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Mating dances and the evolution of language: What’s the next step?

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Abstract

The Darwinian protolanguage hypothesis is one of the most popular theories of the evolution of human language. According to this hypothesis, language evolved through a three stage process involving general increases in intelligence, the emergence of grammatical structure as a result of sexual selection on protomusical songs, and finally the attachment of meaning to the components of those songs. The strongest evidence for the second stage of this process has been considered to be birdsong, and as a result researchers have investigated the existence of various forms of grammar in the production and comprehension of songs by birds. Here, we argue that mating dances are another relevant source of sexually-selected complexity that has until now been largely overlooked by proponents of Darwinian protolanguage, focusing especially on the dances of long-tailed manakins. We end by sketching several lines of research that should be pursued to determine the relevance of mating dances to the evolution of language.

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Fig. 1

(Reproduced from Fitch and Hauser 2004, 378)

Fig. 2

(Reproduced from Fitch and Hauser 2004, 378)

Fig. 3

(Reproduced from Corballis 2007, 700)

Fig. 4

Illustration reprinted from (O’Neil 2012) with permission from the author, who retains all rights

Fig. 5

(Illustrations by K.C. Lukianchuk, reproduced from Lukianchuk and Doucet 2014, p 733)

Fig. 6

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Notes

  1. Notably for the present thesis, chimpanzee gestural communication has been analyzed as a form of dance (Donald 1991, 1998; King 2009).

  2. Following practice in the empirical literature, we will often refer to the manakin mating displays as “dances”, keeping in mind that the degree of similarity between these displays and the most elaborate forms of human dance is one of the issues to be empirically and philosophically evaluated in the present paper. There is no ideal terminology with which to begin, as some of the other options (such as “courtship” or “mating” display) may also be deemed unduly anthropomorphic. So long as we do not begin by interpreting “dance” in an “anthropofabulous” manner (Buckner 2013), it is as good a starting point as any.

  3. Of course in actual spoken language, either the “if” or the “then” can be implicit (i.e. “I’ll go to the store if we are out of milk.”).

  4. For an overview of the cognitive and evolutionary significance of such behavioral flexibility, see (Buckner 2015; Mikhalevich et al. 2017).

  5. Despite the vast evolutionary distance between humans and birds, we should entirely foreclose the possibility that neural structures controlling components of FLB or even important precursors to FLN could be homologous. Even though the architecture of the avian brain is radically different from that of mammalian brains—birds lack a neocortex and white matter—some brain areas like the hippocampus (implicated in higher cognitive functions like declarative memory, transitive inference, sequence learning, and spatial cognition) do appear to be homologous, and there may be more subtle functional or architectural similarities. For reviews of such comparisons, see (Güntürkün and Bugnyar 2016; Reiner et al. 2004).

  6. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting these examples.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Bruce Rushing, Bryce Huebner, Carrie Figdor, Jo Anne Fleischhauer, Lainy Day, Lauren Alpert, Nathan Gabriel, Simon Brown, Susan Balenger, and two anonymous reviewers for discussions and comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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  1. The University of Houston, Agnes Arnold Hall, 3553 Cullen Blvd. Room 513, Houston, TX, 77204-3004, USA

    Cameron Buckner

  2. Houston Community College, Houston, TX, USA

    Keyao Yang

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Buckner, C., Yang, K. Mating dances and the evolution of language: What’s the next step?. Biol Philos 32, 1289–1316 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9605-z

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