The Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse Among Humans Our Family Business donald m. morrison The Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse Among Humans Donald M. Morrison The Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse Among Humans Our Family Business Donald M. Morrison Institute for Intelligent Systems University of Memphis Memphis,TN, USA ISBN 978-3-030-48542-9 ISBN 978-3-030-48543-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48543-6 ©The Editor(s) (if applicable) andThe Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whetherthewholeorpartofthematerialisconcerned,specificallytherightsoftranslation,reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way,andtransmissionorinformationstorageandretrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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ThisPalgraveMacmillanimprintispublishedbytheregisteredcompanySpringerNatureSwitzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Dedicated to my father Donald Harvard Morrison (1914–1959) …and all the other teachers in our human family, past, present, and future. Preface Teaching is our family business. Early in the last century, my paternal grandfather,LouisFrenchMorrison(1880–1961),wasassistantsuperin- tendentofschoolsinMorgantown,WestVirginia.Hisfirstson,myuncle Wilbur Yale Morrison, taught shop for many years in the Morgantown public schools. His second son, my father, Donald Harvard Morrison (note the choice of middle names) was a professor of Government at Dartmouth College, dean of the faculty, and the College’s first provost. On my mother’s side, my aunt, Jane Gibson Likert, taught high school English in Grand Rapids, Michigan. According to family lore, Gerald Ford,38thpresidentoftheUnitedStates,washerstudent.Herhusband, myuncleRensisLikert,helpedfoundtheInstituteforSocialResearchat theUniversityofMichigan.Ofmysevenbrothersandsisters,five(myself included) have been paid to teach. Two are college professors, one is recentlyretiredfromteachingEnglishataprivateschoolinConnecticut, andanotherservedaschairmanofthedepartmentofsurgeryatamedical school in the Pacific Northwest. Now, I’ll bet a cookie—a thousand!—that you have a teacher or two in your own family. The reason for my confidence: Anyone who helps vii viii Preface people learn is clearly a teacher, regardless of title. Take another of my sisters, a clinical social worker who spends her days helping her clients cope with cancer, divorce, and other such challenges. Or another sister, a master jigsaw-puzzle maker who, among her other jobs, helps her colleagues learn the secrets of trick puzzles, which, confusingly, have more than one solution. Or another brother, owner of a successful auto body shop in Vermont, who, since the 1970s, has taught dozens of employees how to straighten frames, remove dents, and mix paint colors tomatch.Almostcertainlyyouhaveteacherslikethatinyourownfamily. But wait, there’s more to it.Yes, teaching is my own family’s business, and quite likely a big part of yours. But teaching is also the business of ourhumanfamily.Indeed,asyoureadthisbook,Imeantoconvinceyou that we and everyone we know and don’t know—all living humans— come from a long line of teachers, going back many thousands of gener- ations; that our present circumstances and predicaments as a species are the result of untold numbers of teaching episodes, stretching as far back as some three million years; and, because teaching is so fundamental to ourwayoflifeonEarth,thatourfateasaspecieswilldependverymuch on our ability to continue helping members of upcoming generations acquire the life-sustaining, civilization-sustaining knowledge, skills, and habits of mind that have gotten us this far. Put simply, if we humans— as parents, teachers, colleagues, and friends—don’t dedicate ourselves to teaching, teaching well, and teaching the right things, we’ll soon be out of business. Not much, I hope you’ll agree, is more important than to understand how we’ve come to this. What is teaching? Why is it that humansaloneuselanguagetoteach?Whathasteachingbroughtus,and where might it take us in the future? These are the questions I try to answer in this book. But before you begin reading, I need to post some warnings. For one thing,theaccountI’mabouttogiveabouthowwecametobesodepen- dentonteachingisnotbyanymeansstraightforwardand,Imustadmit, is likely to be partly wrong. If we really want to understand, at a deep level,whathumanteachingisandhowitevolvedinourspecies,weneed tograpplewithalargenumberofsucharcane,controversialtopicsasthe natureofmonkeyhuntingamongchimpanzees;therelationshipbetween Preface ix ourdiet,technology,andcranialcapacity;howhumansmanagedtocolo- nize Australia some 65,000 years ago; and, most problematic of all, the mysterious forces, both biological and cultural, that led to the origin of humanlanguageandtheevolutionofourspecies.Althoughscientistsina broad range of relevant disciplines—including primatology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience—are beginning to converge on at least partial answers to some of the most vexing questions about human origins, the story of human evolution, and the evolution of teaching and learning through language, remains largelyamatterofspeculation.Ihopeyouwillbecontentwithaplausible account, knowing that a definitive one is still out of reach. Finally, while I’ve tried to keep the technical jargon to a minimum, I askyoutobearwithmeasIexplain,andthenapply,technicaltermssuch as coevolution, adaptive suite, symbolic reference, disambiguated pointing, niche construction, and—my favorite—Mitteilungsbedürfnis (German for “helpful chattiness”). I hope you’ll find, as I have, that these strange, initially off-putting words can become indispensable symbols for the important concepts they represent. Before you begin reading, you might like to have a look through the glossary, which begins on page 337. Memphis, USA Donald M. Morrison Acknowledgments Icouldnotpossiblyhavewrittenthisbookwithoutthehelpandencour- agement of numerous friends and family members, conversations with colleagues, and the published work of researchers in a broad range of disciplines. Of the latter, I have benefitted particularly from books and papers by Francisco Aboitiz, Leslie Aiello, Michael Arbib, Derek Bickerton, Barry Bogin, Adam Boyette, Alison Brooks, Jerome Bruner, Tim Caro, DorothyCheney,FrederickCoolidge,GergelyCsibra,RichardDawkins, Terrence Deacon, Dan Dediu, Jared Diamond, Merlin Donald, Robin Dunbar, Tecumseh Fitch, Peter Gärdenfors, György Gergely, Marc Hauser, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Barry Hewlett, Kim Hill, Anders Högberg, Magdalena Hurtado, François Jacob, Sverker Johansson, Hillard Kaplan, Chris Knight, Deanna Kuhn, Kevin Laland, Stephen Levinson, John Locke, Owen Lovejoy, Katharine MacDonald, Brian MacWhinney, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, Ashley Maynard, Sally McBrearty, PaulMellars,JohnMitani,ThomasMorgan,JohnOdling-Smee,Stephen Pinker, David Premack, Robert Quinlan, Robert Seyfarth, Chris Sinha, xi xii Acknowledgments Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny, Sid Strauss, Michael Tomasello, Lev Vygotsky, DavidWatts,ThomasWynn, and GuyWoodruff. Bill Griffin, Barry Hewlett, Molly Hunter, Brig Klyce, Brian MacWhinney, Chris Sinha, Gail Sansbury, Sid Straus, and Joe Walters gave helpful comments and encouragement on earlier versions of the manuscript. I am particularly indebted to my closest readers: Alan Collins, Trevor Peard, and, especially, Stan Franklin. In addition to reading the entire book and correcting numerous errors, Stan continues tosendmenearlydailylinkstorelevantresearchpapersinabroadrange of disciplines. Finally, I am grateful to the dozens of teachers who helped shape the contentsofmyownbrainfromanearlyage,including,asarepresentative sample: my mother, who taught me to tie my shoes, twice; my father, to whomthebookisdedicated,whodiedwhenIwaseleven,butnotbefore teaching me chess, to be kind to strangers, and how to make a kind of firecrackerwithanold-fashionedbarrelkey,anail,alengthofstring,and some wooden match tips; BenjaminTsou, who first kindled my interest in language and culture; and Catherine Snow, who fanned the flames.