GOD Darwin’s theory of evolution portrayed in Punch’s Almanac for 1882, twenty two years after the publication of The Origin of Species individuals This is not simply because of the difficulty of seeing how spontaneous mutation could produce a language-using individual; it is the difficulty of seeing how anyone could be described as a language-using individual at all before there was a community of language-users Human language is a rule-governed, communal activity, totally different from the signalling systems to be found in non-humans If we reflect on the social and conventional nature of language, we must find something odd in the idea that language may have evolved because of the advantages possessed 303