ROY D'ANDRADE

Cultural Darwinism and Language

ABSTRACT This article examines the effect of cultural selection on the development of language in humans. First, it is claimed that
directive and expressive types of speech acts are commonly found in many animal species. Representative speech acts, on the other
hand, with the exception of animal "calls," are found primarily among humans. !t is argued that a cultural environment is a probable
selective factor for the capacity to produce representative speech acts. Second, it is argued that representative speech acts, once they
became part of language, acted as a selective factor for increased intelligence and associated greater brain size. And, finally, it is argued
that the capacity to create representative speech acts selected for brains that could store great numbers of memory episodes and narratives, as well as plan for the future. [Key words: evolution, language, cultural selection, brain, intelligence, memory]

NUMBER OF YEARS AGO Washburn (1959) argued

that culture was an important selective factor in human evolution. Although most anthropologists have generally agreed, little has been done by cultural and psychological anthropologists to expand on Washburn's point,
with a few exceptions such as Geertz's 1962 essay "The
Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind" (see 1973).
This article is an attempt to follow Washburn's lead and
consider further the role of culture as a selective factor in
human evolution, especially on (1) the development of
language and (2) the growth of the brain. More formal arguments for the importance of culture as a selective factor
in human evolution can be found in Akoi and Feldman
1987, Boyd and Richardson 1985, Calvalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, Durham 1991, and Laland et al. 2000.
A definition of culture is needed before presenting arguments. Culture, as used here, refers to the social heritage
of learningsthat is, the constructs, propositions, beliefs,
and techniques of doing things that people learn from each
other and by which they adapt and adjust to the external
world and to each other. Culture has two sides. One side
consists of a variety of external physical manifestations, induding actions, talk, gestures, pictures, and so on, which
aie understood to be signs. On the other side is the mental
world of meanings and understandings. If the physical
signs were not linked to mental meanings, there would be
no way to communicate about them or pass them on to the
other generations. And if the mental meaning were not
linked to physical signs, the signs would be pointless sounds
and scribbles. The mental meanings of culture are variably
externalized (some ideas are embodied in more signs than
others), variably shared, variably Institutionalized and dis-

AMERICAN ANTHHOPOIOGIST 104(1) 2 2 3 - 2 3 2

tributed in social roles, and variably internalized in human personalities (D'Andrade 1995).
Given this definition of culture, what does it mean to
say that culture is a selective factor in human evolution?
Most obviously, it means that our bodies and our psyches
have been affected by a past history of living a cultural
way of life. That is, having a certain kind of body and a
certain kind of psyche, with certain inbuilt emotions, desires, and cognitive skills, has been selected for because we
have been living in a cultural worlda cultural nichefor
millions of years. In a rather different sense of the term
than is usually used, it can be said that humans are, via
evolution, "culturally constituted."
One of Washburn's (1959) examples of cultural selection is the effect of tool use on the human hand. The
point is not whether the capacity to make tools was the result of natural selection (the standard agreement is that it
was); rather, the argument is that once tool use became
part of human culture, the fact that humans were using
tools selected for the specialized human "precision grip"
the way one holds a screwdriverwhich other primates
lack. Because our ancestors were part of a toolmaking culture, there was an advantage to having fingers that could
hold tools and shape them with precision and strength,
and this selective pressure resulted in physical changes in
the hand. Over any one generation the hand shaped tools,
but over generations, tools shaped the hand.
CULTURE AS A SELECTIVE FORCE FOR THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THE REPRESENTATIONAL
FUNCTION OF HUMAN LANGUAGE

One o! the central issues in human evolution concerns the

development of language. The human brain ililtcrs from

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those of other animals in having both a greater capacity

