“British scientists have pinpointed a single genetic defect that causes a rare hereditary language disorder, providing the strongest evidence yet that mankind's sophisticated communication skills are determined by DNA”.

This is how The Times (UK, 4 October) heralded the news that Tony Monaco's team at the University of Oxford have shown that a mutation in the forkhead-domain gene FOXP2 is responsible for an inherited speech disorder that was first identified in a British family. Affected individuals find it difficult to form words and have problems with certain aspects of grammar, such as changing the tense of verbs.

The heritable nature of this disorder seems to support the idea, proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s, that the ability to learn language is innate in humans. Even Charles Darwin was on the case (The Times, 4 October); in The Origin of Species he states: “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write”.

However, some scientists are sceptical about the idea that linguistic ability resides in specific brain structures or genes. In a letter to the New York Times (5 October), cognitive scientist Philip Lieberman suggests that the FOXP2 mutation affects the basal ganglia nonspecifically, like Parkinson's disease, which also causes “deficits in both manual and speech motor control, and in comprehending grammar and abstract reasoning”. Language researcher Bruce Tomblin points out that “several variant genes that seemed at first to affect only speech [have] turned out to cause other cognitive problems as well” (New York Times, 4 October). Clearly, this new study has not been able to resolve the debate over whether there are genes 'for' language.