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Anyone who sets out to describe the role played by language in the development of our spesies is at once confronted by an apparent paradox, the Paradox of Continuity.Ifsuch aperson accepts the theory of evolution, that person must accept also that language is no more than an evolutionary adaptation - one of an unusual kind, perhaps, yet formed by the same prosesses that have formed countless other adaptations.If that is the case, when language cannot as novel as ot seems, for evolutionary adaptations do not emerge out of the blue.
There are two ways in which evolution can produce novel elements:by the recombination of existing genes inthe course of of normal breeding, or by mutations that affect genes directly. Even in the second case, absolute novelties are impossible.What happens in mutation is that the instructions for producing part of a particular type of creature are altered.Instructions for producing a new part cannot simply be added to the old recipe.Specific instructions that are capable of being altered must already exist to a greater or lesser extent.What this means is that language cannot be wholelly without antecedents of some kind.
But what kind of antecedents could language have?Since language is so widely regarded as a means of communication, the answer seems obvious:earlier systems of animal communication.It has long been known that many species communicate with one another.Some, like fireflies have blinking lights, others, like crickets, rub legs or wingcases together, while many exude chemical signals known as phenomenones.Of course such means are limited in their range of potential meaning and may signal nothing more complex than the presense of a potential mate.But the more sophisticated the creature, the more sophisticated themeans - from the dances of honeybees, through the posturing of sea gulls, to the sonar of dolphins - hence, the more complex the information that can be conveyed. Could not human language be just a supersophisticated variant of these?
The trouble is that the difference between language and the most sophisticated systems of animal communication that we are so far aware of are qualitative rather than quantitative.All such systems have a fixed and finite number of topics on which information can be excahnged, whereas in langage the list is is open-ended, indeed infinite.all such systems have a finite and indeed strictly limited number of ways in which message components can be combined, if they can be combined at all.IN language the possibilities of combination, while governedby strict principles, are (potentially at least)
infinite, limited for pactical purposes only by the finiteness of the you immediate memory store. You do not get from a finite number to infinity merely by adding numbers.And there are subtler but equally far-reaching differences between language and animalcommunication that make it impossible to regard the one as antecedent to the other.
But the net result of all this is the Paradox of Continuity:language must have evolved out of some prior system, and yet there does not seems to be any such system out of which it could have evolved.
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