for grammatically and semantically complex language and
a great innate interest in speaking a language (Vilensky et
al. 1982). This interest in talking is observed by every parent but can be seen in stark form in the case of children
who are functionally deaf but whose parents do notfor
various reasonshave their children taught sign language.
As research by Goldin-Meadow and Feldman (1977) has
discovered, these children develop and teach to their parents grammatical sign language forms that the children
develop by themselves, thereby bringing their parents into
communication with them.
Obviously, for humans now living in a languagebased cultural way of life, being able to talk gives individuals an adaptive advantage. However, this does not explain
how humans came to have a language in the first place. In
fact, there is an interesting problem about the selective advantage of language. The problem is that many of the selective factors postulated for the development of language
are too general, as pointed out by Bickerton (1990) and
Burling (1999a). For example, one might argue that language ability would be selected for because language increases the potential for cooperation, or manipulating
other creatures, or dealing with large groups. The problem
with these arguments is that, were they true, there should
be talking wolves, elephants, baboons, lions, and so on.
These arguments make language such a good thing that it
is impossible to explain why only humans have it. As
Loring Brace says about similar arguments for the advantages of intelligence: "One of the questions which h.as always made me feel a little uneasy about arguments of the
development of human intellect... is: If it worked so well
for humans why did it not work for other creatures as
well? If the explanation has general value, what was the
reason it only found its expression in the human line?"
(1993:695).
A number of factors have been speculated about as
possible causes of the development of language. The argument presented here focuses on cultural factors and is
based on certain assumptions: first, that language is not a
unified entity but, rather, consists of a multifunctional variety of perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral processes
and structures (Langacker 1987). Second, many language
functions are shared with other species. Many species can
reasonably be described as having "language" if one recognizes that the term language is polysemous, with three major senses: (!) the sounds, words, and grammar used by a
community (e.g., the Bantu language); (2) audibie, articulated, meaningful sound (e.g., human language); and (3) a
systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by
means of signs, sounds, gestures, or marks that have understood meanings (e >;, dog language) (taken from lW/>\tcr\ Third New Intcnuitional Dictionary 1993). Thus, although noiihuinan species communicate primarily by
iionlc iinii indexical signs rather than grammatically organized verbal symbols,1 these systems ol communication
will !>c termed here as lunguage In sense 3.

The third assumption is that the most important aspect of any communicative system with respect to selection
is its pragmatic functionsthe things that the communicative system can be used for and thus the effects this
communication system has on others. Finally, it is assumed
that the evolution of communicative systems, including
the use of symbols and grammar, can be explained by Darwinian selection (Pinker and Bloom 1990) and that infrahuman adaptations have served the biological groundwork for the development of human language (Bates and
MacWhinney 1989; Bates et al. 1989).
Pragmatic functions of human language can be classified by types of speech acts. Based on analyses by Austin
(1962), Vendler (1972), Searle (1975), Labov and Fanshel
(1977), and others, five speech act functions have been described that appear to be universal.2 One of these is the directive function: people order, demand, request, beg, and
so on for other people to do various things. Directives can
be direct: for example, "Give me that!"; or indirect: for example, "Would you mind passing the salt?" Directive
speech acts are widely distributed among carnivores and
primates, who use a system of signs composed of gestures
and sounds to indicate who is to do what for the speaker
(Dingwall 1988; Givon 1979). Talmy Givon (1979:277), a
linguist, has presented an analysis of the language of a
male Belgian shepherd dog. Givon points out that this canine language system is limited in its reference almost entirely to reference about here and now, you and 1, this one
here, and that one there. Communications are typically
about some action or event that the addressee is to do or
produce. Givon describes his dog as saying:
(You) give me this!
(You) come with me this way!
(You) Jet me out!
Not surprisingly, directives are the predominant speech
act not only of primates in the wild (Dingwall 1979) but
also of primates who have been taught to use human sign
or token languages (Givon 1979; Miles 1990). Directives
are also the predominant speech act of early child language, with proto-imperatives occurring before nine
months of age (Givon 1979).
Even more widely spread across the animal kingdom
is another type of speech act, called expressives. In English,
statements like "Ouch!" "Damn!" and so on are canonical
expressives. Expressives dominate a baby's communication during the first six months of life (Givon 1979:291)
Adults are often indirect in using expressives, especially
those that derogate others, although not so indirect that
one does not feel the sting: for example, "You might have
thought of me before doing that." Givon records his dog
as saying:
! tot! terrific.1
I Jove you!
I'm scared!
!'m all excited.

D'Andrade Cultural Darwinism and Language

Expressives are used extensively by other mammals.

The evidence concerning birds, reptiles, insects, fish, and
other orders is less clear, but few people have trouble understanding a puppy's whine. Of course, there can be a
problem in determining whether various animal expressions of emotion have conscious communicative intent.
This is part of a more general problem of judging intention in nonhumans. But in any case there is little doubt
that animal expressions of emotion have a communicative
function,
It is interesting that the apes who have been taught
sign languages have been quick to understand and use the
terms good and bad as expressives. Miles, who taught
American Sign Language to a male orangutan, notes:
The sign DIRTY was originally used for urine or feces....
By 1981 [at the age of three], 70% of Chantek's communications using DIRTY were for urine or feces. However, he
also overextended its meaning to refer to soiled objects as
well as "bad" behavior when he was scolded. This represents an overlap in meaning. When the sign BAD was
later introduced to describe disapproved behavior, Chantek decreased his use of DIRTY for these circumstances
from 29% to 10% of his communications, and he began
to use BAD instead. [1990:527]

