ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the convergent-evolution of the brain and the immune system. It focuses on the similar mechanisms that seem to account for the molecular diversity observed in both domains, but also on the crosstalk between the immune system and the brain. The chapter examines several genes that may have been horizontally transferred to the human genome and are expected to interact with genes that we regard as important for language evolution. It discusses the broader effect of the microbiota on brain development and function and introduces the idea of the language hologenome. The chapter also focuses on how these findings could help us improve our current understanding of the linguistic mind and its evolution. If language evolution was affected by changes in the immune system/brain crosstalk, it is interesting that G Protein-Coupled Receptor 1 turns out to be among the genes potentially transferred to humans from viruses.
