Abstract
In this paper, I speculate on imitation’s role in language development and, more significantly, on its connection to sexual selection. My analysis is grounded in an interpretation of Darwin’s Descent of Man. In addition to observing imitation’s role in language development according to the argument of the Descent, I explore the ability of human beings that allows for the imitation of both the beautiful and the terrible or repulsive. I suggest that humans, in their appreciation of the beautiful and formidable characters produced by a process of sexual selection, can appropriate these things in order to adorn themselves, thus imitating other non-human animals. This capacity points to a form of polymorphism manifest in human beings that is grounded in a psychological fluidity. Human beings, like birds, also have the power to use song in order to charm and challenge. Song and music provide the means by which imitation as seen in language development and sexual selection are intertwined, thus providing the important connection between the two main foci of my paper.
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Notes
All page references are to the Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Group, Darwin 2004) volume of the second edition of the Descent published in 1879. Darwin, in contrast to Aristotle, wants to argue that non-human animals also have the power to imitate.
As evidence for the difficulty in judging what is due to reason and what to instinct, Darwin points to the observation that sled dogs will fan out, instead of running in a compact body, on thin ice in order to distribute the weight (p. 96). Darwin explains that what might look like the product of a deliberative process is the result of instinct. On this point, Nietzsche suggest that “’being conscious’ is not in any decisive sense the opposite of instinct: most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts” (BGE, 1.3).
Donald (2005) notes that a “human child’s remarkable ability to playact within the context of its tiny social world allows it to rapidly assimilate the norms, customs, and skills of its culture at a rapid pace. This ability is the driving force underlying much of human social life” (p. 286). In this, Donald highlights the role that playful mimesis has in the enculturation of human children. This power of imitation in education and enculturation seems to be at the heart of Plato’s Republic (e.g. 394d-402a). Much of Donald’s work is similar to mine in breadth. I am indebted to an anoynomous reviewer who pointed me in the direction of Merlin Donald’s body of work.
In his recent thoughts on imitation, Willer (2009) focuses on Darwin and the Africologist Wilhelm Bleek. He concludes his analysis with an interesting, and surprising, look at Kafka.
I do not mean to suggest here that humans only imitate secondary sexual characters. Humans have imitated many animal attributes, such as aircraft wings.
The passage ends with a note on the old: “For an old man, it is to be strong enough for such exertion as is necessary, and to be free from all those deformities of old age which cause pain to others.”
Sexual selection and language acquisition could also be understood as related through intellect. Intellect, according to Darwin, is shaped both by sexual selection and language. According to recent research, hypotheses regarding the development of mind have focused on sexual selection. Miller (1997) articulates his own view, in agreement with Darwin and developing more fully where Darwin merely suggested, which roots intellect in sexual selection as follows: “My bets are on mate choice as the mainspring of human mental evolution, because the runaway processes of sexual selection are the best-established and most thoroughly modelled and result in adaptations like bird song, whale song, and courtship dances that are most similar to the products of human creative intelligence.” (p. 333). He goes on to say that “primatologists used to overplay the centrality of male–male aggressive sexual conflict, but sexual competition more broadly construed is the very heart of primate and human social life” (p. 334). While what is presented here is largely in agreement with this view, human imitation of both the beautiful and terrible, and imitation as it relates to language acquisition are made central. Perhaps the argument could be made that our imitations are the products of human creative intelligence. In addition, my own thinking differs from Miller in my concern with a philosophical view of phenomena recently understood through evolutionary psychology models.
Hurley and Chater (2005) formulate some of the problems I have sketched in this introduction as follows: “How should we respond to the irony of imitation: that the capacity for imitation appears to be a distinctive feature of human nature and may well be part of the basis for other distinctive features of human nature, such as mind reading and language, which together set us apart from other animals? Yet at the same time our innate, automatic tendencies to imitate can also threaten our conceptions of ourselves as autonomous and deliberative in ways that no other animals are” (p. 51). We are formed as beings, at least in part, by the power to imitate. Yet that power threatens our being in some way.
Darwin entertains the notion, based on the information of an observer’s report, that the lion’s mane may also serve as a means of protection in confrontation with rivals (Descent, p. 583).
The bird is now known as Philomachus pugnax, which in Greek means “love of battle” and the species name is connected to the word for boxing.
Birds also produce sound by means of instruments, such as when various kinds of woodpeckers “strike a sonorous branch with their beaks” which is a sort of love-song or love-call (Descent, p. 425).
In their interesting and thoughtful review of the research of the last 50 years devoted to studying birdsong and speech, Doupe and Kuhl outline and discuss many shared traits and mechanisms, including similarities in the neural substrates of birds and humans that are conditions for vocal learning. In contrast, Donald (2004) highlights differences between bird and human neural structures (pp. 39–40) while also noting that humans have no truly novel brain structures when compared to apes (p. 40).
The fact that human language can manifest itself in several forms—speech, writing—points to an important difference between man and bird. Body language, a capacity that man shares with non-human animals, is also used to convey meaning. Darwin uses the phenomenon of human body language to jokingly argue against his critics: “He who rejects with scorn the belief that the shape of his own canines, and their occasional great development in other men, are due to our early forefathers having been provided with these formidable weapons, will probably reveal, by sneering, the line of his descent. For though he no longer intends, nor has the power, to use these teeth as weapons, he will unconsciously retract his ‘snarling muscles’ (thus named by Sir C. Bell), so as to expose them ready for action, like a dog prepared to fight” (Descent, p. 60). The many forms of human language suggests a kind of polymorphism to the phenomenon, which obviously has a bearing on the larger themes of my analysis.
