Times piece on Language Evolution

[Salinas17 at aol.com]

The full article is at 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/science/11comm.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Subscription is required, but it is free.

(Note that the article is about language mechanisms, not language itself.  
So, as is usual in new genomania literature, there is no real mention of the 
environmental contingencies that drove natural selection or of survival value -- 
i.e., there is no real mention of how any specific advantage of language along 
the way could have kept favoring the development of this long string of 
genetic changes -- and why the same causes did not favor the same development of 
language in other species.)

>>From Squeak to Syntax: Language's Incremental Evolution 
By GARY MARCUS
Published: April 11, 2006

The origin of human language has always been a puzzle. No animal 
communication system comes close to human language in its power, and by most accounts 
language has been on the planet less than half a million years, a mere blink of 
the eye in geological time. 

How could this be, if language evolved like any other biological trait? Where 
is the trail of natural selection? Until recently, there was little direct 
evidence of language's evolution. Languages don't leave fossils, and while there 
has never been any dearth of theories explaining why language might have 
evolved (be it for grooming, gossip or seduction), empirical evidence has been 
hard to come by. 

All that is finally starting to change. The booming science of comparative 
genomics is allowing researchers to investigate the origins of language in an 
entirely new way: by asking how the genes that underwrite human language relate 
to genes found in other species. And these new data provide a fresh example of 
the power of natural selection. 

If language had been built on a completely unprecedented set of genes, Darwin 
(and his successors) would have a lot of explaining to do. With no more than 
a few hundred thousand years to play with, a linguistic system that depended 
on thousands of evolutionarily unprecedented genes would seem impossible. But 
evolution is about random processes that tinker with old parts, not about 
engineering new ones. 

Most of the genes involved in language have some sort of close and ancient 
counterpart in other species. As a case in point, consider the first gene to be 
unambiguously tied to language, known as FOXP2, discovered by Simon Fisher and 
Anthony Monaco, Oxford geneticists. 

Rather than emerging from scratch in the course of human evolution, FOXP2 has 
been evolving for several hundred million years — in a way that placed it 
perfectly for evolving a critical role in language acquisition....

This is what Darwin called "descent with modification." An intelligent 
engineer faced with a brand new problem might start from scratch, but evolution 
instead rejiggers old parts for new functions. 

>>From the perspective of function, human language is without evolutionary 
precedent. But from the perspective of biology, human language appears simply to 
be one more remarkable variation on an ancient set of ancestral themes.