Evolution of Language as Innate Mental Faculty

Abstract

This note summarizes our general line of research on the evolution of intelligence with a particular emphasis on human language and mathematics as innate cognitive faculties, capabilities, which set our species apart from non-human primates. At the psychological level of abstraction, human intelligence can be considered as a collection of interacting modules of such mental faculties as language, theory of Mind (ToM), meta-mind and others (). Modules at lower level can be considered as “pre-adaptations” in the evolutionary sense that these are required for the emergence of higher cognitive functions like inventing mathematics and generation and comprehension of language. We outline our “emergence-at-threshold” model of language in terms of other ‘simpler ’ mental faculties such as ToM and unbounded generativity, namely FLN of Hauser-Chomsky-Fitch (2002). Using this model, we estimate that modern human language, FLB in Hauser-Chomsky-Fitch (HCF) sense, emerged around 40,000 years ago.