All you Need is Merge : Biology , Computation , and Language from the Bottom-up

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of activity surrounding biolinguistics along with a parallel, renewed interest in the connections between language and evolution. To be sure, from one standpoint it has often been said, quite correctly, that linguistic science just is biology: the study, however abstract, of a particular, apparently species-specific human trait: knowledge of language. But beyond this immediate point, how might linguistics and biology, especially evolutionary biology, inform one another? How does one go about making a proper evolutionary argument? What can genomics and evolutionary biology tell us now about language, and what might be out of reach, now, or out of reach forever, and why? To answer such questions, this chapter attempts to clear up some possible misunderstandings about evolutionary thinking that one might dub “vulgar Darwinism”—that is, the popular versions of evolutionary theory that sometimes find their way into analyses about language and evolution. The bottom line is that proper evolutionary explanations are often much more difficult to execute than one might think, and that language is a particularly difficult, even uniquely difficult, case to crack. Like linguistics, there is a substantial body of knowledge and theory grounding modern evolutionary analysis, with subtleties that are often missed, even by biologists themselves.