Why only us: language and evolution

We are born crying, but those cries signal first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human -- the faculty -- raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars -- a computer scientist and a linguist -- addresses enduring question of evolution of language. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define language and therefore what it was that had evolved.…