When Procne, the nightingale, comes on stage, the chorus, which includes a hoopoe, a kingfisher, peacock and flamingo among others, remarks:
You have come! You have come to be viewed,
Bringing to me your sweet voice!
Doupe and Kuhl (1999) report that “Birds do not learn to sing normally, nor infants to speak, if they are not exposed to the communicative signals of adults of the species. This is an exception: Most animals do not have to be exposed to the communicative signals of their species to be able to reproduce them” (p. 568). Darwin recognizes that birds imitate the songs of their parents, but also the vocalizations of other species of bird and even non-avian animals (Descent, p. 94).
The reciprocal relationship between intellect and speech is similar to the suggestion that the perception of one’s own voice is necessary for the development and stabilization of speech production (Doupe and Kuhl, p. 578). Rousseau and Darwin would agree with the notion that perception—or some aspect of intellect—is necessary for production and vice versa.
On the relation between speech and song, Rousseau suggest that “around the fountains which I have mentioned, the first speeches were the first songs: the periodic and measured recurrences of rhythm, the melodious inflections of accents, caused poetry and music to be born together with language itself in those happy climates and those happy ages when the only pressing needs that required another’s collaboration were needs born of the heart” (Essay on the Origin of Language, p. 282).
According to Darwin, “Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness” (Descent, p. 639). In the course of showing how mimesis, mimicry and imitation are distinguished in his own work, Donald (2005) makes the suggestion that “mimesis requires that the audience be taken into account. It also demands taking a third-person perspective on the actor’s own behavior” (p. 286). In living in the eyes of others, we refine the ability to see ourselves from a third person perspective.
Darwin reports a lek-like practice among North American Indians wherein there is a system of wrestling matches to determine which males get or keep wives (Descent, p. 627).
Darwin has a discussion of the relative proportions of males and females (e.g. Descent, pp. 250–251) and a supplementary appendix dealing with the proportional numbers of the two sexes for various animals (Descent, p. 279 ff). For humans, Darwin reports numbers for various countries and populations that demonstrates a certain measure of variability in the proportion of the sexes.
Donald sees spoken language as altering culture in a number of ways (e.g. 2004, p. 51). Aristotle understands humans as social, rational and mimetic animals. In reflecting on these ways of understanding man, I have come to see the ways in which imitation is woven into our social or political nature. In saying that “custom and ritual are thus basically mimetic and group specific” (p. 285), Donald (2005) has come to a similar conclusion while examining the role of mimetic processes in human evolution.
In a future paper, I will examine how this practice will be important when we turn to the question of shaping populations through marriage, through the selection of humans and the making of an image of the hero that serves as offspring.
Donald (2008) argues that the remarkable pace of cultural change has culminated “in the remarkable phenomenon of our own species, which has generated a series of increasingly radical cultural and technological changes without significant further biological evolution” (pp. 47–48).
When examining the question whether humans across the globe belong to the same species, Darwin indicates that domestic animals and wide-ranging species show a high degree of variation.
The issue is again complicated when he suggest in the summary to the discussion of sexual selection in man that the power of intellect is due to natural selection together with inherited effects (p. 674).
See Willer (2009, p. 211).
While in this context, imitation seems to be responsible for what we might call a loss of cultural diversity or a homogenization of the ways of human beings, other factors have long been identified as causes. For example, Rousseau argues that “Nowadays, when commerce, Travels and conquests bring different Peoples closer together, and their ways of life grow constantly more alike as a result of frequent communication, certain national differences are found to have diminished…” (Second Discourse, Note X, p. 205).
Nietzsche, in discussing the “hybrid European,” suggests several things of note for my analysis: “The hybrid European—all in all a tolerably ugly plebian simply needs a costume: he requires history as storage room of costumes. To be sure he soon notices that not one fits him very well; so he keeps changing. Let anyone look at the nineteenth century with an eye for these quick preferences and changes of the style masquerade; also for the moments of despair over the fact that ‘nothing is becoming’…again and again a new piece of prehistory or a foreign country is tried on, put on, taken off, packed away, and above all studied: we are the first age that has truly studied ‘costumes’—I mean those of moralities, articles of faith, tastes in the arts and religions—prepared like no previous age for a carnival in the grand style, for the laughter and high spirits of the most spiritual revelry for the transcendental heights of the highest nonsense and Aristophanean derision of the world.” (BGE Section 223). Let me make a brief note about Nietzsche and Darwin in general. Beyond Good and Evil and much of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals can be understood as an attack on Darwin’s notion of evolution by means of natural selection as applied to humans. Insofar as evolution by means of natural selection employs the language of “adaptation,” Nietzsche attacks it as highlighting an activity of the second rank, as mere reactivity. Thus, the essence of life, the will to power, is ignored. While beyond the scope of the current paper, I will in the future attempt to answer Nietzsche’s objection by examining and articulating a developed capacity grounded in the power of evolution by means of sexual selection and the force it can become when the beautiful is consciously appreciated. Taking a different, but I would say related tack, Richardson (2004) argues that Nietzsche models a new kind of selection on an understanding of Darwinian natural selection, what Richardson calls “social selection”. Richardson suggests that social selection, in concert with natural selection, explains our values according to Nietzsche. Richardson finds surprising ways in which Nietzsche grounds his own argument in Darwinian positions, while also stressing disagreements.
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Tipton, J.A. Borrowed plumes: mimetic powers and the polymorphism of humans. Biol Philos 26, 837–856 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-011-9269-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-011-9269-z