Building Gab: Part One: Corante > The Loom >

Building Gab: Part One: Corante > The Loom >: "In 1990, Steven Pinker (now at Harvard) and Paul Bloom (now at Yale) published a paper called 'Natural Selection and Natural Language.' They laid out a powerful argument for language as being an adaptation produced by natural selection. In the 1980s some pretty prominent scientists, such as Stephen Jay Gould, had claimed that the opposite was the case--namely, that language was merely a side effect of other evolutionary forces, such as an increase in brain size. Pinker and Bloom argued that the features of language show that Gould must be wrong. Instead, they maintained, language shows all the classic hallmarks of an adaptation produced by natural selection."