The years after the publication in 1859 of Darwin's On the Origin of Species were full of turmoil. Darwin found a powerfully placed and unyielding opponent in the Oxford linguist Max Mueller. The battle lines were clearly drawn: Miiller (like many contemporaries) was willing to grant natural selection a role in generating animal form, but he thought it incapable of explaining human evolution, particularly the quintessentially human trait of language. Mueller's core critique concerned the lack of plausible precursors of language. He ruthlessly criticized Victorian ideas about the origin of language, coining derogatory nicknames for them, such as the 'bow wow' and 'ding dong' theories, which are still used , today.
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