All episodes of The Michael Shermer Show

The Michael Shermer Show · 2025-09-02 · 72 min · 11,734 words

Why Do Humans Speak?

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You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. All right, so your book, The Origin of Language, I love this subject because I love origin questions, the origin of the universe, the origins of life, the origins of complex life, the origins of uh humanity, the origins of language, morality. That's pretty much it. Those are the big questions that I think scientists should tackle.

So, you know, good on you for taking this on. Give us a little bit of background. What uh what's your story? How'd you get into this? Well it's interesting.

I'm so I'm an experimental biologist and well as she mentioned I got a fellowship at the Ad Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin, which is just a think tank basically and you can't do any experimental work. So I decided I was going to write a book and I had this very um ambitious project in mind and the book was going to be called the um um oh what was it called? It doesn't matter. Oh, how evolution works, yes, how evolution works. Yeah.

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