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Noam Chomsky spearheaded the debate on the faculty of language as a cognitive by-product, or spandrel. As a linguist, rather than an evolutionary biologist, his theoretical emphasis was on the infinite capacity of speech and speaking: there are a fixed number of words, but there is an infinite combination of the words.
A review of Schleicher's book Darwinism as Tested by the Science of Language appeared in the first issue of Nature journal in 1870. [17] Darwin reiterated Schleicher's proposition in his 1871 book The Descent of Man , claiming that languages are comparable to species, and that language change occurs through natural selection as words 'struggle ...
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language is a 1996 book by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, in which the author argues that language evolved from social grooming. He further suggests that a stage of this evolution was the telling of gossip, an argument supported by the observation that language is adapted for storytelling .
One question regards what a convention exactly is, and how it is studied, and second regards the extent that conventions even matter in the study of language. David Kellogg Lewis proposed a worthy reply to the first question by expounding the view that a convention is a "rationally self-perpetuating regularity in behavior". However, this view ...
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has a slightly different perspective by trying to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. DIT is seen by some as a "middle-ground" between views that emphasize human ...
LOTH theories address the debate of whether thought is possible without language which is related to the question of whether language evolved for thought. These ideas are difficult to study because it proves challenging to parse the effects of culture versus thought versus language in all academic fields.
Darwin's work inspired later psychologists such as William James and Sigmund Freud but for most of the 20th century psychologists focused more on behaviorism and proximate explanations for human behavior. E. O. Wilson's landmark 1975 book, Sociobiology, synthesized recent theoretical advances in evolutionary theory to explain social behavior in ...