ABSTRACT
Language deserves some special attention because it is the medium of so much cultural transmission and so many of our efforts at manipulation and persuasion. Culture is to human social life as water is to the lives of fishes or air is to those of birds, one of the raw materials we use in the efforts to deal with the world, and so on. The memeticists, in contrast, have largely been studying the properties of culture while ignoring the details of human social life. Language deserves some special attention because it is, after all, the medium of so much cultural transmission and so many of the efforts at manipulation and persuasion. Language is also a ripe fruit for any biocultural approach to try to pick because of how it involves biology—the hard-wired circuitry of our brains that makes language possible—and culture.
