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A few years ago the UCLA neuroanatomist and psychologist Harry Jerison asked, “What is so great about being smart?” with the implication that in our species' history, it is hard to conclude that our intelligence and our capacity for complex symbol use has done us more good than harm. What is ironic and prophetic, as Terence Deacon shows us in his extraordinary text, is that symbol use itself may be the only means available for shifting the balance toward a kind of positive outcome for ourselves, if not for the planet. The more we understand about the nature and origin of our symbolic capacities, he claims, the better we can regulate our enormous cognitive potential. He wrote his “mystery novel,” as he calls it, with this goal of increasing our understanding about how symbol reference and language came about, and ultimately, of who we are.
For about a year several UCLA linguists, psychoanalysts, and psychologists and I met weekly, reading, discussing, and debating The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. We all concluded that this is a profound work, remarkable for its scholarship and extreme detail, and deserving dedicated study. Here, I will sketch out a broad and oversimplified overview of Deacon's complex evolutionary scenario, and then discuss a few of his essential arguments.
Somewhere in our fuzzy past there were groups of australophithescines who had already been bipedal for some time and who could communicate with context-bound gestures and sounds. These foraging hominids lived in the savannas of eastern and southern Africa. We can only marvel that they survived at all in what must have been a continuously perilous environment. Except for their nascent evolutionary edge of symbolic reference, we might very well not be here, or might not know it. The time was about 2 million years ago; it had taken several more million years to get to that point from the great bifurcation that split man-to-be from the great apes. Then, something very st