On Steven Pinker

The latest installment in the Times' fantastic 'Profiles in Science' series:

Some linguists argued that language simply emerged as a byproduct of an increasingly sophisticated brain, but he rejected that idea. “Language is so woven into what makes humans human,” he said, “that it struck me as inconceivable that it was just an accident.” Instead, he concluded that language was an adaptation produced by natural selection. Language evolved like the eye or the hand, thanks to the way it improved reproductive success. In 1990 he published a paper called “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” with his student Paul Bloom, now at Yale. The paper was hugely influential. 

"There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals," Wilde wrote. "It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other---by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought."