What is biolinguistics?

A brief answer is the only one that can be given to the
fairly newly emergent field of interdisciplinary linguistic study, biolinguistics.
According to renowned linguist href="http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20040517.htm">Noam Chomsky (2004), the
first and "most far-reaching" conference on biolinguistics, organized to discuss "the
biolinguistic perspective," was held in 1974 and coined "biolinguistics" in the title of
the conference, "Biolinguistics." Chomsky asserts that the questions raised at this
conference still govern the search for data in today's biolinguistics
studies.

As explained by Chomsky, from whom this entire
answer will be drawn, href="http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20040517.htm">biolinguistics considers
all aspects of language ("sound, meaning, structure") as being a "state of some
component of the mind." Mind is defined as the outcome of a process of the brain, a
process of "emergences" that "we do not yet understand," according to Vernon
Mountcastle. Biolinguistics is a science that relies upon "Newton's separation" of the
mind-body duality, so that "no coherent mind-body problem remains" and so that all
things falling under the designation of mental processes may be identified as and
examined as what Joseph Priestley said were the result of the "organic structure of the
brain."

The thesis in force in biolinguistics is that
language, the focus of biolinguistics, is an entirely natural phenomenon "caused by the
neurophysiological activities of the brain." This opposes earlier ideas such as those
posited by Locke and Alfred Wallace asserting that mental functions--such as cognition,
moral judgement, imagination, language, even personality--could not be explained by
evolutionary principles alone but required recourse to the existence of an external
power, force, or will to provide reasonable explanation: for Locke it was God and a
“superadded” faculty, whereas for Wallace it was some unidentified additional universal
force along the lines of the nature of gravity or cohesion. Thus biolinguistics
represents a controversial (now as well as earlier) and radically new approach to mental
"emergences" and linguistics. Present research is greatly aided by technological
innovations such as fMRI and PET Scans. This is a brief encapsulized summary of
biolinguistics.