The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky Page B

species have what seem to be perfectly homologous parts of the brain – the STG – but they just do not have this capacity to develop even the rudiments of speech or sign. Is that because they lack a language faculty in addition? Or why? Do you attribute it to some specific feature of the humanSTG, or . . .
    NC: You could make up different stories. It could be that our hominid ancestors lacked thesebrain structures, developed Merge, and then developed the brain structures. But there isn't enough time for that. The brain structures had to have been there for a long period before anything like this explosion took place. And we do know that there hasn't been anything since, because ofthe essential identity of people all over the world. So you've got an upper bound and a lower bound, and they seem to be awful close. So unless something entirely new comes along, the only plausible story seems to be that the apparatus was in place, for whatever reason. And maybe special adaptations like these were used for grunts; after all, you can have polysyllabic lexical items, and maybe polysyllabic lexical items were used, and maybe with the complex characteristics of human concepts, for some unexplained and unintelligible reason. But it still requires the ability tohave infinite generative capacity, which apparently comes along in a flash, giving everything else.
    JM: If, whatever it is, whatever that gene is that introduced Merge and carries it, if it acted something like a control gene along the Gehring PAX-6 line, it might . . .
    NC: . . . it might affect the development of other things. We don't know enough about neurology to tell. So maybe someregulatory gene emerged which both gave Merge and permitted [neural systems to embody it].
    JM: Fascinating speculations . . .
    NC: . . .so little is known about the evolution of the brain that no one can tell.
    JM: Does anyone speculate about these kinds of things . . .
    NC: I don't think so, because the overwhelming assumption is that language evolved slowly through natural selection. Yet that doesn't seem at all consistent with even the most basic facts. If you look at the literature on the evolution of language, it's all about how language could have evolved from gesture, or from throwing, or something like chewing, or whatever. None of which makes anysense.

8 Perfection and design (interview 20 January 2009)
     
    JM: I want to ask some questions about the ‘perfection’ of the language faculty. First, a background matter: if you speak of perfection and in particularperfection in design of the language faculty – or at least, the mapping to the SEM interface – you seem to be invited to answer the question, “design for what?”
    NC: I think that's misleading. That's because of connotations of the word design . Design suggests a designer, and a function of the designed thing or operation. But in biology, ‘design’ just means the way it is.
     
    JM: The structure, whatever it is . . .
    NC: How is the galaxy designed? Because the laws of physics say that that's the way it's designed. It's not for anything, and nobody did it. It's just what happens under certain physical circumstances. I wish there were a better word to use, because it does carry these unfortunate connotations. In a sense – a negative sense – there's a function. If the structure were dysfunctional, it wouldn't survive. And OK, in that sense, it's designed for something. It doesn't mean it's well designed for survival. So take language andcommunication. Language is poorly designed for communication, but we get by with it, so it's not dysfunctional enough to disappear [or at least, disappear with regard to its use for communication, which isn't its only use, by any means]. Take, for example, trace erasure [or in the more recent terminology of copies, non-pronunciation of copies]. It's good for efficiency of structure, but it's very bad for communication. Anyone who tries to write a parsing program