The initial application of evolutionary theory to the universal practice of music-making in humans was at best marginal and at worst dismissive of non-Western musics. Darwin's biography defines an agenda for musicality in the emergence of human culture that is receiving considerable attention in several disciplines, presenting a robust case for…

Could a mutation in a single gene be the evolutionary lynchpin supporting the development of human language? A rare mutation in the molecule known as FOXP2 discovered in a human family seemed to suggest so, and its sequence phylogeny reinforced a Chomskian view that language emerged wholesale in humans. Spurred by this discovery, research in…

Describes the "special destiny-special faculty" paradigm that has dominated western thinking about the nature and origins of language and argues instead that language systems are like technologies and that language acquisition and use involves a range of capacities and skills, a view that could be called the "mosaic development…