Derek Bickerton has two goals in Adam’s Tongue: first, to convince us that language is the key to being human; second, to dispose of several confounding factors in the study of language evolution, including its primate-centric bias, its homo-centric bias, and its assumption that language is the target of natural selection. He doesn’t believe in intelligent design but neither does he believe language evolution is a juggernaut of precursors and stepping stones. According to Bickerton, Darwin may have challenged the view that humans are special creations of God, but natural selection has never been properly understood. Since Darwin we’ve adopted…