Evo–devoderived from evolutionary developmental biology and incorporates the idea that regulatory genes, highly conserved across species, can influence embryonic development through varying the timing and expression of other genes. For example, although different species have dissimilar limbs, such as legs, flippers, or wings, their development is controlled by very similar genes, with the differences due to the way their expression is regulated.
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# Opinion  Language Evolution: A Changing Perspective

Author links open overlay panelMichael C.Corballis1

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## Trends

From the Bible to Chomsky, language has been commonly viewed as representing a profound change in thought, appearing suddenly and uniquely in humans, with communicative language as a byproduct.

Modern research increasingly suggests mental continuity, more consistent with evolutionary theory, with nonhuman animals showing evidence for mental functions such as mental time travel and theory of mind that are critical to communicative language.

Language can then be viewed as a device for sharing thoughts and experiences rather than as a vehicle for those mental contents themselves.

Nonhuman animals such as great apes and dogs are more capable of understanding human-like language than of producing it, so communicative language in humans depended on adapting output systems to be flexible enough to convey the generativity of thought.

Such a system may have originated in bodily gesture before incorporating vocal signals that eventually provided us with speech.

From ancient times, religion and philosophy have regarded language as a faculty bestowed uniquely and suddenly on our own species, primarily as a mode of thought with communication as a byproduct. This view persists among some scientists and linguists and is counter to the theory of evolution, which implies that the evolution of complex structures is incremental. I argue here that language derives from mental processes with gradual evolutionary trajectories, including the generative capacities to travel mentally in time and space and into the minds of others. What may be distinctive in humans is the means to communicate these mental experiences along with knowledge gained from them.

## Section snippets

## Is Language Uniquely Human?

According to the Old Testament, language was a gift to Adam and was for a time the common language of all humans. When people built the Tower of Babel so that they might reach closer to Heaven, the Lord thought them disrespectful and dispersed them, and confounded their languages so they could no longer communicate. Echoing this story Noam Chomsky has argued that language was bestowed on some individual, whom he whimsically names Prometheus, within the past 100000 years, well after Homo sapie ns

## The Evolutionary Challenge

Such views are antithetical to the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin himself wrote ‘If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case’ [6].

Could language be the case that Darwin feared? Chomsky has often characterized language as ‘an organ of the body’ and ‘on a par with the digestive and immune systems’ [7]. Language is also

## Language and Thought

A common theme among those who argue for the sudden emergence of language is that it signaled a change in the manner of thought itself. Thus, Tattersall writes that from about 100 000 years ago ‘we start finding plausible indications that members of the new species were starting to think symbolically’ [5]. Chomsky writes of ‘internal language’ (I-language) as the fundamental basis of human symbolic thought with communication merely a byproduct 1, 7. It is, then, through a secondary process of

## The Communicative Aspect

According to a shifting tide of opinion, it is in our ability to communicate our thoughts, rather than our thoughts themselves, that we differ most profoundly from other species and it is our capacity to communicate that gives an inflated view of human cognition. The difference has more to do with production than with understanding. Great apes [72] and even dogs 73, 74 can understand and respond to spoken requests involving sequential processing and substantial word vocabularies, which implies

## Concluding Remarks: Is Rapprochement Possible?

There are some signs that the longstanding divide over language evolution may be softening. Through progressive modifications, Chomsky’s theory of syntax has become simpler. This is suggested in the title of the current Minimalist Program, whose primary ingredient is Merge, recently described as the ‘simplest case’, requiring a ‘slight mutation’ producing a ‘slight rewiring of the brain’ [7]. These descriptions now seem at odds with earlier notions of language as a bodily organ producing a

## Acknowledgments

Three unnamed reviewers provided extremely helpful input.

## Glossary

Evo–devoderived from evolutionary developmental biology and incorporates the idea that regulatory genes, highly conserved across species, can influence embryonic development through varying the timing and expression of other genes. For example, although different species have dissimilar limbs, such as legs, flippers, or wings, their development is controlled by very similar genes, with the differences due to the way their expression is regulated.

Extended Evolutionary Synthesisextensions of the

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