The suggestion that FLN (narrow faculty of language) – namely, universal grammar (UG) – was an exaptation (traditionally termed “pre-adaptation” - strictly speaking, not an adaptation) is not contradictory to mainstream knowledge concerning biological evolution. — javra

Great, because that's not what I claimed. Rather, the issue has to do with the specificities of language, and the total lack of any plausable account of how and why such exaptation could have occured. I explained this previously to Snakes, and you're more than welcome to read that response.

Further, like the rather useless appeals to PE, the mere fact that exaptation exists licences no claim to plausibility about any one specific trait at all. One may as well say that 'history exists, therefore this one very specific and contentious event could have happened'. It's vacuous and sophistic, and no one should take it seriously. Without specifics, there appeal to the mere existence of exaptation is as empty as it is stupid. And when the specifics amount to "it was probs for navigation or something", that's not science, that's beer room speculation over a bong.

My original post was reported by some sook and subsequently edited, so yeah, it's odd. Basically, I'm not here to explain basic debates in linguistics to you. If you'd like to find out more, read. I've cited authors and papers, which I have no doubt will be ignored, but that would not be my problem.

I had a more, er, robust response, but apparently telling you to educate yourself was not considered kosher.

In any case, if your 'feelings' are what you have to offer then I suppose we're done with any conversation worth anything at all.

Sure. I don't think it's worth my time. You show a bit of investment and I might consider it.

Capable yes; Willing, for someone who's parachuted in, no.

It might be interesting to know — Galuchat

Oh good, then you can follow up on some of the reading I suggested and get back to me.

Try this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_theories_of_grammar

Use. Language as used, which is to say, communicated, shared among its speakers in a socious of linguistic coordination and negotiation, and employed across time (history) and space (geography). i.e. the diametrically opposite position from the Chomskyian one for which language-as-communication is verboten. This and this alone allows language and evolution to be properly thought together without incoherence. So like I said, whatever Chomsky says, do the opposite, and you'll be fine.

The exception clause that language is special makes no sense to me – it's 'specialized?' Huh? — Snakes Alive

Yes, specialized. Language - or rather languages - are chock full of various constraints on syntactical construction. One of the aims of early Chomskyian linguistics was to try and pick out a few universals that would be stable across all languages (after which via imaginitive leap they could be designated 'innate'), only the project was such a miserable empirical failure that it ended up with a postulated single universal, recursion, which itself became nothing but a capacity which, even when totally absent from any one actually-existing-language, could unfalsifiably be claimed to constitute the single trans-linguistic universal regardless.

Of course, for those not labouring under the delusions of Chomskian Grammar, the sheer diversity of various syntactic constraints were not so much useless hay to sort though in order to look for the needle of universals, but the very stuff of linguistic theory itself. And when decoupled from the nonsense injunction to hermetically isolate evolutionary considerations to some mythical, unevidenced puntum long-lost in time (after which the whole question of evolution could be bracketed and effectively ignored), the study of evolution and language as co-developmental throws up incredibly rich sets of correlations and reasons to consider evolution not merely relevant, but foundational in shaping the various syantactical constraints that show up in languages. To quote Evans and Levinson:

"In short, there are evolutionarily stable strategies, local minima as it were, that are recurrent solutions across time and space, such as the tendency to distinguish noun and verb roots, to have a subject role, or mutually consistent approaches to the ordering of head and modifier, which underlie the Greenbergian statistical universals linking different features. These tendencies cannot plausibly be attributed to UG, since changes from one stable strategy to another take generations (sometimes millennia) to work through. Instead they result from myriad interactions between communicative, cognitive and processing constraints which reshape existing structures through use.

