Simone Rotella
RESEARCH on the evolution of language suggests that our communication is largely about cooperation. When we speak with each other, the idea goes, we do so to help coordinate our actions. Antelope hunters, for example, who can signal their movements to each other will do better than those who can’t tell others what they are going to do next. Talking benefits others, and often ourselves.
This perspective, however, ignores elements of an ignoble past: the history of language is also one of subtle lies, not clear truths. Recognising that our communication is a mix of such evolutionary influences can help us better understand our origins and broach big problems of our time, discerning truth from falsity and honesty from disinformation.
Animal signals are the basis of all communication, including human language. When animals signal to one another, the point, evolutionarily speaking, is for self-benefit. Take Batesian mimicry, which is named after the 19th-century naturalist Henry Walter Bates. This involves, for example, a butterfly gaining an edge by evolving colouration that deters predators because it looks similar to another species that is toxic, without any need to expend effort to gain toxicity itself. A lie of sorts.
Yet, unlike in the natural world, human languages don’t appear to be bound by the rule of selfishness: we can and do talk to help each other, not just ourselves. Two cognitive scientists, Thom Scott-Phillips and Christophe Heintz, recently argued that we humans, uniquely, express ourselves in ways that aren’t directly dictated by evolution. We don’t talk just to attract mates or scare predators: the ways we communicate, like the ways we think, aren’t bound to survival and reproduction alone.
Instead, the complexity of language, they argue, relates to the largely interconnected and interdependent lives we lead. But we still have to choose those people we would most like to connect with – our friends – based on shared ideals and behaviours that best promote our mutual benefit. And it is those choices that force us to rely on the complexity of language to advertise ourselves to others, and to adjust those advertisements to our own circumstances.
Of course, these cooperation-promoting qualities of language don’t mean that when we talk, we are always doing so for cooperative reasons – or that what we say is always honest. As the renowned biologist William Hamilton wrote more than half a century ago, we are just as likely to use language to deceive – be it others or ourselves.
Today, with easy access to more information than ever in our evolutionary history, the so-called infodemic makes choosing our sources and the best evidence a difficult and daunting task.
Recognising all the origins of language, from the most basic non-linguistic signal to the layered subtleties of poetry, can help us. When someone says, for example, that taxation doesn’t reduce inequality or that vaccines don’t work, the listener should pay close attention not just to the speaker’s arguments, but to the reasons they have for making them. Lies, like the false colouration of the Batesian butterfly’s wings, are cheap, while the truth takes hard work, be it scientific, philosophical or artistic.
Evolutionary research has shown, convincingly, that human communication is as much about the listener as about the signaller. We have the power to discern what others want from us – and we should use lessons from the natural world, and our own history, to tell what motives lie behind someone’s language, and what they might be trying to hide. We shouldn’t naively assume that language always helps us to cooperate, but with close listening and reasoning, we can maximise the odds that it does.
Jonathan R. Goodman is at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies