By Bolles, Edmund Blair EvoLang is a series of international conferences held every two years to examine the evolution of language. The first was held in Edinburgh in 1996 in an effort to establish a Darwinian basis for language origins.

The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT.

Language centers in the brains of rhesus macaques light up when the monkeys hear calls and screams from fellow monkeys, researchers said in a study that suggests language skills evolved early in primates.

By Fitch, W Tecumseh BIOLINGUISTICS Hypothetically Speaking ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE: Constraints on Hypotheses. Sverker Johansson. xii + 345 pp. John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2005. $114.

The Role of Development in Evolution Some years ago, I found that it was becoming impossible to think about the development of language-something that I had spent several decades doing-without also contemplating the way our species happened to come by the "parts" of the brain, body, and mind that do the developing.