A major achievement of functionalist linguistics has been to map out, under the rubric of grammaticalization, the complex temporal subprocesses by which grammar emerges as frequently-used patterns sediment into conventionalized patterns. Cultural preoccupations may push some of these changes in particular directions, such as the evolution of kinship-specific pronouns in Australia. And social factors, most importantly the urge to identify with some groups by speaking like them, and to maximize distance from others by speaking differently (studied in fine-grained detail by Labov 1980), act as an amplifier on minor changes that have arisen in the reshaping process". (source, PDF)

The exaptation thesis has to ignore all of this, because it is utterly committed to the idea that language evolved for means other than language. It has to, on the basis of nothing other than a prior, theoretical and dogmatic commitment, entirely stuff all of the above under the bed and argue it away because it cannot, on pain of incoherence, admit any of it into it's theoretical remit. It's alternative? Some middling unsubstantiated, unargued for bullshit about how it probably developed from some other reason (unknown) than hopped the genetic barrier over to humans for, again, no reason given. Language is rich, full of rich features, many of which can, and have been tracked closely with the ways in which it has developed over time, among cultures, in addition to anthropogenesis. To condense this all into some unspecified 'genetic modification' is nothing less than waving a magic wand stamped 'science' and thinking this should be taken seriously by anyone with half a brain.

Lol, maybe read your own hero:

"Thus, a basic and logically ineliminable role for comparative research on language evolution is this simple and essentially negative one: A trait present in nonhuman animals did not evolve specifically for human language ... [W]e suggest that by considering the possibility that FLN evolved for reasons other than language, the comparative door has been opened in a new and (we think) exciting way ... One possibility, consistent with current thinking in the cognitive sciences, is that recursion in animals represents a modular system designed for a particular function (e.g., navigation) and impenetrable with respect to other systems. During evolution, the modular and highly domain-specific system of recursion may have become penetrable and domain-general. This opened the way for humans, perhaps uniquely, to apply the power of recursion to other problems". (my bolding)

Read: Language evolved for reasons other than language. About as clear-cut as you can get.

"According to recent linguistic theory, the computations underlying FLN may be quite limited. In fact, we propose in this hypothesis that FLN comprises only the core computational mechanisms of recursion as they appear in narrow syntax and the mappings to the interfaces. If FLN is indeed this restricted, this hypothesis has the interesting effect of nullifying the argument from design, and thus rendering the status of FLN as an adaptation open to question. Proponents of the idea that FLN is an adaptation would thus need to supply additional data or arguments to support this viewpoint."

Read: FLN was not an adaptation. The 'argument from design' referred to above refers to nothing other than natural selection, which is clarified earlier in the paper: "Because natural selection is the only
known biological mechanism capable of generating such functional complexes [the argument from design], proponents of this view conclude... [etc]".

These 'figments of my imagination' are printed in ink and signed by Chomsky.

Seems a bit more to me that perhaps the reason it all seems so bizzare is because... — creativesoul

No this has nothing to do with what I said.

It's not supposed to be. — creativesoul

But it is.

The process is a literal show trial. Like, actual political theatre. That anyone at all is invested in it is utterly bizzare.

punctuated equilibrium would account for a cognitive know-how of grammar that is genetically inherited rather than behavioristically learned — javra

A quick word on this (I'm out right now and don't have access to my usual stuff): this cannot possibly be the case. PE is a theory of evolutionary temporality. It speaks to the rapidity, or not, of evolutionary change. That is what it is an 'account' of. It cannot, even in priciple, be an account of any particular evolutionary trait. Not a single one, let alone a "cognitive know-how of grammar that is genetically inherited rather than behavioristically learned". To confuse a thesis about evolutionary temporality with any one of its particular outcomes is a category mistake through and through. It's not even wrong. It's mistake at the level of sense-making.

PE is used as nothing more than an excuse by Chomskyites to simply ignore and keep entirely mum on the question of how UE is supposed to make evolutionary sense. It's a case of: "well it happened real quick so yeah of course there's no possible way we could have evidence for it, which in any case our theory rules out to begin with because language cannot possibly be adaptive because it's all cognitive so how very convenient for us lets move on and not talk about it anymore OK haha".

