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Deacon's position is that the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language. So for him, explaining the evolution of language (and the brain features that support it) explains much of interest about humans.

The following interview with Dr. Terrence Deacon was conducted at the studios of KCSM (PBS) Television in San Mateo, California on September 5, 2003.

Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior. This idea was the primary insight of the Chomskyan revolution that helped found the field of modern linguistics in the late 1950s, and its implications are both simple and profound. If innate, language must be genetic. It is hardwired within us from conception and evolved from structures and genes with analogues existing throughout the animal kingdom. In a sense, language is universal. Yet we humans are the only species with the ability for what may rightly be called language and, moreover, we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years-an eye-blink of evolution.

Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild.

"Language requires the coordination of perceptually grounded categories with a socially-negotiated set of shared linguistic conventions to express them; i.e. language is based on shared groups of meanings that arise from our perceptual interaction with the external world and the way in which we convey that relationship to other human beings. Deacon's opinion is that neurological predispositions and socio-ecological constraints sponsored the development and evolution of language, and that the subsequent feedback system gave rise to a complex coevolution of the two. Founded neurological determinism within evolutionary and socio-ecological boundaries drives the core of his argument." « Neuroanthropology

Neuroscientist Terence Deacon argues that the emergence of symbolic capacities unique to language were a key factor in the evolution of the human brain, and are a key to distinguishing human from animal forms of communication, ways of learning and brain s

The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain: A Review of two contrastive views (Pinker & Deacon). (Printed 2001 in Grazer Linguistische Studien GLS 55, 1-20) Ken Ramshøj Christensen Department of English, University of Aarhus

NYT

What makes us human? There are at least as many answers to this provocative and searching question as there are authors of this compendium. In the various articles you will find suggestions that include the 'spirit of man', referring particularly to religion, speech and not just language, imitation and 'mimetics', cooking, high levels of cognitive ability, causal belief, that humans are symbolic creatures, innate curiosity and the desire to know, mental time travel, and the ability to read other's minds. These all have cognitive ability as a common thread and, deriving from this, high-level development of language and cultural transmission.

"Our brains are well suited for language. But how did they get that way." Calvin's review of Deacon in the NYRB

Language is a spontaneously evolved emergent adaptation, not a formal computational system. Its structure does not derive from either innate or social instruction but rather self-organization and selection. Its quasi-universal features emerge from the int

Since antiquity, philosophers have argued that higher mental abilities -- in short, thinking and language -- are the great divide separating humans from other species. The lesser creatures, Rene Descartes contended in 1637, are little more than automatons, sleepwalking through life without a mote of self- awareness. The French thinker found it inconceivable that an animal might have the ability to "use words or signs, putting them together as we do." Charles Darwin delivered an unsettling blow to this doctrine a century ago when he asserted that humans were linked by common ancestry to the rest of the animal kingdom. Darwinism raised a series of tantalizing questions for future generations: If other vertebrates are similar to humans in blood and bone, should they not share other characteristics, including intelligence? More specifically, did the earliest humanlike creatures, who split from the ancestors they shared with apes between 5 million and 7 million years ago, already possess a primitive ability to form plans, manipulate symbols, plot mischief and express sentiments?

"Language, foresight, musical skills and other hallmarks of intelligence are connected through an underlying facility that enhances rapid movements. Creativity may result from a Darwinian contest within the brain." Published in Scientific American 271(4):100-107, October 1994

"Chapters on various issues relating to the nature of consciousness. Plus papers on video and other matters of interest, including language, cybernetics, interactivity and computing machines."

"The brain and its 'agent' debate the provenance of thoughts in the charming language of an old Readers Digest article." Also found in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, 1995.

"Is the human mind a relatively inflexible program bequeathed to us by evolution, and culture just a veneer that gives age-old urges a respectable cover? Or our minds largely the product of language, culture, and civilization, with evolution having supplied only the most basic hardware and operating system? John and Ken welcome Leda Cosmides to shed some light on the human mind."

"Scientists compared the genetic sequences of ethnically and geographically diverse people from around the world and found that the genes which code for the nervous systems, had some sequence differences (known as polymorphisms) among individuals. By analyzing human and chimpanzee polymorphism patterns, genetic probabilities and various other genetic tools, and geographical distributions, they found evidence that some of these genes are experiencing ongoing positive selection in humans. They calculated that one genetic variant of microcephalin arose approximately 37,000 years ago, which coincides with the emergence of culturally modern humans, and it increased in frequency too rapidly to be compatible with random genetic drift or population migration. This suggests that it underwent positive selection.[xxi] An ASPM variant arose about 5800 years ago, coincident with the spread of agriculture, cities and the first record of written language. It too is found in such high frequencies in the population, that it indicates strong positive selection."

"Well, there was six million years in which our brains expanded and got rewired in ways that allow us to do completely different things. We can exchange information by making noise as we exhale -- the gift that we call language. We figure out how the world works, we make many different kinds of tools, we coordinate our behavior and exchange information. And all of these changes in cognitive evolution, in the evolution of the powers of the brain, account for why humans are making a film in which they can talk about chimpanzees rather than vice versa."

Article by Terrence Deacon Draft of chapter to be published in B. Weber & D. Depew (eds.) Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect. Reconsidered. MIT Press, 2003