A new theory of evolution has been proposed based on the energy steady state in living things. Any organism is under metabolism and life itself is a form of surplus energy, that is premise of life. No present function in organisms should be traced back to any teleological object, and any individual is historical existence that consists of necessary and non-necessary (surplus) modules. The driving force of evolution is in the essential surplus energy that allows species to change their life styles, and DNA is a mere substance that can stabilize or fix the species life styles. The new theory well appreciates both results of molecular and population genetics, and criticizes the confusion of the evolution and genetic aspects in The Modern Synthesis (Neo-Darwinism); the former is only one phenomenon through a whole history of life and its essence is accumulative development including diversity, the latter are partial phenomena in evolution and the essence is repeat of prefixed stationary. The new theory seems to possess essentially same cognition to that of theoretical linguistics (generative grammar) by Noam Chomsky and of modern ecology with the following common key words: a view from the whole and part, leaping over limit-manifested prejudice, and creation of the future. The situation of present environment is getting greatly serious and co-operation among sciences is required for continuation of human existence. To accelerate the co-operation, this symposium of cultural exchange between the linguistics and the evolution has been proposed as a suitable example in our society of the origin of life.

  Since Chomsky first proposed the theory of generative grammar in 1950’s, generative grammar has attempted to solve such issues as: What is knowledge of language? How is knowledge of language acquired? How is knowledge of language used? What is the biological basis of this knowledge? This paper tries to discuss the second issue, the problem of language acquisition. In particular, the paper presents theoretical advances and some pieces of evidence for developments of the theory of language acquisition within the framework of generative grammar.

  From the perspective of generative grammar, language change is nothing other than a special case of language acquisition in which a generation of speakers acquires a grammatical system different from that of the preceding generation. Under the principles-and-parameters approach, language acquisition is conceived of as parameter setting. This paper looks at how the principles-and-parameters approach handles the loss of wh-movement that took place in the history of Japanese.

Generative grammar constitutes one major branch of theoretical linguistics, but its more important role as biolinguistics can be found in the interdisciplinary field of human biology. By exploring one particular instance of the cognitive faculties of our species, i.e, the Language Faculty (or the Language Organ), researchers in generative grammar/biolinguistics aim to elucidate the fundamental properties of human intelligence, or human nature itself. In this paper, we overview the main topics of generative grammar/biolinguistics to see how deeply they are intertwined with those of modern biology. In particular, we take a new and enlightening look at the familiar issues of the nature, acquisition and evolution of the human language, its universality and diversity, and its economy and redundancy. These are here rephrased in terms of three different levels of genesis of language, i.e., microgenesis, ontogenesis, and phylogenesis, in the hope that their possible unification may be forthcoming.

  According to Chomsky (2000), the “mental” or “linguistic” aspect of the world can be investigated in the same way as any other aspects of the world, such as “electrical” or “chemical,” which have been investigated in natural sciences. In this sense, generative grammar conducts the same type of rational, empirical inquiry as in any branch of natural sciences; it “seeks to construct intelligible explanatory theories, with the hope of eventual integration of the ‘core’ natural sciences.” Chomsky refers to this thesis as “the methodological naturalism.” However, Chomsky does not specifically show to what extent generative grammar shares methodological characteristics with natural sciences. The purpose of this paper is to show that generative grammar has the crucial methodological characteristics of modern science (more specifically, modern physics), which was founded in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century Europe and has been developed into present–day natural sciences.

  In starfish, Asterina pectinifera, parts of egg cytoplasm can be removed by microsugical techniques, and it is known that only 14 % of a whole egg (ca. 0.2 mm in diameter) is enough for the complete development including metamorphosis. Therefore 86 % of a whole egg is surplus. On metamorphosis adult buds are formed and larval mouth and anus are digested, and food supply ceases until adult mouth and anus are formed. Adult buds are never formed before larvae have reached a certain size, i.e. larvae have a critical size for metamorphosis (ca. 1mm). Larval bodies themselves can be regarded as a form of energy accumulation. These indicate that the function of the surplus energy in eggs is to shorten the larval duration and that of the larvae is to accumulate energy for the growth of adult buds. This is the case in extant starfishes: among hundreds starfishes, species with larger eggs (more than ca. 0.25 mm in diameter) do not have larval forms and develop into adults directly from eggs, whereas species with smaller eggs still keeps larval forms. Living organisms are always forced to keep the energy balance positive and to accumulate surplus energy as a whole for the continuation of the metabolism (avoidance of stop in metabolism, i.e. avoidance of starvation). Relationship between DNA changes and phenotypic evolution has been discussed. A new theory of evolution is proposed: the role of DNA in evolution is to stabilize the life styles that are adopted by species and not to control completely their life styles. Even if environments are kept unchanged, silent improvements (invisible metabolic improvements such as DNA reorganizations) progress because of premise of life.