Language Complexity - Part 1: Darwinian Evolution and the Origin of Language

3 years ago
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In this video, I summarize Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and most particularly, Darwin's writings about how the language capacity evolved. We begin questioning some aspects of this theory, and seeing how complex this subject is. And we end with several of the questions that need to be asked if we wish to understand how language emerged.

Some references used:
- Allan Keith et al., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics, chapter 1 (by Salikoko S. Mufwene), pp.1-41.
- Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech, Vintage, 2017.
- W. Tecumseh Fitch, "Musical Protolanguage: Darwin's Theory of language evolution revisited", (2005?)
- W. Tecumseh Fitch, "Descent of the larynx": https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/hg3040-2014-1/?page_id=105
- David Stove, "Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution", Encounter Books, 2006.
- Leading Evolutionary Scientists Admit We Have No Evolutionary Explanation of Human Language: https://evolutionnews.org/2014/12/leading_evoluti/

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