The time-scale of evolution Think of the 3.5 billion years that makes the history of life on earth as stretching for a single year. On the first of January, there is nothing more than primitive bacteria, and this remains the case for the next eight months. Multicellular eukaryotic life appears in early September, vertebrates invade the land at the beginning of December and dinosaurs become exti...

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 ten...