Competition and Cooperation in Language Evolution: A Comparison Between Communication of Apes and Humans - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 95

Tomasello 2008 ;Hareetal. 2000 ; Heyes 1998 ; Povinelli and Vonk 2003 , 2004 ;
Premack and Woodruff 1978 ; Premack 1988 ; Seyfarth and Cheney 2013 ; Whiten
2013 ). We simply underline the fact that the studies discussed so far on chimps in
the wild have explored apes' mind-reading capacities in altruistic contexts rather
than in competitive situations. Most previous research, in contrast, was conducted
on the basis of the idea that it is the competitive element (generally created in
the laboratory) that helped their comprehension. Such an idea was clearly inspired
by Humphrey's ( 1976 ) “the social function of intellect” (or the Machiavellian
intelligence hypothesis). The core idea of Humphrey's proposal is that primate
intelligence is primarily an adaptation to the special complexity of social life, such
as forming optimal coalitions, and that the evolution of primate cognition should
be interpreted in the context of social competition. Taking a similar position, Krebs
and Dawkins ( 1984 ) argued that animals indeed evolved to best guess the minds of
others to manipulate them better. The results of Crockford and colleagues ( 2012 )
and Schel et al. ( 2013b ) cast new light on this hypothesis or at least suggest that
future research on apes' cognitive abilities take greater account of experimental
contexts other than competition.
The ability of chimps to inform others is also relevant to the relationship between
mental state attribution and language evolution. The fact that a theory of mind has
a key role in language origins is not controversial (e.g., Corballis 2011 ; Dunbar
1996; Gärdenfors 2003 ;Seyfarthetal. 2005 ; Sperber and Origgi 2010 ). Indeed,
several scientists have argued that a crucial stage in the evolution of language
occurred when individuals began producing vocalizations with the goal of informing
and thereby reducing ignorance in others (e.g., Pinker 1994 ; Seyfarth and Cheney
2010 ). As we have seen, chimpanzees are capable of it. However, chimpanzees
don't speak. The question that arises from what has been discussed so far is the
following: why did apes not develop language despite the fact that they are able to
communicate to inform others? Trying to respond is, of course, extremely complex,
and it would deserve another paper. To delineate just a schematic answer, we can
posit that although a theory of mind is a cognitive device necessary for the origins
of language, it is not a sufficient condition to explain the transition from animal
communication to human language. In our opinion, to explain this transition, it is
necessary to focus on a specific element that distinguishes human language from
animal communication, namely, its flexible and creative use (language is more than
informing others). Recently, it has been recognized that to explain this aspect,
it is necessary to refer to an integrated network of cognitive systems including
not only mindreading system, but also systems of mental time travel (the ability
to project oneself into the past and future) (Corballis 2011 , 2013b ) and mental
space travel (the ability to navigate space) (Ferretti 2013b ). From this perspective,
the transition from animal communication to human language would rely on the
adaptive reorganization of this particular cerebral network (Ferretti and Adornetti
2014 ) that today has a crucial role in language processing (Ferretti et al. 2013 ;
Ferretti and Adornetti 2011 ; Ferretti and Cosentino 2013 ). Therefore, in future
research on language evolution, the cooperative model should be integrated with
a more complex and articulate view of human language and cognition.