How Could Language Have Evolved?

How Could Language Have Evolved?

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary th...

Potassium ion channels: could they have evolved from viruses?

All potassium channels share a common architecture consisting of their pore module with two transmembrane domains and a conserved filter region that selects for K ions. The current view is that the plethora of complex K channels in eukaryotes evolved from a pore module precursor via gene fusions and gene duplications. Here we suggest that this pore precursor might have originated from viruses. ...

LSDBs and How They Have Evolved.

Locus specific databases (LSDBs) make a key contribution to our understanding of heritable and acquired human disorders, disease susceptibility, and adverse drug reactions. As data have accumulated in LSDBs, a greater reliance on their use has arisen in clinical practice. Even though LSDBs have existed in recognizable form for only a quarter of a century, their origin lies in the manual catalog...

How have plant cell walls evolved?

That's what she (could have) said: How alternative utterances affect language use

We investigate the effects of alternative utterances on pragmatic interpretation of language. We focus on two specific cases: specificity implicatures (less specific utterances imply the negation of more specific utterances) and Horn implicatures (more complex utterances are assigned to less likely meanings). We present models of these phenomena in terms of recursive social reasoning. Our most ...