At least the instances in which PE is invoked has a rich fossil record to back it up. The Chomskian recourse to PE is literally fabricated from out of thin air. Not a single thread of evidence, nor even a plausable conceptual narrative reconstruction that would or would not be corroborated by any forthcoming evidence. The flippancy of what is offered ('it was probably for navigation or some shit') is so intellectually poverty-stricken as to be legitimately insulting.

No, behavioralism is a dead end, but the dichotomy Skinnerism/Chomskyism does not in the least exhaust the field. Both are false alternatives whose headstones ought to lie beside each other in the graveyard of terrible ideas.

More to say later.

Are you ridiculing as stupid the position of punctuated equilibrium? — javra

No, I'm not. That Chomsky's thin gruel speculation on language amounts to "language popped into existence somehow somewhen because of totally unspecified changes to something somewhere probably genetic but we really have no idea, and then somehow somewhen probably started to be used by humans because no idea" has nothing to do with the reality of PE. The gradualism vs. PE 'debate' when it comes to Chomsky is a side-show, but it's one that it's adherents would prefer to make it about in order to distract from the gaping holes elsewhere.

I'll grant your first point.

If the problem you're having is with the speculative aspects of how language evolved, fine. — Xtrix

Except its not. The problem is that anyone who understands just how insane Chomsky's take on language is would be able to see the evolutionary problem for it coming from a mile away - by decoupling language from communication and making it a wholly cognitive faculty, Chomsky can't, by way of design - that is to say, prior and unemprically to any consideration of evidence - he can't have it so that language was in any way evolved by means natural selection. Which is of course exactly the position he is committed to.

Quite literally, he has to be committed, on pain of incoherence, to the insane idea that language initially evolved for means other than language. Which would be fine for a great deal of other exaptations, except that language is so incredibly specialized that the suggestion is pure madness. Not to mention that all exaptations that we are aware of were further subject to refinement by natural selection after that change in function - something else that Chomsky has to, and does in fact, deny. So we end up in this evolutionarily-nonsense position: language did not evolve via natural selection for any language- specific task, and once it came to be used for those tasks, it could not be subject to natural selection then either. It just popped into existence one fine day, and will remain the same forevermore.

If that isn't magic, I don't know what is. So yes, Chomsky and his adherents are so stupid as to believe humans' capacity for language is a miracle of God, or due to some other magic. And I don't need to write Chomsky a letter about this. Plenty of people have pointed out the madness to him already. I'm just relaying rather well established points.

And that's the thing: this is a problem specific to Chomsky's position, and not one facing evolutionary accounts of language in general. This insofar as most other, sane accounts, are not so idiotic as to make language nothing but a cognitive faculty unconnected with it's use, as language, among humans. And it should further be noted that those other accounts - I have in mind the work of Jablonka and Dor, Michael Tomasello, Terrance Deacon, Merlin Donald, and others - do and more importantly can say a great deal more than the trash that 'language popped into existence somehow somewhen because of totally unspecified changes to something somewhere probably genetic but we really have no idea, and then somehow somewhen probably started to be used by humans because no idea', because they are not theory-bound by utterly ridiculous ideas on language that make no evolutionary sense.

Chomsky's evolutionary incoherence is a feature, not a bug, of his position. It is purpose-built to be unamenable to any normal evolutionary account. Also, given that Chomsky basically forswore any discussion of the evolution of language up until his recent papers with Fitch and Hauser, it is littler wonder that I'm actually quoting the pitiful little he actually does have to say on the topic.

I do have to admit I find the whole impeachment process politically bizzarre. The outcome is predetermined: Trump will be exonerated in the senate, which he will spin as proof the whole thing was a witch-hunt, as he was saying all along, and the democrats have quite literally handed him a defeat of their own making on a silvered platter. It seems to defy any good political sense. Why would anyone hand a victory over to your sworn opponent? Not to mention that it would make any other attempt at impeachment almost impossible. Least we forget, Clinton was never more popular than after his aquittal. I simply don't understand the political logic here.

