A Brief Guide to [A Brief Guide to Language Evolution for Linguists - by Derek Bickerton]

I’ve been rereading the Derek Bickerton paper, A Brief Guide to Language Evolution for Linguists quite a lot recently. Its a really good attempt to synthesize the diverse debates about language evolution into something that an average linguist can quickly refer to. Unfortunately I think that Bickerton is not very impartial in his representation of the issues and I feel duty bound to pick my way through it and give a little commentary. It is a very useful paper and he makes some excellent points, however there are some parts where I think he is promoting his position whilst claiming to be an impartial guide.