The Rhetoric of Racism Book

If you are interested in language evolution you cannot skip this book, the best you can do is to start with it. The amount of interdisciplinary information presented here is huge, the discussion is impressively cohesive and easy to follow. Although the book title has the word "meaning" in it, don't expect much linguistics, there is much more evidence from biology, ethology and psychology than from linguistics, and it is good so. If you are used to linguistic literature, it may be hard to recognize that too much is assumed to be given there. The truth is that, very likely, linguistics cannot afford to be as self-contained as it pretends to be. This comment relates more to the first part of the book which for me was a completely new perspective on the notion of meaning (for the reason stated above). The second part is about animal communication and there you will find the usual set of cooperation-altruism-fitness-selection-game theory stuff which is (fortunately) presented critically. The theories presented there, like inclusive fitness, sexual selection, the handicap principle, are all relevant but none decisively answers the question how come humans are so cooperative? I am very much looking forward to the second volume on the origins of grammar.