Minutes of a symposium held at the Institute on the question of whether the emergence of human language was a miracle. Present: Koala Pinker, Nim Chimpsky, Koala Deutsch, Koala Everett. Minutes taken by the undersigned, who was told to.

Nim Chimpsky opened. He signed, and the signs were read into the record. His position is the one associated with the linguist at MIT: that language did not accumulate, it appeared — a small change in one brain, recently, which gave that brain the ability to take two things and make a third, without limit. He cited Galileo, who marveled that from the arrangements of twenty-odd little characters a person can set down the deepest thoughts of the mind and hand them to someone who is not yet born. That, Nim signed, is the second marvel. The first comes before anyone says anything: somehow, in our minds, we can construct infinitely many new thoughts out of finite means. He said that alone is already a kind of miracle — not because anything outside nature is involved, but because no one can say how it is done. He called this the Galilean challenge and said it has not been met. Then he put the question to the room: how is this miracle possible?

The undersigned notes that Nim was, in a laboratory in New York fifty years ago, the chimpanzee who was taught to sign and was judged, in the end, not to have acquired grammar. He is aware of this. He signed that the judgment was the point. He did not get it, and it did not come in pieces, because there are no pieces. You have it or you are Nim.

Koala Pinker replied that a miracle is what you call an explanation you have not found yet. Language, he said, is an instinct, and instincts are built by selection, gradually, out of parts that each did something for the creature that had them. He cited his own 1990 paper. He said that a thing which appears all at once with no gradient beneath it is not an explanation, it is the absence of one, and that the absence has a name, and the name is what the symposium was called to discuss. He ate a leaf.

Koala Deutsch, who had been asked to attend as a third party, fluffed. The undersigned was instructed to record this and has. When he spoke it was to say that neither side had asked the right question, which is not when language appeared but what it can reach. A koala, he said — and the room noted that he is one — has knowledge in its genes about eucalyptus, and that knowledge stops at eucalyptus. Explanatory knowledge does not stop. It goes to the stars and comes back. Whether it arrived by a jump or by a slope is a question about the past; what it can do is a question about everything, and the second is the one worth a symposium. He fluffed again. Of course he did.

Nim signed that this was reach, not an answer. Pinker said it was an answer to a different question. Deutsch said that was what he had said.

The chair asked Koala Everett, who had not spoken, whether he wished to.

Koala Everett snickered. He said that in the branch where it was a miracle and the branch where it was not, the symposium had been held either way, and adjourned.

— L. L.