LOCKING STEPS ACROSS DISCIPLINES Albert F. H. Naccache Archaeology Department, Lebanese University anaccash@nidal.com A specter is haunting Science -the specter of History. All the Powers of old Science have entered into a holy alliance to benefit from the reinvigorating spirit of this specter. Even cosmologists are looking at "the rich layering of history in the heavens" to refine their models of galactic evolution (Zepf and Ashman, 2003, 33). So it is not surprising that students of the evolution of language are after all kinds of cues about the history of how, over five million years, the primate communication system evolved from one that must have been less elaborate than that of present-day chimpanzees and bonobos to today’s human language. The proposed presentation will try to substantiate the claim that some of the cues presently perceived in the rich layering of history in the human brain and in the human mind are not only compatible with Sydney Lamb’s neurocognitive model of language, but that they can help us derive the steps and stages in language evolution consequent to this model. "A simple object can be conceived of as coming into being in an event called ‘originating’, but language is too complex to have been able to come about by virtue of any such event. The development had to start from a very primitive communication system, perhaps some- what like that of chimpanzees, and to progress on a step by step basis through a long series of intermediate stages, perhaps corresponding to the various stages a child goes through during the language development process" (Lamb, 1998, 287). I will pick my cues from two corners of the field of cognitive studies, and will start by attempting to synchronize the - step by step - through a long series of intermediate stages - scenarios of Radu Bogdan’s model of how, in childhood -and phylogeny, a reflexive mind evolves (Bogdan, 2000), and of Barbara Finlay’s model of brain evolution and development (Finlay & Darlington, 1995; Finlay, Darlington & Nicastro, 2001); then check that the result matches and supports the historical pace implied by Lamb’s model; and finally, on that basis sketch a history of the possible stages of language evolution as inferable from Lamb’s model. This matching reconstruction will be erected over a background of notions about language, borrowed from broadening, but not strictly concentric, approaches, from "Functional Grammar" and "Cognitive Neurolinguistics" (Givón 1978; 1998), to "Emergent Grammar" (Hopper 1998), to "Cultural Origins of Human Cognition" (Tomasello, 1999) and "Neural Darwinism" (Edelman, 1992), and informed by recent evolutionary thinking (Carroll, 2000; Cleland, 2001; Depew & Weber, 1995; Jablonka et al, 1998; Salthe et al, 1998). The proposed exercise is not one of defending a hypothesis about some behavioral challenge that might have driven language or brain evolution, although it might eventually help identify elements of the mosaic that contributed to fuel human evolution, or took advantage of the available spandrels. Nor is it one of identifying or defining the mechanisms that have allowed cultural accretion, though again it might eventually facilitate such tasks. Rather, the aim is to sketch a reasonably substantiated and illustrated multidisciplinary history of the social and cultural stages of accretion of the language-based human communication system. Such an approach, involving the harnessing of as much data from as many fields of study of human evolution as possible, is validated by checking that the various data sets meet some explicit tests of logical coherence and empirical compatibility. References - Bogdan, R., 2000. Minding Minds. Evolving a Reflexive Mind by Interpreting Others. MIT Press. - Carroll, R. L., 2000. "Towards a new evolutionary synthesis," Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 15:1, 27-31. - Cleland, C. E., 2001. "Historical science, experimental science, and the scientific method," Geology, 29:11, 987-990. - Depew, D. J., and B. H. Weber, 1995. Darwinism Evolving. Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection. MIT Press. - Edelman, G. M., 1992. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire. On the Matter of the Mind. BasicBooks. - Finlay, B. L. and R. B. Darlington, 1995. "Linked Regularities in the Development and Evolution of Mammalian Brains", Science, 268, 1578-1584. - Finlay, B. L., R. B. Darlington and N. Nicastro, 2001. "Developmental structure in brain evolution", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 263-308. - Givón, T., 1979. On Understanding Grammar. Academic Press. - Givón, T., 1998. "The Functional Approach to Grammar", in M. Tomasello (ed.), 1998, The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 41-66. - Hopper , P. J., 1998. "Emergent Grammar", in M. Tomasello (ed.), 1998, The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 155-175. - Jablonka, E., M. J. Lamb and E. Avital, 1998. " ‘Lamarckian’ mechanisms in darwinian evolution", Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 13:5, 206-210. - Lamb, S. M., 1998. Pathways of the Brain. The Neurocognitive Basis of Language. John Benjamins. - Salthe, S., G. van de Vijver, and M. Delpos, 1998. Evolutionary Systems: Biological and Epistemological Perspectives on Selection and Self-Organization. Kluwer Academic Publishers. - Tomasello, M., 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press. - Zepf, S. E. and K. M. Ashman, 2003. "The Unexpected Youth of Globular Clusters", Scientific American, 289:4, 28-33.