ABSTRACT
Darwin’s theory is founded on a number of key notions: fitness, variation, and heritability among them. The heritability of a characteristic is crucial if that characteristic is to play a role in the process of evolution by natural selection. Just as the product, evolution, can easily be confused with one of the mechanisms that produce evolution, natural selection, it seems the heritability of a characteristic is easily confused with its being one of the mechanisms that underpin heritability and genes. In this chapter, we will see why this is an important mistake. What we will see is that there is a very important sense in which English, or the mastery of it, is a biologically heritable trait. This claim sounds wrong and has commonly been controverted. In the literature on the evolution of language, it is a commonplace observation that unlike the language faculty itself, speaking this or that language is not heritable. Showing that English is, strictly speaking, a heritable characteristic is useful because it highlights the mistaken assumptions that might lead some to think it is false.
