De Ruiter, J. P., & Levinson, S. C. (2008). A biological infrastructure for communication underlies the cultural evolution of languages. Behavioral and Brain Sciences commentary, 31, 518.

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Universal Grammar (UG) is indeed evolutionarily implausible. But if languages are just “adapted” to a large primate brain, it is hard to see why other primates do not have complex languages. The answer is that humans have evolved a specialized and uniquely human cognitive architecture, whose main function is to compute mappings between arbitrary signals and communicative intentions. This underlies the development of language in the human species.