Comparing cognition in animals, and researchers.

conclusion follows from the logic of natural selection: the restructuring of the human SVT [supralaryngeal vocal tract] to enhance the perception of speech would not have contributed to biological fitness unless speech and language were already present in the hominid species ancestral to modern Homo sapiens’ (p. 141, also see Ref. 5). If this is true, then it is not implausible that natural selection has also restructured the human brain, however slightly, in response to these same selection pressures. The existence of some domain-general capacities underlying language does not allow us to distinguish between evolutionary stories like Lieberman’s, in which language followed selection for various motor capacities, such as manual dexterity, and brain lateralization and expansion, from evolutionary stories like that of Chomskian authors Calvin and Bickerton6. These scenarios have compelling similarities in terms of the emphasis on prior selection for motor capacity. They differ in the relative importance ascribed to subsequent natural selection for language (by Calvin and Bickerton) and to cultural transmission (by Lieberman) in the development of linguistic ability in the species over time. Chomsky certainly did not choose the best term when he used ‘language organ’ to describe the neural seat of universal grammar, as this has implications that are inconsistent with the distributed nature of the language system that researchers like Lieberman have demonstrated. It might also be incorrect to assume that the representational and processing abilities we use for language have been specifically shaped by natural selection within that domain, even though this is still entirely plausible with a distributed system. However, nothing about the distributed nature of our language system argues against the existence of innate constraints on the ontogeny of language, the core concept within a Chomskian framework. As reptilian as my brain may be, it didn’t learn to be that way.