A Surprising Meeting at the Summit

Napoleon and the tsar meet at Tilsit to agree on their spheres of interest. (But Tolstoy still got a story to tell) Talk about a marriage of irreconcilables! PLOS Biology has published an article titled "How Could Language Have Evolved?" and like all PLOS papers it is available online to anybody interested. The topic is absolutely the question I've been asking myself for the past 45 years so it should be up my alley. Regrettably it doesn't seem to say anything that hasn't already been discussed in this blog. Nevertheless, it has a distinguished set of authors who are famous for their contrasting perspectives. I don't suppose it is quite as astonishing an alliance as Churchill and Stalin sitting down as allies, but it is surprising. Johan Bolhuis and his work has been mentioned a few times on this blog (here and here). Most notably he has compared the neurobiology of bird song and speech, leading this blog to report: The conclusion that we have little positive data about speech to gain from studying chimpanzees, but much to be learned from birds now seems settled. Language in his work is mainly concerned with the biology that supports communication. Ian Tattersall is an anthropologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History. I haven't had much to say about his work of late, but I did cover him a couple of times in the blog's early days. Most notably I discussed his article in Scientific American in which he claimed that language was the result of invention an...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Source Type: blogs