*shrug*, I'm sure they said the same of phlogiston. And I'm sure a great deal of those fair-minded about it now belong in the dust-bin of history, as will Chomskian linguistics in the not-too-far future.

If actually giving a shit about empirical evidence and not attempting to curve-fit reality to prior theoretical commitments is ideology, count me all in.

. It seems to imply, early on, that Chomskyans thought that a universal grammar literally meant that all the world's languages had a structure similar to the European languages the researchers spoke (not only is this not true, but Chomsky was a scholar of Hebrew, a Semitic language, and generativists were early on studying languages like Japanese – that languages existed in a wide variety was utterly common knowledge, of which everyone was aware, including him and the other generativists!) — Snakes Alive

Hey, don't take its word for it. Here it is from the horse's mouth: "According to Chomsky, a visiting Martian scientist would surely conclude that aside from their mutually unintelligible vocabularies, Earthlings speak a single language" (Pinker). Like, this is simply a preposterous statement on the face of it, and the only way to understand how anyone could hold such a view is to recognise the grip of ideology at work. This is the kind of rubbish one can come up with when one hews to Chomskian views on language, one that requires one to ignore an ocean of cognitive dissonance. In the face of this kind of tripe, one has to wonder, who exactly is being hyperbolic?

And you really need to drop the idea that Chomskian linguistics is scientific. It's simply not. It's self-immunizing against all counter-evidence, and its empirical basis is limited to nothing other than sheer speculation. It's creationism in the realm of linguistic theory.

Sounds like that is almost a reductive scientific approach. Limited, yes. Redundant? — I like sushi

Yes. Chomsky developed his views at a time when computational reductionism was all the rage, and when AI was thought to be just around the corner, and that intelligence would yield if we just learnt how to manipulate symbols better. It was outdated at the time of its incipience, and it's the equivalent of an intellectual zombie as it stands today.

Is your view VERY basically that language is a more or less a circumstance of other human facilities? — I like sushi

I don't know what 'human facilities' are meant to be, but I do believe that language must be studied in the context of it's history, development, and socio-cultural specificities, along with it's biological and cognitive aspects. I believe in a kind of wholism and embeddedness of language, if it could be put that way. The exact opposite, that is, of the Chomskian program which seeks to isolate, dehistoricize, desocialize, and place language under the air-tight seal of a hermeticism for nothing more than ideological prejudice.

Chomsky's whole schtick has always been explanatory adequacy, that is that grammars should reflect the way languages develop in children (not only that they reflect the empirical facts of adult language use). — Snakes Alive

Chomsky's interest in developmental studies have always been limited to confirming his a priori theories, which of course, they consistently fail to do, requiring all sorts of curve-fitting to make them hold up:

"A key flaw in Chomsky’s theories is that when applied to language learning, they stipulate that young children come equipped with the capacity to form sentences using abstract grammatical rules. (The precise ones depend on which version of the theory is invoked.) Yet much research now shows that language acquisition does not take place this way. Rather young children begin by learning simple grammatical patterns; then, gradually, they intuit the rules behind them bit by bit.

...The main response of universal grammarians to such findings is that children have the competence with grammar but that other factors can impede their performance and thus both hide the true nature of their grammar and get in the way of studying the “pure” grammar posited by Chomsky’s linguistics. Among the factors that mask the underlying grammar, they say, include immature memory, attention and social capacities.

As with the retreat from the cross-linguistic data and the tool-kit argument, the idea of performance masking competence is also pretty much unfalsifiable. Retreats to this type of claim are common in declining scientific paradigms that lack a strong empirical base—consider, for instance, Freudian psychology and Marxist interpretations of history.

