Gary Marcus, author of The Birth of the Mind, has a pithy piece in The New York Times, From Squeak to Syntax: Language's Incremental Evolution, which sketches out the refinements that the new science of genomics is adding to our understanding of the origins of language. In fact, one could argue that it isn't adding, it is actually building the initial foundations. Many of you probably also know that the Linguistic Society of Paris banned the discussion of the origin of language in 1866 because it seemed to be simultaneous attractive and intractable. Though Noam Chomsky was one of the major drivers in conceiving of language as being facilitated by a biologically undergirded "organ," he has also been resistent to a more thorough evolutionary and adaptive explanation in a standard Neodarwinian (read: adaptive) framework.
But as Marcus notes the discovery of necessary genetic loci like FOXP2 allows us to explore ...
