Darwin y la facultad (no tan) humana del lenguaje

Guillermo Lorenzo

Resumen


Darwin and the (not so) human language faculty.

For Darwin, the human faculty of language was an ideal field for applying the evolutionary mechanism of sexual selection. Furthermore, he saw the song of birds as a perfect candidate to establish a line of continuity between language and the rest of the organic world. Recent molecular findings have revitalized both theses. This article reviews the question from a historiographic point of view and it offers some remarks concerning the parallelism of language and birdsong evolution from the perspective of current evo-devo biology.

Key words: Darwin, faculty of language, birdsong, sexual selection, FOXP2 gene, evolutionary developmental biology.

 


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