Is Language A Technology? Or A Virus?

Cormac McCarthy, famed author of dystopian novel The Road, among others, is also a researcher whose subjects include artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics, and linguistics. In this fascinating and readable essay (he’s a novelist, not a professional academic), he focuses on the latter topic, asking how and why humans developed conscious language, though it's completely unnecessary to our survival. McCarthy’s method here is part philosophical inquiry, part neuroscience research, part literary metaphor.

“Did language meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it.”

The human unconscious, like the unconscious systems of many animals, can solve complex problems without words or grammar—it can do “everything from scratching an itch to solving math problems”. Hominids existed, probably, for at least two million years without speech. So why did we ever "evolve" the capacity? Was it passed around like any other technological tool that changed societies? Or would a better metaphor be a virus that infected us and changed the shape of our brains and bodies over the years?

Spoiler: McCarthy doesn’t directly answer these questions—because there are no answers currently available. But by raising the questions he provides pathways for researchers to purse them further. And he does so by taking us on a trip through his personal thinking process, so we see a performance of the way language and unconscious thought coexist to solve conceptual problems, like this one, in tandem.