The third, fourth, and fifth functions of speech are, so

far as 1 know, predominately human. The third function is
usually called the representative function. The normal form
in speech is the declarative sentence that informs someone about something, potentially something that is not
immediately present: for example, "John found a nut tree
in that canyon last year." This is the what/when/where aspect of a communicative system. "Calls," in which an animal provides information about the presence of predators
or prey or other kinds of environmental information, can
be considered a combination of representatives and directives. Similarly, bee communicative systems would be another example of the representative function in nonhumans. In general, however, animal calls tend to be limited
to giving information about the here and now and usually
also function as directives.
In human language representatives typically involve
more complex grammatical relations than directives and
expressives. Directives normally have an understood and
unstated actor and recipient: for example, "(You) bring
(me) the ball"; meanwhile, expressives often have only a
grammatically understood experiencer/speaker: for example, "Damn," Representatives, on the other hand, require
subjects and objects and must distinguish who did what to
whom, Representation of nonimmediate or displaced
events presents a greater demand for true symbols, for it is
difficult to use pointinga clear indexical signto indicate what Is not there. Development of representatives, especially representatives about nonimmediate events or
displaced reference, would have greatly increased the need
for the development of grammar and true symbols (Bickerton 1995; Deacon 1997),

225

The fourth function of language is called by John

Searle (1975), following Austin (1962), the commissive.
Commissives are basically promises to do something or
commitments of some sort: for example, "I'll bring the
beer." And the fifth function of language is called the declarative. Declarative speech acts are a special category by
which the speaker creates a symbolic condition of some
sort (Searle 1975). The minister marries a couple by appropriately declaring the couple married. Other common examples of declaratives are "You're fired" and "I vote 'no.' "
The fourth and fifth speech-act functions of language
would have evolved later than the representative function
because they require making a representation to perform
the promise or declaration. Interestingly, as with most
things claimed to be being uniquely human, one can find
rudimentary examples among the nonhuman primates,
such as the implicit promise involved in vervet grooming
before receiving help (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990) and testes holding by male baboons apparently used to cement
alliances (Smuts and Watanabe 199O).3
Most linguists consider true symbols and grammar to
be the defining and essential marks of language. This
seems unnecessarily restrictive. That said, there is something useful about the question "Why don't other creatures use true symbols?" Deacon (1996) has argued that it
is not convincing to say that symbols are not found in the
communicative systems of others animals because they do
not need them, for to whatever degree they need a communicative system of any kind, symbols could theoretically be useful.
Deacon's argument is that the reason only humans
use arbitrary symbols is that, given the structure of the primate/mammalian brain, learning arbitrary symbols is an
extremely difficult task, requiring something primates just
do not do well. The problem the primate brain has in
learning symbols, according to Deacon, involves not just
learning that a sign means that one should do something
with some object but learning relationships among the
symbols themselves. The human brain has been uniquely
adapted to do this kind of learning, but if the learning is
developmentally delayed, it can be quite difficult for even
a human to learn (Deacon 1996).
Susan Schaller (1995), in a fascinating study of an
adult male deaf mute from Oaxaca living in Los Angeles
who could pantomime but could not use sign language,
describes vividly the difficulty ol trying to teach this man
to understand pure symbols. After weeks of struggle, when
he finally made the breakthrough that the sign tor cat means
cat, he went through an extreme emotional state, demanded
the sign for numerous objects in the classroom, and wept.
The emotional strength of his reaction is reminiscent of
Heien Keller's response to learning the word for water.
Jean Massieu, a deaf 18th-century French 14 year old who
was taught the names of things by names drawn under
pictures, Is reported to have had a similar reaction when

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he realized that names have meaning (Aitchison 1996:

95-96).
However great the problems faced by our hominid ancestors in developing an arbitrary symbol language system
that could represent distant events, the transition was
eventually made, The argument to be made here is that a
cultural way of life increased the fitness of individuals
who were more effective at producing and understanding
representatives because hominid band life became organized in such a way that information outside the immediate
world of the here and now came to have important value.
According to this argument, a strongly cultural way of life,
involving learned age and sex roles with complex learned
routines, performed at different times and in different
places, fragmented the unitary here-and-now togetherness
of the primate band, at the same time requiring ever more
coordination by means of environmental and social information concerning things not present. In such a world,
displaced linguistic representations became the glue that
held together the intersubjective world of the band.
Why, then, do baboons, wolves, lions, and apes not
have representative speech acts outside simple calls? Consider a wild dog who wishes to communicate to the rest of
the pack: "I saw a lot of ground squirrels east of here." The
best a dog can do is say, in its canine manner: "Come with
me this way!" This is quite adequate provided the informing dog can take the rest of the pack to the squirrels. But
when the complexity of the coordination of action
reaches a point at which "follow me" or "go that way"
commands no longer suffice, representative speech is
needed to specify the directives concerning who should do
what, when, and where. The increased importance of the
family and the increased sexual division of labor within
families increased the complexity and differentiation of
daily routines in ancestral human groups, which in turn
increased the need for representative information. The
adaptive advantage of representative information would
also have been augmented by the fact that special adaptations necessary to exploit new environmentsnew tools,
new behavioral routines, new strategies and decisionshad to be accomplished by learning and sharing
new cognitive structures, something greatly facilitated by
linguistic representations.
This argument says that there are certain kinds of information that only representative speech acts can communicate effectively. These are not things like how to
make tools or how to do pack hunting, which can be
learned by direct observation and participation. For learning such things, representatives convey no huge advantage. But what, when, and where knowledge about events
incurring outside one's own observational world can only
be effectively loiiiinuiiiuteil by representations (see Bickerton 1990).
Civon (1979) has .in interesting discussion ot how the
social organization of wild canines and pongkls fits their
spec-ill ait forms. He points out that their social groups
form small worlds in which most individuals know the

