ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2010
Colloquium paper: a role for relaxed selection in the evolution of the language capacity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Constructive Neutral Evolution of Behaviour.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Disembodiment and Language in Schizophrenia: An Integrated Psychopathological and Evolutionary Perspective.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2023Article
- Meaning in Music Is Intentional, but in Soundscape It Is Not-A Naturalistic Approach to the Qualia of Sounds.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Review
- The persistence and evolutionary consequences of vestigial behaviours.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Review
- Research on bilingualism as discovery science.Brain and language · 2021Article
- The Role of Canalization and Plasticity in the Evolution of Musical Creativity.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
- How Culture and Biology Interact to Shape Language and the Language Faculty.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Article
- Birdsong as a window into language origins and evolutionary neuroscience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Maladaptation in feral and domesticated animals.Evolutionary applications · 2019Review
- Temporal Coordination in Mother-Infant Vocal Interaction: A Cross-Cultural Comparison.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Limiting parental interaction during vocal development affects acoustic call structure in marmoset monkeys.Science advances · 2018Article
- Self domestication and the evolution of language.Biology & philosophy · 2018Article
- The ideomotor recycling theory for tool use, language, and foresight.Experimental brain research · 2017Review
- Sexual communication and domestication may give rise to the signal complexity necessary for the emergence of language: An indication from songbird studies.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2017Article
- Culture and biology in the origins of linguistic structure.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2017Article
- Limiting parental feedback disrupts vocal development in marmoset monkeys.Nature communications · 2017Article
- The Role of the Baldwin Effect in the Evolution of Human Musicality.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2017Article
- How self-organization can guide evolution.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
- Culture shapes the evolution of cognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Explaining the extravagant complexity of the human language and our competence to acquire it has long posed challenges for natural selection theory. To answer his critics, Darwin turned to sexual selection to account for the extreme development of language. Many contemporary evolutionary theorists have invoked incredibly lucky mutation or some variant of the assimilation of acquired behaviors to innate predispositions in an effort to explain it. Recent evodevo approaches have identified developmental processes that help to explain how complex functional synergies can evolve by Darwinian means. Interestingly, many of these developmental mechanisms bear a resemblance to aspects of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, often differing only in one respect (e.g., form of duplication, kind of variation, competition/cooperation). A common feature is an interplay between processes of stabilizing selection and processes of relaxed selection at different levels of organism function. These may play important roles in the many levels of evolutionary process contributing to language. Surprisingly, the relaxation of selection at the organism level may have been a source of many complex synergistic features of the human language capacity, and may help explain why so much language information is "inherited" socially.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.