The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

Try the following thought experiment. Imagine that anthropologists discover a relict population of Homo habilis in some remote highland. Habilis would now be our closest living relatives. Would that take the pressure off chimps, so it is not so important that they have something like language after all? Or do it the other way around. Imagine that some epidemic wiped out all the apes several thousand years ago. Would Darwin be in danger unless we showed that monkeys had language? If you are inclined to answer yes, just push the thought experiment one branch up: imagine that in the past some extraterrestrials developed a craze for primate fur coats, and hunted and trapped all the primates to extinction except hairless us. Would insectivores like anteaters have to shoulder the proto-language burden? What if the aliens went for mammals in general? Or developed a taste for vertebrate flesh, sparing us because they like the sitcom reruns that we inadvertently broadcast into space? Would we then have to look for talking starfish? Or ground syntax in the mental material we share with sea cucumbers?