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"Heliconius butterflies have contributed hugely to our understanding of evolution over the last 150 years. These brightly coloured tropical butterflies are famous for their great diversity of wing patterns and also repeated convergence of pattern due to mimicry. The book explores their ecological relationships with Passiflora host plants, which provide an example of coevolution between host and herbivore. They also have coevolved relationships with cucurbit vines that provide a reliable source of pollen for the butterflies in return for pollination services. This has led to a shift in life history, with Heliconius characterized by a long lifespan and extended reproductive period compared to other butterflies. They also have large brains and unusual behaviours involving detailed spatial memory of their local environment. Their extraordinary diversity of wing patterns is controlled by a remarkably simple system of alternate alleles at just four major wing patterning genes. These genes regulate the development of patterning and colouration in the wing through regulatory changes that control expression of these key genes. These genes therefore offer insight into how developmental processes can evolve in rapid radiations, to produce such bewildering variety from just a few genetic building blocks. The alleles at these major patterning loci have been exchanged between species through adaptive introgression, offering a mechanism for convergent evolution through allele sharing. The genomes of sympatric species also show rampant evidence for genetic material exchanged through hybridization, which challenges our notions of species identity. Divergence in wing pattern also contributes to speciation. In summary, these butterflies have a well understood ecology, genetics, and behaviour, which offer some remarkable insights into tropical rainforest biodiversity and adaptive radiation."

""Ideophones have been recognized in modern linguistics at least since 1935, but they still lie far outside the concerns of mainstream (Western) linguistic debate, in part because they are most richly attested in relatively unstudied (often unwritten) languages. The evolution of language, on the other hand, has recently become a fashionable topic, but all speculations so far have been almost totally data-free. Without disputing the tenet that there are no primitive languages, this book argues that ideophones may be an atavistic throwback to an earlier stage of communication, where sounds and gestures were paired in what can justifiably be called a 'prelinguistic' fashion. The structure of ideophones may also provide answers to deeper questions, among them how communicative gestures may themselves have emerged from practical actions. Moreover, their current distribution and behaviour provide hints as to how they may have become conventional words in languages with conventional rules"--"

"Evolution has not typically been recognised by linguists as a constraining factor when developing linguistic theories. This book demonstrates that our theories of language must reflect the fact that language has evolved. It critiques a currently dominant framework in the field of linguistics, the Minimalist Program, by showing how it fails to take evolution into account. It approaches the question of the evolution of human language in a novel way by applying findings from the field of evolutionary biology to language. Key properties associated with typically evolving systems are identified in language, and the shortcomings of the Minimalist Program in its outright rejection of these features are exposed. "