... Even beyond these empirical challenges to universal grammar, psycholinguists who work with children have difficulty conceiving theoretically of a process in which children start with the same algebraic grammatical rules for all languages and then proceed to figure out how a particular language - whether English or Swahili— connects with that rule scheme. Linguists call this conundrum the linking problem, and a rare systematic attempt to solve it in the context of universal grammar was made by Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker for sentence subjects. Pinker’s account, however, turned out not to agree with data from child development studies or to be applicable to grammatical categories other than subjects. And so the linking problem—which should be the central problem in applying universal grammar to language learning—has never been solved or even seriously confronted." (source)

Seriously, the Chomskian response to reality not fitting the theories has been to claim that reality is not good enough. Bullshit at every turn.

No, the conditions under which children successfully learn their first languages is very well-studied. — Snakes Alive

That would be a great answer if Chomsky was not famous for entirely disregading linguisitc development in children, because that's precisely the kind of thing GG is designed to exclude from relevance.

Again, it really helps to actually know the position you're meant to be defending.

The presence or absence of a potential is revealed when, under the hypothesized conditions, it actualizes or fails to actualize. — Snakes Alive

What conditions? That's the nub: Chomsky's 'conditions' amount to 'is human + has evolved'. Why and how? No answer. It's arbitrary, unscientific nonsense.

The target of falsification has therefore been misunderstood. What would have been relevant to falsifying it would have been facts about Pirahã speakers, and their inability to learn a recursive language, not facts about the Pirahã language — Snakes Alive

Sure, and this is what I addressed: by so sharply demarcating the 'faculty' of language (as a 'basis for acquiring and using individual languages') from actual language use, evidence now has to bear on a potential (a 'faculty'). But by doing this, by 'changing the target of falsification' from actual language use to a sheer potential, this effectively translates to unfalsifiability. Why? Because you can't test for the absence of potential (/of a faculty), only a presence. Both the absence and presence of a potential 'look' exactly the same. The only thing you can test for is actual language use, and all that can confirm, trivially, is that the potential for something is there (just in case where the actual capacity is manifested). And of course, if recursion does not show in actual language-use, one simply says: 'ah but the potential is there, what actually happens is irrelavent'. This is Chomsky's 'rebuttal'.

Like I said, it's as if I were to claim that I have the 'faculty' for my touch to turn things into gold, but that, just because you don't see me turning things into gold, this doesn't mean I don't have the potential to. I simply have the faculty to turn things into gold ('the basis for turning things into gold with my touch') - your empirical evidence be damned.

He thinks it has a different relation to them, to be sure, but the idea that being a Chomskyan involves wholesale 'disregarding' them is not plausible — Snakes Alive

It seems you're simply not familiar with what you're talking about, which of course, you admitted, but this is where it starts to matter: the whole point of the generative grammar program is to discover the principles of linguistic competence - these principles are meant to be transhistoric and transcultural, so much so that, as our friend the threadstarter seems to celebrate, not even communication ought to be taken into account. In fact the principles are meant to be so abstract, that they are meant to have no relation to meaning at all. They are meant to be entirely syntactical, shorn of any semantic relevance. I mean, this is simply built-in to the program. To the degree that there have been Comskities who try to bring history and culture back into it - and there have been - it's largely been an exercise in retro-fitting and hand-waving; not unlike intelligent design arguments in the face of evolutionary ones.

So no, I don't take your ignorance on the matter as an index of what Chomsky's program entails.

What, in your own words, is Chomsky's objection? Not a criticism of it – a statement of the position itself. — Snakes Alive

I'm not restating shit. If you have an issue with what I said, tell me what it is. I'm not here to entertain you.

Refusing to entertain the possibilities off the bat isn't a good idea. — Snakes Alive

It is when the price to pay for it is so incredibly high. Hewing to Chomsky's linguistic program means disregarding history, society, child development, evolution, anthropology, and all the rest of it. This follows from his construal of language as a wholly cognitive phenomenon, utterly disconnected from function. It's like saying that intelligent design ought to be entertained as a research program because hey, let a thousand theoretical flowers bloom. Well sure, but relegate it to a basement where cranks can do as they like.

