Thursday, April 17, 2008
Spandrels, Kluges and Language
In this discussion a scientist and science writer talk about Kluges — a name that was coined to indicate a jerry-built but needed structure for a job at hand. The Apollo 13 movie was given as an example, where the astronauts got in trouble, the scientists on the ground threw a bunch of materials available to the space dwellers on a table, and said, we have to create from this something that will make a connector or the astronauts are finished.
So this cognitive scientist derived the idea that maybe that is how language forms, appropriating various brain structures, which he analogized as, “Chomsky meets the genome”. His idea of Kluges really sounds to me like Gould's idea of spandrels. Structures that are byproducts of evolution trying to achieve something quite different. Spandrels are necessary to create the structure as support, but serve no purpose. But eventually they do. (Dennett claims this is merely selection by another name.) Spandrels, or kluges (the difference, I really don't understand), seem a likely suspect; essentials of the human spirit, like language, imagination, culture, morality, law — little things like that — could have arisen from the play of possibility inherent in life evolving — built from what is at hand, from the genius of tinkerer Nature, from the drive of life to survive.
After all, in one view we are constructed of the detritus of stars that have exploded, re-accreting into new stars like our sun, and the leftovers — that would be us — evolve on a planet rich with the complex elements created by that star. Why wouldn't language also be a byproduct, of another scale? It can seem a concept reductive of human beings and our cultural and spiritual achievements, but what greater affirmation than to think we are endowed from the play of the spheres and the dance of evolution?