Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion.

They will often specify mixtures of shared and unique attributes, reflecting the evolutionary process in which an ancestral primate design was retained, modified, augmented, or lost in the human lineage.

But if represents a minor extension of capacities that existed in the ancestral primate lineage, it could be the result of a chance mutation that became fixed in the species through drift or other non-adaptive evolutionary mechanisms (Pinker

Specifically, the language faculty evolved in the human lineage for the communication of complex propositions.

Speech production Turning to the articulatory side of speech, HCF cite two arguments against evolutionary adaptation for language in the human lineage.

But this is irrelevant to the question of whether vocal imitation evolved for language in the human lineage.

HCF’s recursion-only hypothesis implies no selection for speech production in the human lineage.

These findings refute the hypothesis that the only evolutionary change for language in the human lineage was one that grafted syntactic recursion onto unchanged primate input–output abilities and enhanced learning of facts.

Instead they support the notion that language evolved piecemeal in the human lineage under the influence of natural selection, with the selected genes having pleiotropic effects that incrementally improved multiple components.

A recent comparison of the genomes of mice, chimpanzees, and humans turned up a number of genes that are expressed in the development of the auditory system and that have undergone positive selection in the human lineage (Clark et al.