others intimately and there is a shared model of the world

There is no occupational differentiation, and there are
relatively small sex differences in activity. General skills
are acquired by all adult members as a product of experience, The home range usually stays constant for relatively
long periods in an individual's life. In such a world there is
a shared universe of knowledge in which likely actions are
obvious to everyone. In general, each individual can infer
accurately most of the emotions, goals, and other internal
states of other members of the group. Givon points out
that under such conditions there is little need for representative speech acts because what, when, and where are
known by immediate experience. The major task for communication is the instigation of action by direct means of
directives or indirectly through expressives,
What this argument does not explain is how there
came to be a cultural way of life with role specialization
and a complex division of labor in the first place. Standard
text explanations (Haviland 1994; Lewin 1984) say that a
developing complex of tool manufacture, tool use, and
specialized hunting and scavenging pushed hominid
groups in the direction of greater division of labor and
more emphasis on marital and family relationships. This
complex required learned cultural adaptations to the opening of new ecological niches. The usual placement of this
niche is the East African savanna, although forest-edge
and interlacustrine sites would also seem to be good possibilities.
In sum, the argument presented here about the evolution of language has the following form:
1. Most primates and other mammals live in predominantly here-and-now worlds in which their languages, containing primarily directives and expressives, are adequate for the social coordination of
action. These animals produce few representative
speech acts outside of simple calls because they do
not need them and, if taught human languages, still
predominantly produce only directives and expressives.
2. To account for the development of human language, one must account for the development of
representative speech acts that have the capacity to
represent the world outside the known here and
now. For this to have happened, there must have
been a point in human evolution when producing
representations of things outside the known here
and now began to be advantageous for individual
reproductive success. It is likely that this would occur with the development of a cultural way of
lifethat is, with the need to coordinate learned
routines with complex environmental and social
information about things and events not present.
It is not assumed here that hominids first had to develop a large brain before they could learn a language that
used representatives. Apes can be taught enough symbolic
language by humans to form linguistic representative-

D'Andrade Cultural Darwinism and Language

Pepperberg (1987) successfully taught an African grey pariot to use spoken language to request, identify, and even
count objects, as well as to make verbal judgments about
difference and similarity, The "trick"if it can be called
thatfor both Pepperberg teaching Alex and the Rumbaughs teaching Austin, Sherman, and Kanzi, is the use of
naturalistic training procedures that stress the pragmatics
of language and the modeling of the activities of another
creature. The idea of symbolic reference is not obvious to
most creatures and needs careful tuition. However, the capacity for symbolic reference is already there in the ape
and some parrots; it does not require another thousand
cubic centimeters of brain.
One can say that in focusing on the conditions that
would select for the use of representative speech acts, the
really important things about the differences between human and nonhuman language have been overlooked. One
might argue that what needs to be accounted for in evolutionary terms is the use of speech sounds as symbols
(Brandon and Hornstein 1986) or the development of
grammar and the capacity to produce an infinite number
of utterances (Pinker and Bloom 1990). These are important problems but not the problem being addressed here.
The problem here is to find an explanation for the differing uses of language. The fact that we have evolved to do
what we do with language by means of the larynx, producing speech sounds, requiring a relatively complex grammar, is a different level of problem and requires a different
level of explanation. Unless speech sounds, true symbols,
and grammar did something adaptive, they would not
have been selected for in the first place.
There are other explanations of the evolution of language, such as the idea that human language developed as
a means of social and emotional grooming (Dunbar 1993)
or as a result of the Machiavellian potentialities that language brings (Bryne and Whiten 1988). However, the idea
that language developed as a means of social grooming ignores the fact that primates already have a well-developed
and complex language for doing exactly this, which Burling (1999b) calls "gesture-calls." Gesture-calls include
sounds (grunts, laughs, screams), gestures, body postures,
and facial expressions. In humans, the gesture-call system
and the symbol-grammar system operate simultaneously.
Human and ape primates are both masters of the gesturecall system. The Dunbar hypothesis successfully predicts
the spectacular human gesture-call system. (Watch two old
friends at a reunion, or two academics in an argument, or
a French mime having his heart broken.) But the Dunbar
hypothesis does not predict our representation-making
language system.
The Machiavellian potentiality of speech as an evolutionary account fails to explain how deceit could increase
adaptive fitness unless language representatives were already present. One cannot lie about the cat being on the
mat unless one can say that the cat is on the mat. So,
a
galn, the problem comes back to the question of how

