Group items tagged

[S]ymbolic reference itself must have been the prime mover for the prefrontalization of the brain in hominid evolution. Language has given rise to a brain which is strongly biased to employ the one mode of associative learning that is most critical to it.

The Baldwin effect allows unrecorded tweaking from flexible behavior to secondarily drag along relevant genes ("recipe items") in the long run; it's Darwinian but at one remove. Thus relevant gene combinations "fill in" behind the behavioral advance.

"The Baldwinian perspective suggests... that the first stone tools were manufactured by australopithecines, and that the transition to Homo was in part a consequence rather than the cause.... The large brains, stone tools, reduction in dentition, better opposability of thumb and fingers, and more complete bipedality found in post-australopithecine hominids are the physical echoes of a threshold already crossed [in behavior].... Another way to look at this is to say that many of the physical traits that distinguish modern human bodies and brains were ultimately caused by ideas shared down the generations."

But selection favoring language need not be via the success of language per se

the nonlanguage task of remembering who owes what to whom sets you up for understanding structured sentences. They carry over into linguistic argument structure (those word categories involving actors, recipients, beneficiaries, and so forth), which provide major clues to understanding a story-like sentence about who did what to whom.