Professor Simon Kirby delivered his inaugural lecture entitled "The Language Organism: evolution, culture, and what it means to be human" on 22 March 2011.

For my public Inaugural Lecture, I will be trying to give a broad accessible summary of the importance of some of the recent research in the LEC. Our species can do something utterly unique in the natural world - a behaviour so transformative that it has reshaped the mechanisms of our own evolution. We are able to take a novel thought and cause another person to share that thought simply by recombining sounds we learned to make as children. Virtually all species communicate, but only humans have this trick called Language. But where does this unique trait come from? How did it evolve? Why are we the only species that has it?

Recorded 22 March 2011. Audio version.