227

representatives evolved, The cultural selection hypothesis

presented here is certainly not a complete explanation of
the development of human language, but it is a contender
because it attends to the question of why selection occurred among human ancestors and not the other primates and also relates directly to the major difference between humans and apes in the use of language.
LANGUAGE AS A SELECTIVE FORCE FOR INCREASING
BRAIN SIZE

However it happened, once the representative function of

language had been sufficiently developed, a new factor of
cultural selection came into effect, With language to transmit knowledge to others, knowing a great many things became a real possibility. Without representative language,
most knowledge dies with each individual. Language makes
possible an advantage in having brain structures large enough
to store hundreds of thousands of items because it makes learning from other brains effective and efficient. And in a cultural

world, an individual who knows very large amounts of information has an advantage over an individual who does
not.
So far as 1 have been able to discover, language as a
factor of cultural selection and a cause of the large human
brain has been rarely discussed in the literature. In a
search for past formulations of this hypothesis, 1 did discover that a similar point had been made by Darwin in
The Descent of Man:
A great stride in the development of the intellect will have
followed, as soon as the half-art and half-instinct of language came into use; for the continued use of language
will have reacted on the brain and produced an inherited
effect; and this again will have reacted on the improvement of language. As Mr. Chauncey Wright (1870) has
well remarked, the largeness of the brain in man relatively
[sic] to his body, compared with the lower animals, may
be attributed in chief part to the early use of some simple
form of languagethat wonderful engine which affixes
signs to all sorts of objects and qualities, and excites trains
of thought which would never arise from the mere impression of the sense, or if they did arise could not be followed out. [1871:173]
The point is also made by George Miller (1981) in a discussion of the expansion of association areas in the human
brain compared with those in other primates. He suggests
that the expansion functioned to increase the neural tissue available for memory and that this was selected for because there was "something worth remembering":
What could this have been? We can never know for sure,
but clearly the information in our mental lexiconnot to
mention our mental encyclopediacould not be stored in
anything less than a prodigious memory.... Why did
larger memories suddenly become so valuable? Language
acts both as a medium by which the information mows
from one brain to another and as a medium by which
Information within a single brain is processed through verbal reasoning and planning. As Darwin succinctly says,
language "excites trains of thought which would never
arise from the mere Impression of sense, or if tliev did artse
could not be followed." Verhops \ynholic rowimimhiifi<vt

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came first, then the large brain followed because it enhanced
the selective advantage of those who could communicate symbolically. (1981.108, emphasis added]
Gibson and Jessee also present a similar hypothesis:
In the human species language serves as perhaps the primary mechanism for the social transmission and verification of factual information. Thus, irrespective of whether
expansion of the limbic circuits played an integral role in
the evolution of the neural substrates of language, expansion of these regions were integral for mastering the factual information transmitted by language. [1999:203, emphasis
added]

Undoubtedly, others have said similar things. It is interesting, however, that this rather obvious effect of language is
not often discussed in the literature. My suspicion is that
this is because language is a cultural phenomenon and not
normally considered a part of natural selection. Group
size, diet, or gait seem more like "real" explanatory factors
to many people because they are simple physical things,
whereas language is not.
Gibson and Jessee (1999) also stress that absolute
brain size is probably the best simple predictor of primate
cognitive skills, rather than various brain-body size ratios.
Brain size, they point out, is highly correlated with neuronal density, the ratio of dendritic connections to neurons,
and the complexity of dendritic branching. Gibson and
Jessee say:
Taken together, these findings indicate that overall brain
size in primates is a significant predictor of many neural
parameters potentially related to cognition, learning, or
sensorimotor skills. Although other factors may yet be
found that are equally predictive of overall behavioral capacity, at the present time absolute brain size and/or the
size of many neural components that strongly correlate
with absolute brain size appear to have the greatest predictive value.... [A]ny explanation of the evolution of
human language or cognitive skills must eventually come
to terms with these size variations. [1999:200-201]
Exactly what happens to the structure and processes
of the human brain as it increases from 300 or so cubic
centimeters to over 1,300 cubic centimeters is still a matter of active research. It used to be thought that human
brains differed from ape brains in having greater frontal
lobes. However, recent work by Semendeferi and her associates using Magnetic Resonance Imaging has found that
human frontal lobes have the same proportions as those
of other great apes relative to total brain size (Semendeferi
and Damasio 2000). The relative size of the temporal lobe
seems to have increased slightly, while the cerebellum decreased slightly. Within the relatively constant sizes of
these largo areas Semendeferi finds enlargement of specific
neural areas fur humans, especially area 10 of the frontal
iobe, which is involved in abstract thinking and planning.
The medloilorsal and anterior primipai nuclei of the
tlialauuis, Important in attention and (mling information,
hiivc also enlarged noticeably in humans. For both humans and bonohos the or!>itofrontal lortices, which .no
involved in emotional processing, ,ne highly diversified
(Aitiistiong I*>82; Semcndetrii In press) Thus, the human

