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from Part V - Language, Our Greatest Gift
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2023
You have already performed the greatest feat of your life, although you most likely are unaware of it. This is the acquisition of your native language. Within the first few years of your life, you went from nothing to a fully competent speaker of the language(s) you were exposed to. That happens unconsciously, without any instruction,1 in a very short time, with native-speaker competence as the result.
Would the same hold for exobeings? Indeed, would it be valid to assume that exobeings have a division of their lifespans into childhood and adulthood as with humans? Recall that for Darwinian evolution to occur there must be some way for an organism to reproduce and be gradually subject to natural selection. If sexual reproduction applied in the animal world of an exoplanet, reaching sexual maturity would be a feature of animal life.
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