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Overview
How can infinite language be generated from a finite mind? How could language have evolved from apes? How could apes have evolved from protozoa? How could protozoa have evolved from rocks? In a highly readable series of thought experiments, the first half of How the Brain Evolved Language retraces the steps by which Darwinian evolution selected first one-celled animals which could communicate among themselves, and then multicelled organisms which could communicate within themselves.. "The second half of How the Brain Evolved Language explores the particular ways in which universal evolutionary designs - universal minimal neural networks - have been adapted for human language.Synopsis
How can an infinite number of sentences be generated from one human mind? How did language evolve in apes? In this book Donald Loritz addresses these and other fundamental and vexing questions about language, cognition, and the human brain. He starts by tracing how evolution and natural adaptation selected certain features of the brain to perform communication functions, then shows how those features developed into designs for human language. The result — what Loritz calls an adaptive grammar — gives a unified explanation of language in the brain and contradicts directly (and controversially) the theory of innateness proposed by, among others, Chomsky and Pinker.