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A review by maria_rb
How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention by Daniel L. Everett
3.0
While this author provides an alternate explanation to that of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG) assertions, the evidence he provides to dispute UG is to merely state that he is correct and other scientists are wrong. While he provides cultural scenarios that he deems likely to have happened with Homo Erectus, in particular, he doesn’t quite make the link from cultural necessity to language invention clear beyond: if they needed to work together to complete more complex tasks, such as building boats to travel vast distances , they’d have needed language, so therefore they invented language that later evolved to what is currently what we use. That isn’t convincing enough to me.
He does have some very good explanations for how evolution is likely to have happened, but all of this is predicated on a theory that he is right and others are wrong, without making a case for why he’s right.
The fact that he simply dismisses ALL of the linguistic work of earlier scientists for his own theories comes across as shortsighted to me in that his explanation for dismissing it all isn’t clear. He simply starts with a premise that his theories are correct and others’ theories are not. That’s bad science and bad academic reasoning. I do appreciate that he is positing a new theory, but wish he’d done more to connect the dots to come across as more credible.
He does have some very good explanations for how evolution is likely to have happened, but all of this is predicated on a theory that he is right and others are wrong, without making a case for why he’s right.
The fact that he simply dismisses ALL of the linguistic work of earlier scientists for his own theories comes across as shortsighted to me in that his explanation for dismissing it all isn’t clear. He simply starts with a premise that his theories are correct and others’ theories are not. That’s bad science and bad academic reasoning. I do appreciate that he is positing a new theory, but wish he’d done more to connect the dots to come across as more credible.