Donald Loritz, How the brain evolved language. New York & Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1999. Pp. 227.

Lyle Jenkins, Biolinguistics : exploring the biology of language. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii+264.

In the course of reviewing recent books on the evolution of language andcommunication (Dunbar 1996, Hauser 1996, Deacon 1997) I have hadoccasion to note that relatively few writers on these topics know much aboutlinguistics, and to wish that more of them did. I should have remembered theold adage that one shouldn't wish for things - one might get them.

For more than a century, linguists honored the Linguistic Society ofParis's ban on all discussion of language evolution; other disciplines wentahead with it regardless. Now that the centrality of language evolution to anystudy of our species is becoming apparent, linguists are desperately trying toplay catchup, and the two volumes reviewed here both appeared in the lastcouple of years. Both authors are linguists, albeit hyphenated ones. DonaldLoritz teaches computational linguistics at Georgetown University; hisdoctorate was in psycholinguistics. Lyle Jenkins works in the BiolinguisticsInstitute in Cambridge, MA; however, his doctorate was in unhyphenatedlinguistics. It would be difficult to find two authors whose ideas were morediametrically opposed.