"Continent of origin" is too ponderous. We could shorten it to "coo". But then Scots would insensitively joke about Black coo, Brown coo, White coo, etc.

Anyone have a source for the original: I can't access it though our university library.

Thanks,

I see little support for this conjecture. Language, at least a language rich in elements, cannot come into being without being mutable


I can think if a number of computer languages that are rich in elements, but that are immutable.

The reviewer likes making unsupported assertions, it seems to me.

If there was value, in terms of reproductive success, in language being unchanged and fixed by genetics, that would have happened.

Finally, as much as women would rather live in a world where everyone just gets along and women can select the male they want to have children with so they can maximize their reproductive success, the world doesn't work that way. It is a dangerous place, even today :-)

This reminds me of a recent paper showing that women do worse at math when they hear talk of any theory that genetic differences contribute to a male-female math gap. But they don't do worse if they just hear a gap exists or that a gap exists and its due to discrimination of some sort. The reason cited was that women who hear the scare-word 'genetics' reflexively assume all sorts of fallacies, such as that all women do worse than all men, or that there is nothing that can ever be done (while of course, discrimination or socialization are assumed to be easily remedied).

The important point is that these very same misconceptions are NOT being disseminated by the researchers and intellectuals trying to be clear and honest about these questions and their study, but by their critics (tons of examples during the Larry Summers dust-up; Summers clearly says 'some', while his critics accuse him of saying 'all', etc.)

Same for 'race'. If scientists using the word 'race', instead of some cryptic synonym, cause some people to think of inferiority or homogeneity or some such, the problem should be directed at the juveniles and ideologues who created it, not the sober scientists and intellectuals just trying to communicate in a clear and transparent manner with their research and exposition.

The people enforcing the taboo, are only perpetuating the misconceptions they created with the same taboos. They are causing the problem with their 'cure', not alleviating it.