Natural Selection and Language Genes.

Dmitry Pruss sent me a link to “Natural selection and language genes in humans” by Rob DeSalle, Guilherme Lepski, Analia Arévalo, et al. (Scientific Reports 16:9382, 17 February 2026; open access), adding “I am not ready to believe any of it, but technically it says that the genetic basis of speech consisted of a broad network of genes with the foundations laid back in the ape times and most of the subsequent changes made during the emergence of the common ancestor of our species, Neanderthals and Denisovans.” I too am not ready to believe any of it, but I don’t have the technical background to make any useful judgments, so I present it for your appraisal. The abstract:

In this study we construct lists of candidate genes for articulate language. Analysis of coding regions of over 100 candidate genes for the effects of natural selection (directional episodic selection and relaxed/intensified selection) in the various lineages of primates (thirty-four nonhuman primate species, plus Homo sapiens Neanderthals and Denisovans) revealed a burst of altered selection effects on neural genes at the node leading to the Homo sapiens-Neanderthal-Denisova triad, followed by bursts of selection effects on neural genes related to language in both the Denisovan and Neanderthal lineages. Those latter increases in involvement of neural genes in Neanderthals and Denisovans can be contrasted with the missing or slight response to selection on those same genes in the H. sapiens lineage. The genes involved in these bursts can mostly be classified as involved in synapse structure and maintenance. We develop a hypothesis for how synaptic efficiency could be related to language acquisition in these lineages.

Thanks, Dmitry!