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Natural language and natural selection

Pinker, Steven, Bloom, Paul·1990·Behavioral and Brain Sciences
DOI 10.1017/s0140525x00081061
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Abstract

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.

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Metadata

Authors
Pinker, S., & Bloom, P.
Venue
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
1990-12
Volume
13
Issue
4
Pages
707-727
ISSN
  • 0140-525X
  • 1469-1825
DOI
10.1017/s0140525x00081061
Cited by
1,330
References
14
Language
en
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified, 7474 d)

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