Cormac McCarthy's point can be summarized in this sentence that he wrote in TFA "...the inheritance of ideas remains something of a sticky issue. It is difficu

Cormac McCarthy's point can be summarized in this sentence that he wrote in TFA "...the inheritance of ideas remains something of a sticky issue. It is difficult to see them as anything other than acquired." which is an interesting way of putting it. we are very comfortable discussing evolutionary history of body parts. what is language though? it doesn't really seem like a body part (though certain structures in the brain, as well as in the mouth and throat, are very important for language) and it does rather seem like an idea. you can teach someone English. you can't teach someone Left Arm. and yet, language is inherited. babies learn it automatically just by being around it in the environment. that makes it something like a communicable "disease", actually. the language-as-virus metaphor is one that McCarthy referenced frequently in his discussion. so what if it's not just a metaphor? what if it really is something transmitted through the environment and that certain kinds of animals become "infected" by it? it's interesting to consider things like this specifically because of the absence of clear evidence that language is like any other physical trait that an animal might have. it's not like those traits. it's something different. something stranger. we don't really have a clear understanding of what exactly it is and so positions like McCarthy's are interested to consider. I don't think you should mistake his own coherence for misplaced confidence though. He isn't saying "it definitely didn't evolve". He isn't making any strong claims like that, as far as I can tell. He's just exploring the interesting differences between language and other things that mammals have/do.