The funny thing is that as it's become clearer and clearer just how ridiculous Chomsky's ideas have been - even to Chomsky himself - it's actual content has become thinner and thinner as all the various proposals for what once counted as 'universal' have been dropped, one by one, by Chomsky himself. The whole principles and parameters framework? Gone. To the point where the only thing left standing is the thin gruel of 'recursion', which itself is utterly controversial. Hence the so called 'minimalist program', which is nothing but an admission of total defeat and an attempt to salvage the wreck that is the generative grammar program.

Can you reexplain in your own words what Chomsky's objection was, or can you repeat back to me my construal of it? — Snakes Alive

I've made my point twice, and even quoted other authors on it. If you still don't get it, then the problem lies elsewhere.

I have no particular sympathy with Chomsky on this line (I don't study this, or much care one way or the other), but to demand just-so stories at this stage, and reject a hypothesis on account of having agnostic elements seems to me not to be a good idea — Snakes Alive

Except it's far from merely 'agnostic'. It's committed to a particular view in which evolutionary gradualism is ruled out in favour of a kind of linguistic evolutionary catastrophism. And of course, what motivates this is not a shred of empirical evidence (other than the mere possibility of sharp evolutionary breaks as demonstrated in other wholly unrelated domains) but an a priori theoretical commitment to cutting langauge off from all history and all society so as to make it a wholly cognitive phenomenon. History, evolution, and society are all incredibly inconvenient for the thesis, so they get nothing but the most cursory and mind-bogglingly parsed-down treatment as could be possible.

What would have falsified Chomsky's claim would have been that Pirahã people were unable to natively acquire a recursive language. — Snakes Alive

This is hilarious. Insofar as Chomsky's program is so disconnected from reality that is only deals with postulated potentials, the only apparent way to falsify it is to show that a potential does not exist. And of course, if never manifests in actual fact, the Chomskite simply falls back on the completely convenient idea that because it's just a potential, you wouldn't be able to observe it anyway. Self-insulating, pseudo-scientific trash.

Well guess what. I have the potential to turn anything I touch into gold. Only, the only way for you to falsify this, is to prove that this potential does not exist. Until then, you're just going to have to assume that I can do exactly this.

Finally, you'll understand if I take unsubstantiated claims from internet randos that 'claims about Pirahã are false anyway' with a grain of salt.

That doesn’t follow. The point is to narrow down the fuel for the system. As an analogy we could say liquid makes an engine run and fill our cars with coffee - that doesn’t mean engines don’t function. — I like sushi

What are you even talking about? Fuel? Coffee? Engines? Be specific, or don't bother. The charge of unfalsifiability in response to Chomsky's own response to the Pirahã is not mine alone, but well acknowledged among those who follow this stuff. Here are Tomasello and Ibbotson: "Chomsky tried to define the components of the essential tool kit of language—the kinds of mental machinery that allow human language to happen. Where counterexamples have been found, some Chomsky defenders have responded that just because a language lacks a certain tool—recursion, for example—does not mean hat it is not in the tool kit. In the same way, just because a culture lacks salt to season food does not mean salty is not in its basic taste repertoire. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning makes Chomsky’s proposals difficult to test in practice, and in places they verge on the unfalsifiable".

We have the ability to either create language from some faculty or we’re born with a faculty to create language - what’s the difference? If we’re to define language as necessarily requiring ‘syntax and grammar’ then we have our answer (or rather, the question then becomes ‘what is syntax and grammar’?) — I like sushi

I don't know how many times I have to say this: this is not a debate over whether or not we inherit certain predispositions for language. That we do is, I agree, undeniable. But this is not what is at issue. The relevant question is what is inherited, and how this inheritance (which magically evolved) functions to underpin the FLN. Chomsky offers not a single biological mechanism that would meet these two criteria, other than to handwave some kind of evolutionary exaptation as a promissory note in its place. This is like trying to say that we've inherited the ability to walk without talking about legs and gravity, and then, to add insult to injury, further speculating that we may never know what allows us to walk, other than to note that we possess 'the faculty' for it. It's so incredibly stupid that anyone who who even feels a jot of sympathy for Chomsky should feel their intelligence insulted.

