 The view expressed here that all (or even most) interesting properties of the language faculty are not adaptations conflicts with the basic explanatory strategy of evolutionary psychology found in the neo-Darwinian Essentialist views of Pinker and Bloom. Piattelli-Palmarini (1989), following Chomsky, adopts a fairly standard Bauplan critique of adaptationism. On this view the language faculty did not originate as an adaptation, but more plausibly “may have originally arisen for some purely architectural or structural reason (perhaps overall brain size, or the sheer duplication of pre-existing modules), or as a by product of the evolutionary pressures” (p. 19), i.e., it is a kind of Gouldian spandrel.