A role for relaxed selection in the evolution of the language capacity

Explaining the extravagant complexity of the human language and our competence to acquire it has long posed challenges for natural selection theory. To answer his critics, Darwin turned to sexual selection toaccount for theextremedevelopmentof language.Many contemporary evolutionary theorists have invoked incredibly lucky mutationor somevariantof theassimilationofacquiredbehaviors to innate predispositions in an effort to explain it. Recent evodevo approaches have identified developmental processes that help to explain how complex functional synergies can evolve by Darwinian means. Interestingly,manyof thesedevelopmentalmechanismsbear a resemblance to aspects ofDarwin’smechanismofnatural selection, often differing only in one respect (e.g., form of duplication, kind of variation, competition/cooperation). A common feature is an interplay between processes of stabilizing selection and processes of relaxed selection at different levels of organism function. These may play important roles in the many levels of evolutionary process contributing to language. Surprisingly, the relaxation of selection at the organism level may have been a source of many complex synergistic features of the human language capacity, andmay help explainwhy so much language information is “inherited” socially.