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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Whatever enables humans to learn and use language would have been subjected to strong positive selection pressure once it began to emerge in the human species.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Language capacity may have emerged as a spandrel—a byproduct of selection for other traits like general cognition or social complexity, not language itself.
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    • 2.Gould and Lewontin's spandrel argument establishes that not every complex trait requires direct positive selection; indirect co-option is evolutionarily well-documented.
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    • 3.If language is a spandrel, the claim that 'whatever enables language learning' faced strong positive selection is unwarranted, since the selected trait was something else.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Strong positive selection pressure requires reproductive fitness advantages to accrue to individual variation in the trait, but early language may have had negligible individual-level fitness variance.
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    • 2.Sober and Wilson's work on multilevel selection suggests group-level benefits do not straightforwardly translate into individual selection pressure of the kind the claim assumes.
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    • 3.A trait conferring diffuse group benefits without fine-grained individual heritable variation may not face 'strong positive selection' in the technically precise population-genetic sense.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.The ability to speak and understand a language provided and continues to provide humans with many benefits.
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    • 2.The costs of the ability to speak and understand language were not too great.
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    • 3.Traits that provide significant benefits at low cost are subjected to strong positive selection pressure.
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