and epigenome. As described by West-Eberhard, the adaptive evolution of novelties can be initiated with a plastic, phenotypic response by the organism to a new environmental input. If the environmental input is recurring, a subpopulation capable of responding to it can be selected - that is, adaptive variation in the regulation, form, or side effects of the plastic trait is selected, in a process otherwise known as genetic accommodation. As West-Eberhard writes, this ‘phenotype first’ mode of evolution differs from the standard Neo-Darwinian approach in that genes are followers, not leaders, in evolution. In the case of language evolution, Dor and Jablonka suggest it might have originated with collective explorations of a new communicative strategy (an instructive, imaginative one). Its gradual proliferation in human societies would have created a selective environment in which the plastic traits allowing language learning would evolve. Dor suggests a process in which humans were constantly trying to catch up with their new communication technology, and argues that the innate capacities humans currently possess are derivative, emergent, variable and partial. Dor sums up the argument thus: “First we invented language. Then language changed us.” Reception Reviews of the book were largely favorable, with several noting the wide-ranging implications of Dor's theory, while criticism of the book suggested it under-emphasised the role of play and took an overly-essentialist approach to language. Daniel Dennett wrote: Daniel Dor’s remarkable book [...] analyzes language as a “social communication technology,” banishing most of the Chomskian innateness dogmas and replacing them with reverse engineering of culturally transmitted habits and dispositions [...] Dor ignores meme theory and doesn’t rely as much as he should on evolutionary processes (and free-floating rationales), but he has clearly set out a reimagined set of specs for language, filling in many details only dimly suggested by my sketchy account. I recommend it to all serious thinkers about the phenomena of language. Brian Boyd, reviewed the book favorably, writing: It [Dor’s theory] promises not only to change the face of the language sciences, but also to have profound implications for anthropology, biology, cultural studies, literary studies, philosophy, politics, and religion, and for our understanding of human experience [...] Dor offers much of his theory in an ample nutshell, one bold hypothesis with eight bold subhypotheses, each challenging refutation and thereby stimulating, I predict, decades of new argument, research and discovery. Gurpinder Lalli, reviewing the book for The British Society