  Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in
communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious"
and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language
amounts to explaining why none of the other primate species evolved anything
even remotely similar to language. What I propose here is to reverse the
picture. On closer examination, language resembles a losing strategy. Competing
for providing other individuals with information, sometimes striving to be
heard, makes apparently no sense within a Darwinian framework. At face value,
language as we can observe it should never have existed or should have been
counter-selected. In other words, the selection pressure that led to language
is still missing. The solution I propose consists in regarding language as a
social signaling device that developed in a context of generalized insecurity
that is unique to our species. By talking, individuals advertise their
alertness and their ability to get informed. This hypothesis is shown to be
compatible with many characteristics of language that otherwise are left
unexplained.
