COULD EVO-DEVO SAVE CHOMSKY FROM THE EVOLUTIONARY PARADOX?

Chomsky's viewpoint on the evolution of language is quite controversial. (Pinker & Bloom, 1990; Newmeyer, 1998; Jenkins, 2000; Bickerton, 2005; Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005) On the one hand, many supporters believe that Chomsky, who benefits a lot from the new development of evolutionary theories, especially from the non-selectionist concepts such as "spandrel", "exaptation", and "known or unknown physical laws", provides a reasonable speculation on the origin and evolution of language (Jenkins, 2000), which probably can be termed as "neo-neo-Darwinism" (Piattelli-Oalmarini, 1989: 9); On the other hand, some critic argue that the "by-product" concept held by Chomsky is "utterly implausible" (Newmeyer, 1998: 313), and that the evolution of syntax attributed to a very lucky accident of "hopeful monster" mutation, is out of biology (Szabolcs Számadó, 2009: 18).

From Chomsky's own words, we can see that although "the specificity and richness of the language faculty" held in the early phases of generative grammar poses serious barriers to inquiry into how this faculty might have evolved, the Principles and Parameters (P&P) approach, which makes "a sharp distinction between process of acquisition and the format of the internal theory of a language", removes "a crucial conceptual barrier to the study of evolution of language". (Chomsky, 2007, p. 13-4) According to Chomsky, the idea of P&P approach mainly comes from both the intensive study of various languages and an analogy to the new development of biology, evo-devo theory. Chomsky (2005b) has recently written a paper to discuss the application of evo-devo to the study of language, in which the origin and evolution of language became a simple thesis of evo-devo. The impression given by Chomsky is that the exploration on the evolution of language faculty in the framework of P&P approach can greatly make use of the updated development of evolutionary theory---evo-devo. Then could evo-devo save Chomsky from the evolutionary paradox that subtly goes across natural selection and directly attributes the birth of the "merge" operation to a magic random mutation?

The form of every animal is the product of two processes---development from an egg and evolution from its ancestor. What evo-devo focuses on is the closely related relationship between these processes. The fundamental principles of evo-devo theory are that evolution has close relationship with development and the regulatory gene that controls the development of different organisms, is very conservative even across a long period. (Carroll, 2005) Chomsky (2005a, b, 2007) seems to have seized the soul of evo-devo correctly and makes two analogies in linguistics: from the relationship between development and evolution, Chomsky (2005a) finds three factors that can influence the development of language in an individual; and from the regulatory gene mechanism, he gets the idea that the interaction between invariant principles and alternative parameters can determinate the nature of language and language acquisition. Although those ideas, as Chomsky has said, truly get their origins from the parallel development in biology, they are just simple conceptual analogies without any direct relationship with evo-devo theory. We can not find any evolutionary mechanism for Chomsky's "hopeful monster" random mutation in the birth of "merge" operation in evo-devo. From the evo-devo perspective, more attentions should be paid to the epigenetic factors in language development and evolution, rather than just putting too much weight on language phenomenon on genetic instructions. (Deacon, 2003a, b, 2005) Meanwhile, the conservation of regulatory gene means that the reappropriation of old genes to new use is much more the normal case that organisms adopt than the creation of new genes, and instead of expecting too many new "language genes" produced just by magic mutation, the research of language evolution needs the mechanism, such as relaxed selection (Deacon, 2010). to reduce its heavy burden on genetic requirement.

From the analysis above, we can draw conclusions that (1) though evolutionary linguistics can greatly make use of evo-devo, Chomsky just makes a few analogies at the conceptual level and there is not a direct relation between his arguments on the magic mutation and the content of evo-devo theory; (2) Chomsky's viewpoint on language evolution can't get enough evidence from evo-devo, and in fact, some points of his arguments are contradictive to evo-devo; (3) what Chomsky says on the origin and evolution of language mainly comes from his language philosophy, not soundly based on biological phenomena.

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