Herbert Terrace is blogging at Psychology Today, at least in part to support his new book, Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can (Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures) . Here's the concluding paragraphs for a post entitled, Alfred Wallace's Problem.
How cooperation and the need to communicate about targets of scavenging contributed to the origin of words will be the topic of my next post. Meanwhile, we should recognize the mistake in Wallace’s and Müller‘s reasoning about natural selection. Both should have heeded Darwin’s observation that evolution proceeds in “innumerable gradations”, one of which was the use of words before grammar.
Language is too complex to have resulted from a single evolutionary change. The failure to recognize that fact is why the evolution of language has been an embarrassment since Darwin speculated about its origin a century and a half ago.
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