ABSTRACT
This volume attempts to track aspects of the prehistory and development of the research hypothesis first explicitly suggested around 1996, according to which the narrow syntactic component of language is a system whose properties are ultimately determined by gene-independent natural law. There are certain typical properties that, everything else being equal, make theories less elegant and so less highly valued than their respective competitors that do not suffer from such shortcomings. These include, for example, redundancies among theoretical principles, the nonunified treatment of apparently unifiable phenomena or the need for auxiliary hypotheses. Under the assumption that properties of natural language syntax are determined gene-independently, that is, independently from evolutionary bricolage, such methodological considerations carry over fully to the study of this component of the human mind.
