Excerpts From:
The World From Within:
Triumph and Failure
of an Evolutionary Adaptation

The evolutionary gains, which language may have afforded at a significant transitional moment in the past, have long since been trivialized by the emergence, and triumph, of a set of negative factors -- a particular pathology if you will -- which has blocked the healthy expression of the collective (and individual) sensibility, undermining in the process the social purpose of language, its biological raison-d être.English would bring this pathology to a new level of refinement...

Though a reasonable case can be made that language itself is a "uniquely human" possession, we run into a logical trap when we attempt to give discourse that same unique evolutionary status. Language is a sub-category of discourse, a single peculiar manifestation of an inclination to discursive interaction which is deeply rooted in animal "behavior"...

Discursive interaction is a process largely of assimilation, a momentary (often enduring) expansion of the personal "self" which seems to challenge the individual biology of the organism and its presumed limits. It constitutes the basis of community and much collective action. And when this process fails, connections are severed and the organism comes out of sync with its social environment. Left intact is the mere surface reality of the organism's existence, its objective experience. The affected organism now exists in a world defined by the sensory apparatus alone, all is veneer, structure without content.