ABSTRACT
As a promoter of Evolutionary Psychology Steven Pinker (see Extract 22) is concerned to promote the belief that genetics (the study of the way in which the genome (gene map) informs our appearance and behaviour) holds the key to understanding the ways we behave physically, mentally, and verbally. In his book The Language Instinct he brings this approach to bear upon language which ‘most educated people’, he quips, ‘know… is man’s most important cultural invention’. In fact Pinker lists the knowns about language with great fluency:
It is ‘the quintessential example of his [man’s] capacity to use symbols’;
It is ‘a biologically unprecedented event irrevocably separating him (sic.) from other animals’;
‘language pervades thought’;
different languages cause their speakers to ‘construe reality in different ways’;
‘children learn to talk from role models and caregivers’;
‘English is a zany, logic-defying tongue’; and
‘English spelling takes such wackiness to even greater heights’.
