Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement

Table of Contents - Volume 70, Human Nature - 2012  

Papers

Paul Broca and the Evolutionary Genetics of Cerebral Asymmetry

Tim J. Crowa1

a1 University of Oxford tim.crow@psych.ox.ac.uk

In 1873, within two years of the publication of The Descent of Man, Friedrich Max Mueller wrote:

There is one difficulty which Mr Darwin has not sufficiently appreciated … There is between the whole animal kingdom on the one side, and man, even in his lowest state, on the other, a barrier which no animal has ever crossed, and that barrier is – Language … If anything has a right to the name of specific difference, it is language, as we find it in man, and in man only … If we removed the name of specific difference from our philosophic dictionaries, I should still hold that nothing deserves the name of man except what is able to speak … a speaking elephant or an elephantine speaker could never be called an elephant.' and (quoting Schleicher) ‘If a pig were ever to say to me, “I am a pig” it would ipso facto cease to be a pig’.

Tim J. Crow was Head of the Division of Psychiatry at the Clinical Research Centre at Northwick Park from 1974 to 1994 and subsequently a member of the External Staff of the Medical Research Council and Honorary Director of the SANE Prince of Wales Centre for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford. He has written on the nature and causation of psychosis, in particular on its relation to the evolution of language. He edited The Speciation of Modern Homo Sapiens (OUP, 2002).