ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how people can have begun to operate with symbols and the problem of origin of language. The most important difference between language and other media of communication is that language involves the use of symbols. The rule-governed nature of languages makes it difficult to explain the origin of language by natural selection. The explanation by natural selection of the origin of a feature in a population presupposes the occurrence of that feature in particular individuals of the population. Whatever difficulties there are about explaining by natural selection the internalisation of the rules of a particular language, it is surely doubly difficult to explain in that way the internalisation of a set of rules about rules. To try to explain the origin of universal grammar by natural selection seems as least as difficult as trying to explain the utility of a light-sensitive cell to an animal living in an environment totally without light.
