ABSTRACT
It is over 100 years since the Linguistic Society in Paris banned papers on language evolution from its meetings, because they were speculative rather than scientific. Further, spectacular work with nonhuman primates makes it abundantly clear that there is little agreement within the scientific community over what exactly constitutes a language. Objectively, language is just noise with pattern. In reality, it is a bit more than that. At any point in time possibilities exist for change at four levels: possible possibilities, probable possibilities, actual possibilities, and actualized possibilities. Possible possibilities are less specified than actual possibilities: the levels of possibility are at the same time levels of specification. In a thoroughgoing ecological account, the distinction between individuals and their environments becomes very blurred: the two terms are in a dialectical relationship with each other. An environment cannot be thought of as a vacuum that presents a myriad of potential niches for the ecological elaboration of the organism's progeny.