brain did not just increase in size; significantly increased

specializations of cortical and subcortical areas are also important.
Deacon (1997), considering the controversy about
whether increase in brain size causes increase in intelligence, points out that the general cognitive strategies of
small-brained animals differ from those of large-brained
animals. In general, smaller animals with smaller brains
must be quicker to control limbs, and their decision making must be more streamlined because their high metabolic rates and minimal energy reserves offer little leeway in
foraging activities, defending against predators, and mating activities. Also, the short lifetimes of small animals decrease the amount of time for learning and demand more
reliance on preprogrammed behavior. More specifically with
respect to the effects of increasing brain size, although increasing brain size normally increases the number of neurons,
the number of connections among neurons must increase
geometrically to maintain a constant level of connectional integration. This becomes an impossibility when considering increases of millions or billions of neurons, as in the
case of hominid development. This problem is met primarily by differentiation of function; however, differentiation requires more long-distance connections to integrate
functional areas and, hence, a slowing down of responses.
Deacon says:
Thus, even if size confers greater information-canying capacity, these gains may be balanced by significant costs in
other areas of function.... But reduced processing speeds
and loss of integration of function may not be prohibitive
prices to pay for increased discrimination and storage capacities, so long as its large size also shields the organism
from the need to produce rapid learning and responses.
[1997:163]
The argument presented here is not that the great increase in brain size was driven solely or even primarily by
requirements of greater intelligence, although, even with
modern humans, brain size is significantly correlated
(around .40) with intelligence (Wickett et al. 2000). Rather,
the argument made here and presented in more detail below is that the major selective pressure was to increase the
amount of knowledge or expertise that could be stored by
an individual (Skoyles 1999). There seems to be agreement
that larger brain size is a requirement for such storage. Undoubtedly, selective pressure for increased skills of many
kindstool use, throwing, weaving, and so onwould have
added increased pressure on brain expansion.
According to the hypotheses presented above, the
large increase in human brain size and the subcortical
changes that occurred between australopithecines and archaic Homo sapiens would have happened as representative speech acts became a part of language. Lieberman, in
a review of the fossil evidence, concludes that "Homo
erectus clearly possessed manual, cognitive, and probably
language abilities commensurate with increased brain
size" (1998:81). For Neanderthals (and, by extension, other
archaic sapiens) Uebernun (1998:137) concludes that they

D'Andrade Cultural Darwinism and Language

had vocal tracts that are intermediate between those of
modern humans and apes, He states:
The Neanderthals, who had vocal tracts that were intermediate between ours and the ape-australopithecine
model,.. illustrate the continuity of evolution and the
adaptive value of speech. Their speech was less efficient
and "dear" than ours; they represent an intermediate
stage in the evolution of human speech. Neanderthals
must also have possessed the neural circuits and
neuroanatomical structures that regulate speech production and that are implicated in human language and cognition, [1998:141-142]
Lieberman suggests that the roots of human language
reach all the way back to the australopithecines. He cites
the work of Gordon Hewes, who thought that the earliest
form of protolanguage used manual gestures, facial expressions (grins, lip protrusion, etc.), and posture. The Lieberman/Hewes position is similar to that of Burling concerning gesture-calls. Lieberman (1998:84-85) links such a
gestural protolanguage to australopithecines in part because of the close connection between the brain mechanisms that control precise manual motor movements and
speech production (see also Calvin and Bickerton 2000).
According to the account being presented here, the
development of language, like the growth of the human
brain, was a long, slow, million-plus-year process, moving
from the gestural calls of apes, to the development of a
protolanguage among Homo erectus, and then finally to
the development of modern language with symbols and
grammar during the period of increased encephalization
characteristic of archaic sapiens. With some variation, this
appears to be the consensus position of most current theorists of language evolution (King 1999). The particular hypothesis presented here is that increase in language capacity and use, driven by the selective pressures involved in
coordinating a cultural way of life, increased the potential
of gaining knowledge from the brains of others, which increased the selective pressure for a larger brain to increase
the effectiveness of cognitive processing and the size of
memory storage, which then in turn increased the capacity for an even more culturally based way of life.
This two-cycle positive feedback loop appears to have
driven brain size to the physical limits of the human body.
Davidson (1999) speculates that the increase in stature
from Australopithecus to Homo (from 1.05-1.40 meters to
1.75 meters) was brought about primarily by the need to
accommodate a larger head. Greater cortical area within
the skull was created by the in-folding of the cortical
sheet. New physical adaptations provided this larger brain
with energy temperature regulation, Adaptation in the
structure of the female pelvis also had to occur. The modwn human brain continues to grow greatly after birth, requiring a long period of physical immaturity, All of these
adaptations have had costs, And despite these adaptations,
the human Infant skull is still so large that humans suffer
lo
ng, painful, and dangerous childbirths. This mosaic of

