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that hasn’t had contact with other humans for thirty thousand years comes to Boulder, Colorado, it will speak like any kid in Colorado, because all children have the same language capacity. And the converse is true. This is distinctly human. There is nothing remotely like it among other organisms. What explains this?
    Well, if you go back fifty years, the proposals that were made when this topic came on the agenda were quite complex. In order just to account for the descriptive facts that you saw in many different languages, it seemed necessary to assume that universal grammar permitted highly intricate mechanisms, varying a lot from language to language, because languages looked very different from one another.
    Over the past fifty to sixty years, one of the most significant developments, I think, is a steady move, continuing today, toward trying to reduce and refine the assumptions so that they maintain or even expand their explanatory power for particular languages but become more feasible with regard to other conditions that the answer must meet.
    Whatever it is in our brain that generates language developed quite recently in evolutionary time, presumably within the last one hundred thousand years. Something very significant happened, which is presumably the source of human creative endeavor in a wide range of fields: creative arts, tool making, complex social structures. Paleoanthropologists sometimes call it “the great leap forward.” It’s generally assumed, plausibly, that this change had to do with the emergence of language, for which there’s no real evidence before in human history or in any other species. Whatever happened had to be pretty simple, because that’s a very short time span for evolutionary changes to take place.
    The goal of the study of universal grammar is to try to show that there is indeed something quite simple that can meet these various conditions. A plausible theory has to account for the variety of languages and the detail that you see in the surface study of languages—and, at the same time, be simple enough to explain how language could have emerged very quickly, through some small mutation of the brain, or something like that. There has been a lot of progress toward that goal and, in a parallel effort, to try to account for the apparent variability of languages by showing that, in fact, the perceived differences are superficial. The seeming variability has to do with minor changes in a few of the structural principles that are fixed.
    Discoveries in biology have encouraged this line of thinking. If you go back to the late 1970s, François Jacob argued that it could well turn out—and probably is true—that the differences between species, let’s say an elephant and a fly, could be traceable to minor changes in the regulatory circuits of the genetic system, the genes that determine what other genes do in particular places. He shared the Nobel Prize for early work on this topic.
    It looks like something similar may be true of language. There’s now work on an extraordinarily broad range of typologically different languages—and, more and more, it looks like that. There’s plenty of work to do, but a lot of this research falls into place in ways that were unimaginable thirty or forty years ago.
    In biology it was plausible quite recently to claim that organisms can vary virtually without limit and that each one has to be studied on its own. Nowadays that has changed so radically that serious biologists propose that there’s basically one multicellular animal—the “universal genome”—and that the genomes of all the multicellular animals that have developed since the Cambrian explosion half a billion years ago are just modifications of a single pattern. This thesis hasn’t been proven, but it is taken seriously.
    Something similar is going on, I think, in the study of language. Actually, I should make it clear that