern it are universally the same, when stripped of certain minor incidentals and contingencies that superficially appear important but in reality are not.

It follows that no language or dialect is superior to any other and that modes of verbal communication cannot be ranked according to complexity, expressiveness, or any other virtue. Thus, attempts to foist alleged grammatical ?correctness? on native speakers of an ?incorrect? dialect are nothing but the unacknowledged and oppressive exercise of social control?the means by which the elites deprive whole social classes and peoples of self-esteem and keep them in permanent subordination. If they are convinced that they can?t speak their own language properly, how can they possibly feel other than unworthy, humiliated, and disenfranchised? Hence the refusal to teach formal grammar is both in accord with a correct understanding of the nature of language and is politically generous, inasmuch as it confers equal status on all forms of speech and therefore upon all speakers.

The locus classicus of this way of thinking, at least for laymen such as myself, is Steven Pinker?s book The Language Instinct. A bestseller when first published in 1994, it is now in its 25th printing in the British paperback version alone, and its wide circulation suggests a broad influence on the opinions of the intelligent public. Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, and that institution?s great prestige cloaks him, too, in the eyes of many. If Professor Pinker were not right on so important a subject, which is one to which he has devoted much study and brilliant intelligence, would he have tenure at Harvard?

Pinker nails his colors to the mast at once. His book, he says, ?will not chide you about proper usage . . .? because, after all, ?[l]anguage is a complex, specialized skill, which . . . is qualitatively the same in every individual. . . . Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture,? and men are as naturally equal in their ability to express themselves as in their ability to stand on two legs. ?Once you begin to look at language . . . as a biological adaptation to communicate information,? Pinker continues, ?it is no longer as tempting to see language as an insidious shaper of thought.? Every individual has an equal linguistic capacity to formulate the most complex and refined thoughts. We all have, so to speak, the same tools for thinking. ?When it comes to linguistic form,? Pinker says, quoting the anthropologist, Edward Sapir, ?Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.? To put it another way, ?linguistic genius is involved every time a child learns his or her mother tongue.?

The old-fashioned and elitist idea that there is a ?correct? and ?incorrect? form of language no doubt explains the fact that ?[l]inguists repeatedly run up against the myth that working-class people . . . speak a simpler and a coarser language. This is a pernicious illusion. . . . Trifling differences between the dialect of the mainstream and the dialect of other groups . . . are dignified as badges of ?proper grammar.? ? These are, in fact, the ?hobgoblins of the schoolmarm,? and ipso facto contemptible. In fact, standard English is one of those languages that ?is a dialect with an army and a navy.? The schoolmarms he so slightingly dismisses are in fact but the linguistic arm of a colonial power?the middle class?oppressing what would otherwise be a much freer and happier populace. ?Since prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble.?

Children will learn their native language adequately whatever anyone does, and the attempt to teach them language is fraught with psychological perils. For example, to ?correct? the way a child speaks is potentially to give him what used to be called an inferiority complex. Moreover, when schools undertake such correction, they risk dividing the child from his parents and social milieu, for he will speak in one way and live in another, creating hostility and possibly rejection all around him. But happily, since every child is a linguistic genius, there is no need to do any such thing. Every child will have the linguistic equipment he needs, merely by virtue of growing older.

I need hardly point out that Pinker doesn?t really believe anything of what he writes, at least if example is stronger evidence of belief than precept. Though artfully sown here and there with a demotic expression to prove that he is himself of the people, his own book is written, not surprisingly, in the kind of English that would please schoolmarms. I doubt very much whether it would have reached its 25th printing had he chosen to write it in the dialect of rural Louisiana, for example, or of the slums of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Even had he chosen to do so, he might have found the writing rather difficult. I should like to see him try to translate a sentence from his book that I have taken at random, ?The point that the argument misses is that although natural selection involves incremental steps that enhance functioning, the enhancements do not have to be an existing module,? into the language of the Glasgow or Detroit slums.

In fact, Pinker has no difficulty in ascribing greater or lesser expressive virtues to languages and dialects. In attacking the idea that there are primitive languages, he quotes the linguist Joan Bresnan, who describes English as ?a West Germanic language spoken in England and its former colonies? (no prizes for guessing the emotional connotations of this way of so describing it). Bresnan wrote an article comparing the use of the dative in English and Kivunjo, a language spoken on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Its use is much more complex in the latter language than in the former, making far more distinctions. Pinker comments: ?Among the clever gadgets I have glimpsed in the grammars of so-called primitive groups, the complex Cherokee pronoun system seems especially handy. It distinguishes among ?you and I,? ?another person and I,? ?several other people and I,? and ?you, one or more other persons, and I,? which English crudely collapses into the all-purpose pronoun we.? In other words, crudity and subtlety are concepts that apply between languages. And if so, there can be no real reason why they cannot apply within a language?why one man?s usage should not be better, more expressive, subtler, than another?s.

Similarly, Pinker attacks the idea that the English of the ghetto, Black English Vernacular, is in any way inferior to standard English. It is rule- governed like (almost) all other language. Moreover, ?If the psychologists had listened to spontaneous conversations, they would have rediscovered the commonplace fact that American black culture is highly verbal; the subculture of street youths in particular is famous in the annals of anthropology for the value placed on linguistic virtuosity.? But in appearing to endorse the idea of linguistic virtuosity, he is, whether he likes it or not, endorsing the idea of linguistic lack of virtuosity. And it surely requires very little reflection to come to the conclusion that Shakespeare had more linguistic virtuosity than, say, the average contemporary football player. Oddly enough, Pinker ends his encomium on Black English Vernacular with a schoolmarm?s pursed lips: ?The highest percentage of ungrammatical sentences [are to be] found in the proceedings of learned academic conferences.?

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