Thus it seemed that, whatever advances science would make, it would never even begin to understand the need for an originary hypothesis as proposed in my 1981 book, The Origin of Language . This ambitious overview by a neuroscientist of the emergence, evolution, and present reality of the brain s language function takes long strides toward the position of the originary hypothesis. It is both disquieting and exalting after all these years to see a biological scientist associate language origin with ritual, interdiction, and the difficulty of making peace among groups of male hunters. Thus far, this middle ground, formerly the exclusive terrain of religion, has been approached almost exclusively from the humanistic side. Girard s Violence and the Sacred made strong, specific ethnological claims that the ethnologists themselves have largely ignored.
Deacon focuses on language from the standpoint of brain structure.
But Deacon s specialized knowledge of the interconnections in the brain between language and perceptual and motor functions allows him to avoid Bickerton s dichotomized vision of language as with or without syntax. Deacon s adaptation of C. S. Peirce s semiotic categories of icon , index , and symbol to the stages of evolution of animal communication and its expression in the brain is a model of the scientific assimilation and application of philosophical thought. But even more than its author s semiotic sophistication and neurological expertise, what sets The Symbolic Species above all other scientific writing on language origin is the power of his anthropological intuition. This researcher of brain functions has succeeded in articulating the social nature of language better than any social anthropologist. In speculating on the possible origin of this new form of social activity, he has revived in a new context the powerful intuitions of the nineteenth-century evolutionists, most notably, the link between language and ritual and their function in establishing peace through the interdiction of ethically destabilizing behavior.