But the danger with emphasising the uniqueness of language is that it can seem to overstate the gap between human language and other forms of communication, such as animal systems of communication - an issue I shall address in the next chapter. After all, if language is unlike anything else, it is then but a small step - and a slippery slope - to claiming that language really must have emerged out of thin air. The language-as-instinct thesis proposes something very much like this. Its progenitor and most extreme proponent, Noam Chomsky, has claimed that language was most likely the result of a genetic mutation. On this account, language emerged all at once in a perfect or near-perfect state,
in one lucky individual, who won the greatest linguistic jackpot of all time.