In focusing on GA has Neoreaction moved away from Filmer?
Derrida and post-structuralism are really not that important. Gans takes from Derrida the notion of "deferral," but revises it so that it's not just inexplicably part of the way language works but grounded in an anthopologically conceived scene. The referent is there from the beginning--it is first of all the desired object at the center which the gesture of aborted appropriation points to.
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You could first of all ask yourself whether language has to have an origin--that is, is language the kind of "thing" that could have "evolved" gradually, unconsciously, through a series of accidents; or is the nature of language such that it had to emerge in one fell swoop, "all at once," so to speak, with its "inventors/discoverers" having at least some minimal idea of what they were doing. Insofar as language is qualitatively different than "signals" grounded in "instinct," it has to be the latter. If we assume an event of emergence, then, we can hypothesize regarding more or less plausible accounts of that emergence. Such a hypothesis would want to narrow things down to the most minimal, absolutely necessary elements of the scene or event in question. That's what Gans provides. If someone gets more minimal than the originary hypothesis, we should work with that. If you think language could have emerged through natural selection based on random genetic mutations, then you probably won't be interested in the originary hypothesis--but you might, then, feel obliged to explain how that could have happened--and why no one has yet gotten anywhere near a serious explanation of the emergence of language in such terms.
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And these sections of the brain evolved this way before there was language to produce and interpret?
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The brain mutates in order to facilitate new forms of language. So, what is language?
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I already made a distinction above between the more instinctually based signals involved in animal communication and the specifically intentional nature of language--"its "inventors/discoverers" having at least some minimal idea of what they were doing," as I put it above. Michael Tomasello calls this joint attention--the participants in an act of communication know that they are participants, that they are looking at the same thing--they can point to something, and refer to and therefore revise the act of pointing. Even the most intelligent animals can't point, in the sense of pointing out something. Language is not a signal and response relation. You can't get to pointing through genetic mutations. You can't get to two people knowing that a particular sound represents a concept. You seem to be thinking that human language is just a complex version of what bees do, or dolphins, or vervet monkeys, or whatever--but it's not. It's qualitatively different.
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The animals you refer to behave in the way you describe (and project onto) when they are trained by humans. They don't do anything remotely similar amongst themselves.
It is very important for many, for what are ultimately ideological reasons, to "see no reason why language should be put on a pedestal." If you don't want to see a reason, you won't. You can believe that myths, conceptions of God, scientific inquiry itself, even something as seemingly simple as "irony," are really all just incrementally different from whatever scientists happen to be saying the elephants do at the moment. You want to prove yourself right, here and now, do you not? Is that just another version of dominance struggles amongst advanced primates? At a certain point this becomes like arguing with Communists, because "natural selection seems to account for enormously complicated processes" serves exactly the same function as "the contradiction between the forces and relations of production," or "class struggle"--it's an attempt to appropriate scientific authority for girding your loins for some political struggle.
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And by "ideological," I ultimately mean liberal--the attraction to evolutionary psychology is that it provides a model of a "natural" order upon which structures of authority are merely "superstructures," and to which those superstructures should be made to conform.
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I tend to agree that there's not much conversation to be had--although perhaps the bonobos and hunting fish are better conversationalists, and perhaps they are also busy picking apart poorly thought ideologies. I'm not going to read the studies you've found or take the trouble to explain how whatever these animals are doing indexically has nothing whatsoever to do with one human pointing out a shiny pebble to another. If you can't see that these efforts to keep humans and their language off their damn pedestal serve interests which are not purely scientific, aside from being utterly comical, it's because you don't want to see. I can't tell which evolutionary adaptation is thereby served. Perhaps you can hypothesize the path the horny female bonobos might take in getting from requesting some genital stimulation to dismantling ideologies.
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Let them read Tomasello. Some things one needs to delegate.