Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon is professor of biological anthropology and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Deacon's research combines human evolutionary biology and neuroscience with the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition.

His work extends from laboratory-based cellular-molecular neurobiology to the study of semiotic processes underlying animal and human communication, especially language and language origins. His neurobiological research is focused on determining the nature of the human divergence from typical primate brain anatomy, the cellular-molecular mechanisms producing this difference, and the correlations between these anatomical differences and special human cognitive abilities, again, particularly language.

His 1997 book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain, is widely considered a seminal work on the subject of evolutionary cognition.