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. (shrink)

In The Adapted Mind (1992), Cosmides and Tooby argue for the thesis that biological evolution endowed the human mind with a system of content‐specific computational mechanisms designed to solve long‐standing adaptive problems humans encountered as hunter‐gatherers, and not just a generalized "capacity for culture" or all‐purpose "learning capacity". I analyze three types of arguments they offer: historical arguments for the rise of content‐Specific psychology; programmatic arguments for the aims, theory, concepts, and methods of their evolutionary approach; and experimental arguments for (...) the content‐dependence of reasoning. Their arguments stand or fall on the claim that functionally specialized adaptations must be richly structured in a content‐specific way. (shrink)