>It may be that the influential persons imagine all mammals waiting for language to appear. I dont know.

>Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it. But useful? Oh yes.

> There is no selection at work in the evolution of language because language is not a biological system and because there is only one of them

Organisms don't 'wait' for new traits to come along. They just come along and if they are useful and benefit the organism, they propagate across the population through successful reproduction. Evolved traits propagate themselves precisely through being useful in helping the organism survive and reproduce. McCarthy doesn't seem to understand the elementary process by which natural selection functions.

>The invention of language was understood at once to be incredibly useful. Again, it seems to have spread through the species almost instantaneously.

>For while it is fairly certain that art preceded language it probably didnt precede it by much.

There is absolutely no evidence for any of this whatsoever. It's pure supposition. How can he know language propagated so fast and arose so suddenly? Some evolutionary biologists analyzing the physiology of early hominids think there is evidence of physical adaptations for language as far back as Homo Ergaster over a million years ago, but vocal language leaves no archaeological evidence. There is just no way to know how long it took to develop to modern forms and no reason to suppose that physical representation in the form of art predates spoken language.

Edit:
McCormack's premise seems to be that Language did not evolve from any preceding capacity, including any preceding ability to communicate. We know that modern primates other than humans communicate in very primitive pre-linguistic ways, but McCormack specifically dismisses the idea that human language is descended from or evolved from similar capabilities in our common ancestors. This seems absurd to me on several grounds.

Our common primate ancestors did not have vocal cords or throat configurations capable of modern speech, or anything close to it. McCormack even points this out in the essay and highlights the fact that reconfiguring our throats for speech is, independent of any advantage language gives us, a serious disadvantage because it makes us more susceptible to choking. Yet then he goes on to say that language gives us no evolutionary advantage because it’s ‘not a biological system’. If it gives no evolutionary advantage, how does it compensate for the increased risk of choking?

Speech-like non-verbal communication must have preceded physical adaptation in order to make the adaptation advantageous, otherwise there would again have been no compensating factor for the choking risk. So early forms of language-like communication would necessarily have been non-verbal (by which I mean involving gestures sounds like those made by some other modern primates but not 'spoken'). This early communication was less efficient and advantageous than spoken communication, otherwise physical adaptations for spoken communication would not have increased fitness.

So it seems far more plausible that language-like communication originated as more complex forms of gestures and sounds our common primate ancestors already used and then evolved into a form dominated by spoken language in order to increase it’s efficiency. After all, our ancestors going back millions of years had complex physical culture including manufacturing composite artefacts, creating and managing fire, processing and cooking food. All of these would need to be taught somehow. Yet McCormack’s thesis is that this teaching involved communications no more sophisticated than the basic communications we see in other primates and other mammals today, until spoken language somehow burst on to the scene fully formed 100k years ago.