Abstract
Commentary: Cultural recycling of neural substrates during language evolution and development.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
While I am in principle highly sympathetic to any endeavor that addresses “Darwin’s problem” (Boeckx, 2009) within the conceptual framework of “neural recycling” (e.g., Dehaene and Cohen, 2007), it occurs to me that Christiansen and Müller’s outright dismissal of Universal Grammar (UG) is premature and ill-founded, as they reiterate misconceptions regarding evolutionary biology and UG that are common in the literature (e.g., Dunbar, 2003; Christiansen and Chater, 2008; Christiansen et al, 2009; Evans and Levinson, 2009; Chater and Christiansen, 2010)
The assertion that FL did not “evolve” might appear somewhat bizarre at first, but the idea that natural selection is not the only force in evolution was already acknowledged by Darwin himself and has been gaining widespread acceptance among biologists in the last two or so decades (Fodor and PiattelliPalmarini, 2010/2011)
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. “Cultural recycling of neural substrates during language evolution and development,” in The Cognitive Neurosciences, 5th Edn. by Christiansen, M.
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