A mosaic eye is different from a vertebrate or human eye. The human eye is a single organ; the eye is mobile and can scan the surroundings, scan objects. In the case of butterflies, ants, bees, their eyes are multiple eyes, compound eyes with hundreds or thousands of fixed micro-eyes each presenting a view of some part of the environment. The mosaic eye of the dragonfly has 28000 ommatidia. These transmit information through the retina to the insect's brain where it is integrated to form a usable picture of the insect's environment and of activity in the insect's environment.

Each human individual's eyes look out on a segment of existence in space and time; each human in the light of the information transmitted to the central nervous system can determine how he or she should behave, should react in the environment in a useful way. Each individual accumulates knowledge through perception of the particular segment of space-time in which he finds himself. Throughout humanity we have thousands of millions of eyes looking out on the single world, the single universe. In the same way as the insect's mosaic eye composed of many micro-eyes makes it possible for the insect to integrate information over a much wider field than any single ommatidion can, so for human beings the information, the perception, the experience of each individual is not limited necessarily to that individual; human beings have developed refined systems of communication with one another. In the case of humanity the integrating processes which in the insect are the result of the organisation of its nervous system, have been constituted by the development of language, language as a system for externalising the contents of each individual's brain and beyond that through the invention of writing, that is the recording of language, enabling information to be transmitted over time as well as over space between one section of humanity and another, between one generation and another generation, between one country or continent and another.

The multi-faceted eye of humanity, present, past and future, constitutes a great mosaic eye. Collectively, humanity has opened its eye on all time and all space; the explorers in the past revealed the shape of the earth, the distribution of land and sea, the mountains, rivers, natural phenomena; the zoologists and botanists listed the animals and plants; the physicists and chemists, the doctors, revealed and integrated the patterns of living and non-living material, the historians, dramatists, investigated and recorded the succession of human lives, of human communities; the poets, philosophers, composers, psychologists, explored the human mind, human emotions, language, thought, consciousness.

These explorations, geographical, historical, intellectual, social, emotional by thousands of millions of human being over the centuries have been brought together through language, the power of words, spoken and written, through the multifarious devices now available for recording life from moment to moment, for communicating more and more rapidly and fully between individuals across the world and across time. We (the collective human eye) can look to the remotest past, imagine the remotest future, explore the distances and the minutenesses of the universe. All this knowledge, all this perception, all this imagination and thought, no longer held within any single small brain but spread, reflected, multiplied, through massive quantities of neural matter, human brains behind human eyes.

The orthodox view in linguistics, held by generations of students of language, has been that language is an artificial, non- biological system, a system of conventional lexical symbols fitted together by arbitrary syntactic structures. Though Chomsky has claimed that language (the Universal Grammar) must have a biological basis, he denies that it can have evolved by any standard Darwinian process of natural selection; attempts to account for the evolution of language by gradual natural selection have not been successful. The perceptuo-motor theory of language origin proposes that language in its evolutionary origin, in its processes of development and change and in its current functioning is not an arbitrary system; it was constructed directly on and from the preexisting complexity of the human brain, from pre-existing organisation of the perceptual and motor systems. New connections were established between these systems and the structures we use for articulation. Motor control has the central role in all behaviour; language is an important segment of behaviour; it is itself action and is integrated with perception and bodily action. Cerebral motor control makes use of pre-wired motor programs; these elementary motor units were put in correspondence with the articulatory motor programs which generate speech sounds. Speech sounds are directly related to elementary movement-patterns of the body, particularly of the arm; there is a limited set of elementary arm movement-patterns. Neither individual words nor syntactic processes are in origin necessarily arbitrary. The original sound-structures of words were modelled on, derived from, neural patterning of perception and action. Words derived their sound-structures from the visual patterning, action-patterning or sound-patterning associated with the objects or actions to which the words were related. Similarly syntactic processes were derived from cerebral motor processes involved in assembling part-movements into complete movements. The neural rules for forming motor programs into action-sequences served as the basis for the syntactic rules by which words are assembled into utterances. The relation between movement and speech can be clearly seen in the intimate relation between gesture and language. The stereotypical argument against a natural origin for language, the diversity of languages, the differences in lexicon and syntax, can be accounted for in terms derived from population genetics. Populations over long periods of time have differed in gene-frequencies affecting both the cerebral and anatomical bases for language, including notably those affecting the articulatory apparatus. Languages have diverged and changed as a result of minute genetic differences between populations which produced small differences in the neural and anatomical bases of articulation, movement control and perception. As these genetic differences within a population accumulate over time, they produce small neural and anatomical/physiological changes which ultimately alter phonological, lexical and syntactic preferences. The expansion of language beyond speech came with writing, the recording of speech sounds. The origin of this power to transduce spoken language into written language can also be traced to a physiological and neurological basis in human vision, human perception of patterning, the diagramming of articulation.

The structures of human culture and changes in human culture, can be traced back to the operation of language. Language can be seen as the 'missing link' between genetic and cultural evolution. Language has contributed in many ways to the human advance. This power of language exists because it is not an arbitrary, symbolic, purely conventional system but a biologically-based system, derived from and directly related to brain structures for action and perception. The potentialities offered by language have been translated into specific human achievements and capabilities. Language has been the foundation for morality, social cohesion and continuity, religion, science, law, philosophy. Most fundamentally the evolutionary acquisition of the capacity for language made self-awareness possible. Language operates not only externally between individuals but also internally in the structuring of the individual. In the human brain, in the human mind, language has become a means of internal conversation, internal perception of the individual's activity, the emergence of the human self, the perception of one's own perception which is consciousness.

The past can be stored as language in many forms, journals, books, film, tapes and records. With language we also have the power to create structures which model unobservable features of the universe, generating the sciences. We can hold these together, manipulate, transmit them from one person to another; even mathematics depends for its transmission and formulation on language - numbers are words and mathematical symbols are shorthand for words. The techniques for managing the material world, transmitted by example or by language from generation to generation, crystallised as technology, and later as science.

In society language plays a central role; it forms within the individual, within the group, a sense of the cohesion of the group. It creates within each individual images of the group, of the nation, and ultimately of humanity as a whole. Through language humanity becomes able to speculate on the future of humanity and on the future of the evolutionary process of which humanity forms a part. Language made possible both the development of the individual consciousness - we use words to become aware of ourselves - and also of the social consciousness. With the birth of self-awareness came perception of the self of others, of their self-awareness. From the natural link between mother and child - the maternal care found in many species and which humans inherited - coupled with the growth of self- awareness as a result of language came the new and vital phenomenon for human society, the possibility of love, at first an intense love between mother and child, and then, extended, the possibility of love between individual and individual. This capacity for love, for interpenetration of the selves of individuals, became the basis for the solidarity of the human family, for the cohesion of the human group, for the emergence of an active social consciousness. These were the foundations for the critical importance in human evolution of the group, of group selection. The smiling face of this was the growing power of group action in responding to environmental challenges, famine, flood, disease. The other face was opposition between group and group, the potential for intra-specific group conflict, something rare in other species. Language, family love, social feeling, empathy, allowed the accumulation of experience, the transmission of successful techniques, the extension of the power of the group both in relation to the non-human world and to other human groups. The patterns of group-functioning over many generations, transmitted by spoken language, and later by written language, became established as the morality of the group, the practices that over the very long-term had proved successful for the survival and flourishing of the group, and so of the individuals forming the group.