Computational Phenotypes: Towards an Evolutionary Developmental Biolinguistics

by Sergio Balari, Guillermo Lorenzo

This book confronts the hotly debated claim that language is a species specific trait of humans. It also considers the notion that disentangling the evolutionary history of language is one of science's hardest problems. Building on the recent conceptual breakthroughs of the EvoDevo paradigm, Balari and Lorenzo argue that language is not so exceptional after all. It is, rather, just the human version of a fairly common and conservative organic system which they call the Central Computational Complex. The authors also propose that interspecies variation of this organ is restricted to (i) accessible memory resources, and (ii) patterns of external connectivity, both being the result of perturbations on the system underlying its development. The book, written accessibly for both biologists and linguists, offers a fresh perspective on language as a naturally evolved phenomenon.

254 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2012

Reviews

[Othman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The field of biolinguistics is a very interesting one; however, it seems to have been permeated by conceptual arguments, which, no matter how much they appeal to us, cannot be taken as conclusive. A conclusive argument is one that is experimentally backed.

This book has an intriguing premise. It calls into question Hauser et al’s (2002) claim that recursion is human-specific. Rather, the authors argue that grammar emerged from a biological system that allows sequencing items and stores sets of items and sets of sets in active memory.

The book presupposes some background in linguistics and biology. The authors didn’t do a good job of explaining the scientific jargon used in the book, which made the book hard to understand. I think the book would’ve been much easier for me had there been clearer definitions for those terms.

Overall, I think the book is a worthwhile read despite its difficulty, and I recommend reading it.