Biology, Culture and the Emergence and Elaboration of Symbolization

Introduction The human language capacity presents biological and cognitive sciences with a striking paradox, since this capacity is unique, even though its biological, cultural and communicative foundations are in large measure shared with non-human species. It is widely known that humans share around 95% of their genetic material with their closest primate relatives, chimpanzees. We also know, since the publication of the initial results of the human genome project, that the linguistic gulf separating the human species from other closely related species is not correlated with a difference of any substantial order of magnitude in the available quantity of genetic material for directly coding the language capacity. This does not falsify claims for such a direct coding, but should at least give pause for thought.