Descartes v Natural Selection

The father of modern philosophy. Really, the opposition to natural selection by so many orthodox linguists is a scandal. The latest example is in Biolinguistics (here) in which the authors seek to refute Derick Bickerton's paper (PDF here), which I discussed in Biology Without Darwin? Bickerton's point was that even if a process is self-organizing rather than genetic, it becomes fixed in the species only through selection. I have often thought that if I could just get a grip on the reason Chomskyans have such a distaste for natural selection, I would have a much clearer grasp of what at lies at the root of our disagreement. Chomsky is making an assumption; I hold a counter-assumption. They are so basic that I can stare them in the face and not see their radicalism. So I was relieved to find a paper by Francesco Ferretti and Ines Adornetti titled "Against Linguistic Cartesianism" (abstract here) that at last made the obvious pop out at me. I first thought Chomsky's main objection was about genetic slowness. Chomsky takes an all or nothing approach to language that does not fit with genetic tweaking. Chomsky does not like the business of a little here, a little there, and ultimately you have language. His point is that if you say—as he does—that a defining trait of language (possibly the defining trait) is that it can generate sentences of unbounded length, then uttering five word sentences gets you no closer to unbounded length than you are at sentences of zero length...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Source Type: blogs