Nature 404, 441 - 442 (2000) Ĺ  Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Survival of the clearest

STEVEN PINKER

Steven Pinker is in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02193, USA. e-mail: steve@psyche.mit.edu

There are no fossils to show how language evolved. But evolutionary game theory is revealing how some of the defining features of human language could have been shaped by natural selection.

The study of the evolution of language, famously banned by the Société de Linguistique de Paris in 1866 and dismissed as idle story-telling ever since, has returned to respectability. Recent years have seen a flurry of articles and books1-5, a biannual research conference and now several papers by Martin Nowak and collaborators applying evolutionary game theory to the problem6-9. Their latest offering appears on page 495 of this issue9.