Fingers existed before they were ever used to communicate.
Eyes developed before they were used to communicate.
Language developed, as a means of thought, before it was used to communicate.
The use of these things to communicate has led to adaptations, but they did not originate as a means to communicate.
As far as Gould goes, you are unfit to talk about the man.
He was not a great genius. Just a minor one.
You just opened a door. I hope you persist through what follows.
I gotta tell you that I've spent a lot of time, almost 50 years, attempting to divine rules of evolution, one cell detect, two cells move, etc. Very early on it became apparent to me that communication was a prime feature in evolution. If one solution resulted in better communication relative to whatever aspect was being driven it survived. Now I go pretty far with communication I admit. But it is one of those well defined regularities we've been talking about.
Hands, feet, fins, paws, all evolved as a consequence of the evolution of bilateral symmetry. But that is not the point. A the time of the simplest cells there were several evolutionary steps in communication. Unpacking chemical signals was necessary for organisms to exploit usable metabolic products which meant communication systems running from and through lipid bi-layers encasing protoplasm were required to process such signals and others systems within the cell needed to find ways to work with that information to exploit it so the cell could survive to reproduce which called for other communications along those lines to produce progeny.
DNA and its processes act as communication network to some of those ends. The point here is that DNA is structured information that is exploited to communicate just as the brain is an information system that is exploited to communicate in a variety of ways.
With the advent of were multiple cells a more or less symmetrical evolution of animals current extending communication by permitting travel, exploitation of neural tissue to sense etc. That we have hands came about by various happenstances following that dictum demanding ever greater communication capacity and ability as one avenue of survival strategy. So communication was actually a driver for the acquisition of hands and opposable thumbs.
To suggest that language developed as a means of thought puts the cart before the horse. Thought was, excuse the rewiring of the word, an afterthought relating to an overall capability in communication relating to that particular important avenue of fit things beings. The story is the same everywhere with animals, with insectae,, with fish, with paramecium, mollusks, every kingdom. Every metabolic reproducing thing requires the ability to communicate.
As for the particulars of how that problem was solved for organisms that communicated between themselves beyond just the demands for exploiting environment it seems a particular strategy had been set out before divergence of from the first species with the ability to attract mates among the early bilateral species. Obviously forms that developed after bilateralism, ring forms like octopus, comes to mind.
Every one of these have a similar problem in that they need to solve a problem of neonate learning of signals that aren't hard wired.
I dug this article up as an illustration that the problem has been studied extensively for some time. Hemispheric laterality in animals and the effects of early experience
http://www.researchgate.net/profile...ralization/links/545aa33e0cf25c508c3198b9.pdf
A review of research with chicks, songbirds, rodents, and nonhuman primates indicates that the brain is lateralized fora number of behavioral functions. These findings can be understood in terms of three hypothetical brain processes derived from a brain model based on general systems theory: hemispheric activation, interhemispheric inhibition, and interhemispheric coupling.
Left-hemisphere activation occurs in songbirds and nonhuman primates in response to salient auditory or visual input, o rwhen a communicative output is required. The right hemisphere is activated in rats when spatial performance is required, andin chicks when they are placed in an emotion-provoking situation. In rats and chicks interhemispheric activation and inhibition occur when there is an affective component in the environment (novelty, aversive conditioning) or when an emotional response is emitted (copulation, attack, killing). An interhemispheric coupling (correlation) found in rats and rabbits implies that the hemispheres are two major components in a control system with a negative feedback loop. Early-experience variables in rats can induce laterality in a symmetric brain or facilitate its development in an already biased brain.It is predicted that functional lateralization, when present, will be similar across species: the left hemisphere will tend to beinvolved in communicative functions while the right hemisphere will respond to spatial and affective information; bothhemispheres will often interact via activation-inhibition mechanisms when affective or emotional processes are involved.Homologous brain areas and their connecting callosal fibers must be intact at birth and must remain intact throughout development for lateralization to reach its maximum level. Injury to any portion of this unit will result in hemispheric redundancy rather than specialization. One major function of early experience is to provide stimulation during development,which acts to enhance the growth and development of the corpus callosum, thereby giving rise to a more specialized brain.
By the way both hemispheres functions, see bolded, are communications related, just of different sorts. I just happened on this, having never read it before, but, it is so similar in its analysis to mine I find it scary.
It had never been my intent to suggest anything is determined, designed, beyond the happenstance of those surviving tend to be more capable than those that do not in their environment. All I have to say about an apparent extending of capability toward optimums or ideals suggests something about that of which we are talking, the laws of nature. Does it appear at all likely that with near infinite time in a pretty consistent world that living things tend to evolve to more and better capacity for whatever they do, like ears processing acoustic signals near, ideals that eyes detect as little five to seven photons permitting precision seeing in little light, etc. All I and the author do here is use witnessed regularities to suggest why patterns of evolution occur.
