Is human language an evolutionary adaptation? Is linguistics a natural science? These questions have bedeviled philosophers, philologists and linguists from Plato through Chomsky. Prof. Givón suggests that the answers fall naturally within an integrated study of living organisms.In this new work, Givón points out that language operates between aspects of both complex biological design and adaptive behavior. As in biology, the whole is an adaptive compromise to competing demands. Variation is the indispensable tool of learning, change and adaptation. The contrast between innateness and input-driven emergence is an interaction between genetically-coded and behaviorally-coded experience.
In enlarging the cross-disciplinary domain, the book examines the parallels between language evolution and language diachrony. Sociality, cooperation and communication are shown to be rooted in a common evolutionary source, the kin-based hunting-and-gathering society of intimates.
The book pays homage to the late Joseph Greenberg and his visionary integration of functional motivation, typological diversity and diachronic change.

Marina Rusakova, Saint Petersburg State University on Linguist List 14-3125 (2003):
I believe that this book opens new horizons in linguistics... 'Bio-Linguistics' provides the reader with the material to admire, reflect upon, agree with or disagree with. Besides being a manifest of linguistics of a new type. 'Bio-Linguistics' is a brilliant handbook that can help bring up a linguist who thinks within common sense frame and who would not de frightened to penetrate into both subtle details of particular investigations and into the soars of general theory. The book is vivid and full of humor.