I'm interested in all aspects of human language. It then raises the question of what other aspects of the human intellect are instincts coming from specialized neural circuitry. (One corollary is that most of the complexity in language comes from the mind of a child, not from the schools or from grammar books.) All this suggests that language is caused by dedicated circuitry that has evolved in the human brain. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.

I call language an 'instinct,' an admittedly quaint term for what other cognitive scientists have called a mental organ, a faculty, or a module. STEVEN PINKER is an experimental psychologist professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT author of Language Learnability and Language Development (1984), Learnability and Cognition (1989), The Language Instinct (1994), and How the Mind Works, forthcoming,1997. There have been all sorts of suggestions: bipedalism, tool use, that sort of thing, but it struck me at the time that the one defining capability is language. I remember speculating in my 1966 book about what it is that makes the human species special. There are features there that have been evolving, and that we can interpret with respect to why they evolved.

What's particularly notable is his work on the evolution of our language capability, and being able to talk about this in specific terms.

He's going to be a superstar well into the twenty-first century. Williams: I'm very favorably impressed with Steven Pinker.

The language instinct