229

highly directional change is indicative of very strong selective pressure (Gibson and Jessee 1999).
The argument presented here contrasts with the argument that humans have big brains and language because
big brains and language give a creature greater intelligence. Such an argument faces Brace's objectionit does
not explain why all animals do not have genius-level IQs
and giant heads. On evolutionary grounds, one assumes that
different species of animals have just as much language as they
need, and if they somehow had a human speech device
grafted into their brains and larynxes, they would only say
what they already communicate quite effectively. My cat,
for example, would say, "Let me o u t . . . . Well, I don't
know if I want to go out. Maybe 1 want to come in. No, I
want to got out. Well, I will just sit here while I decide, so
leave the door open." In fact, this is what my cat does say
without words. Animals already say quite well all that they
have to say; it is just that we have not specialized in listening. Because they do not use arbitrary symbols as their primary units of communication and do not specialize in
representative speech acts, we self-servingly deny that
they have language and thereby deny that they, too, are
saying something (Savage-Rumbaugh 1999).
MEMORY
A further point to make is that cultural selection did not
just make the brain bigit made it good at certain things
and not so good at others. That is, the specifics of our human cognitive capacities have been culturally selected.
This raises the question: Which cognitive things are we humans good at? It used to be thought that humans were
great symbol processorsexcellent at things like formal
logic, which is reasoning with uninterpreted symbols, like
([A = > B] = > C) = > (A = > C). However, when computers
came along, it turned out it was easy to write programs
that could do symbol processing much better than humans. In the 1960s computer programs were written that
proved all the theorems of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica in a few seconds. So although humans
are better at pure symbol processing than any other carbon-based form of life on this planet, we are not even in the
same league with desktop computers. We just looked good
before computers because we had no competitors.
However, computers are not good at everything. Human's brains are good at lots of things that computers at
present are notsuch as rendering a visual scene into
three-dimensional objects and coordinating physical movements with these objects. However, this ability was not
culturally selected for. Dogs are as good as or maybe better
than humans at catching flying Ftisbees. What, then, are
the human cognitive capacities that have been selected for
by a cultural way of life?
One of the things hum.ins are very good at is recili.
The vocabularies of nonhuinan primates who have been
taught either sign or token languages turn out to be verysmall, with a maximum of ,i lew hundred words. The human

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American Anthropologist Vol. 104, No, 1 March 2002

capacity seems to be 100 times larger. Nagy and Anderson

(1984) estimate that printed school English contains between 25,000 and 50,000 words. Miller (1996), in a review
of the problem of estimating vocabulary size, estimates
that the average high school student has learned 60,000
words and superior students may know twice as many.
Even more impressive than our word memory is our enormous memory for events, for what happened in our pasts,
and for what other people have said to us.
The issue is not just the ability to retain a sensory impressionthat someone has done something nice for one
or that something tastes nice. With just one appropriately
distinctive event, most animals will remember whether to
approach or avoid a person or object. With respect to this
kind of memory store we are probably not much better
than other mammals. But humans canmore or less at
willrecall an enormous number of specific episodes: for
example, the day my car broke down Bill went out of his
way to give me a lift and took me to the grocery store, and
we talked about the bad weather and so on. Humans can
also remember a huge number of knowledge factsnames
of people, number facts, word meanings, the things that
are on trivia tests, and so onwhich is called declarative
knowledge. Dudai (1997), a neuroscientist who studies
memory, estimates that the total number of retrievable
items in human declarative memory is somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 items. Unfortunately, there is
not any hard comparative species data on extensiveness of
memory,4 but the great difference between humans and
apes with respect to learning vocabulary indicates that humans are, in all likelihood, one or two orders of magnitude
better than other animals with respect to episodic memory
and declarative knowledge.
Why should such an ability be selected for? According
to cultural selection theory, language created a new possibility that created a new advantagehaving lots of knowledge. One of the major sources of human knowledge is our
personal memories. Once language capacities have developed, it becomes possible to share our stores of memory
and become experts (Skoyles 1999). This makes having
relevant memories something of valuea resource that
gives an individual selective advantage. And having this
large memory makes it possible to remember the memories that other people have told one: the kinds of things
there are in the world, how to do things, what is likely to
happen, and the old storiesthe myths, tales, family traditions, and local lore that people everywhere recount.
Memory is "looking back" to the past. Humans are
also notable for their forward memoriesthat is, their
ability to look forward to the future, to plan ahead, to anticipate what will happen, to predict and develop elaborate scenarios of what may be. This, too, seems to be a cognitive capacity that is distinctively human. It is not that
other i matures <.io not do planning; they obviously do. It
Is just that we do it ever so much more than other creatures. It Is inleresting that persons with Alzheimer's and
other people with extreme memory problems also have

problems imagining the future; they typically seem unable

to conceive that the future will not be just like the present
and they are generally unable to plan beyond looking forward to already established routines. Again, once language
developed, it became possible to share plans, so having a
mind that can both plan and store other people's plans as
well as one's own becomes a resource. To the extent that
language makes possible extensive planning, and to the
extent that more extensive planning increases adaptiveness, the human brain would again be affected, becoming
an even better thinking engine, as Darwin suggested.
It is argued here that the distinctive human capacities
to talk, to remember, and to plan are all part of a package
created by cultural selection. The advantages of talking,
sharing memory, and making plans, central to and selected by a cultural way of life, are factors that formed the
large brains we now have, brains that also give us a natural
fascination with stories and a great love of gab and brains
than can store a huge amount of exactly this kind of stuff.
It may distress some anthropologists that claims such
as these are not based on direct observation of behavior.
But, obviously, this is not possible when trying to reconstruct evolutionary history. Claims about evolutionary
history are sometimes called "just so" stories. Just so. But
some stories fit the facts we have in hand better than others. 5 Although we may never know for sure which story is
best, this is not because there is no true story. The true
story is what happened. The problem here is an ancient
one. Once we had the capacity to create stories, we had
the problem of trying to decide which stories are true. One
sophisticated form of this endeavor is called "science,'
just so stories and all (D'Andrade 1986).

ROY D'ANDRADE Department of Anthropology, University of

California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093
NOTES
Acknowledgments. Helpful comments by Daniel Fessler, Paul Kay,
Don Tuzin, Katerina Semendeferi, Melford Spiro, and Marc Swartz
are gratefully acknowledged. I particularly wish to thank James
Moore, who added greatly to my understanding of human evolution and its debates.
1. A sign is something that stands for something else for somebody. Icons stand for things because they resemble them. InAats
stand for things because of their connection to them; the connection can be causal, spatial, or temporal. Symbols stand for things by
virtue of a purely conventional or arbitrary association between
the physical sign and the meaning of the sign (Peirce 1940).
2. This classification of speech acts has its critics (see Lapore and
Van Gullck 1991). The general thrust of these criticisms is that
Searle has not given a fully satisfactory philosophical account of
how It Is that speech acts are accomplished (what it "really means'
to make a promise, for exampie). So far as i know, there are no critics who hold that people do not product different kinds of speech
acts. Also, none of the critics that I am aware of has disputed the
claim that principled and useful distinctions can be made among
directives, expre$sivc\ representatives, and declarations. It is noteworthy that these five funciioru can be reliably coded in natural
Interaction (D'Andrade and Wish 1985) and have shown gw*t
value in the analysis of the pragmatic use ot language (Labo and
Fanshel 1977).

D'Andrade Cultural Darwinism and Language

3. These nice examples were suggested by an anonymous reviewer.
4. In a persona! communication, Dudai (February 10, 2001) reported that he was not aware of systematic cross-species comparative research concerning the size of Jong-term memory. For example, in a collection of chapters on memory in animals and humans
edited by Andrew Mayes (1983) there are no estimates of the size of
long-term memory for any of the species mentioned. Dudai has
pointed out that part of the problem Is the difficulty of measuring
the capacity of long-term memory without a defined output such
as song or storage sites. For birds, Dudai (1989) estimates that some
species know several hundred songs.
5. For those who have heard that the correspondence theory of
truth is not philosophically sound and feel perplexed about this, it
may be of interest that Searle has written a straightforward and
powerful analysis of this issue, found in chapter 9 of his The Construction of Social Reality (1995). Searle finds Strawson's and Davidson's doubts about Austin's argument that "statements are true if
and only if they fit the facts" (1995:219) to be unwarranted and
presents a compelling argument that Austin is right.
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