It should further be noted that the 'faculty' in question is quite precisely defined by Chomsky as the FLN, which "comprises only the core computational mechanisms of recursion as they appear in narrow syntax and the mappings to the interfaces". That's it. If you're wondering out loud if the faulty is some manner of ability to utilize 'syntax and grammar', you're not discussing Chomsky but something else totally irrelevant. Chomsky's proposal is at once very specific (it's the FLN, which is comprised of recursion, exclusively), and entirely undertheorized (how is it inherited, and how does it function?: NFI). If you're not dealing with that specificity, you're not dealing with Chomsky.

Chomsky: "As a matter of simple logic, it would be impossible for the language to contradict any theory of mine, even if the claims about the language were true. The reason is simple: these theories have to do with the faculty of language, the basis for acquiring and using individual languages ... ". — Xtrix

It's worth noting that Chomsky's response here is a straightforward admission of unfalsifiability. Quite literally, not a single piece of empirical evidence - of language-as-actually-spoken - would be able to contradict his theories. Insofar as he's dealing with the 'faculty' and hence potential for language, no actual use of language could, even in principle, bring the theory into question. This is the very definition of unscientific. The choice again remains: either Chomsky, or science.

If the only operation in FLN is the operation that appears in every computational system ["Merge"], and if it's a fact at some point in evolutionary history humans got the capacity for unbounded computation, then at the very least they had to have this minimal computational operation (Merge), and if they only have this (and the general principle of keeping computation efficient), then the story of acquisition is already over. — Xtrix

Paraphrased: "FLN must have been evolutionarily acquired because FLN must have been evolutionarily acquired".

Also, this paper by Ibbotson and Tomasello is also worth reading if entire books are hard to acquire: http://lefft.xyz/psycholingAU16/readings/ibbotson-tomasello-2016-scientific-american.pdf

Who's arguing the FLN isn't adaptive? — Xtrix

Er, Chomsky: "If FLN is indeed this restricted, this hypothesis has the interesting effect of nullifying the argument from design, and thus rendering the status of FLN as an adaptation open to question. Proponents of the idea that FLN is an adaptation would thus need to supply additional data or arguments to support this viewpoint.” Direct quote from the FoL paper, accessable here. [pdf]

Between the work of Vyvyan Evans (The Language Myth), Daniel Everett (How Language Began/Language: The Cultural Tool), and Daniel Dor (The Instruction of the Imagination), I'm basically convinced that Chomskyian linguistics is the entirely wrong approach to anything regarding language.

You’re seriously putting forward that Chomsky has moved the field of linguistics backward? — I like sushi

Yes. He took one step forward beyond Skinner's rightly pilloried behaviorist approach and rather immediately 50 steps backwards by devising a pseudo-solution (UG) so incredulous that it's a mark of shame on anyone who takes it seriously. A cognitive (asocial), ahistorical, and evolutionarily incompatible theory of language? Like, it's basically UFOlogy.

Just this alone goes to show they've never read a word of Chomsky. Of course language evolved. It's difficult to see, however, how it evolved incrementally. So yes, it's possible that it appeared in one human a couple of hundred thousand years ago. Hence the sudden explosion of creativity that's seen at this time — Xtrix

You misunderstand - Chomsky et. al. effectively say that the FLN ('faculty of language in the narrow sense', which includes only recursion and nothing else) should not be considered to be adaptive. They want instead to insist that it is exaptive - it evolved for some other, entirely unspecified, entirely speculative, and entirely theoretically unsubstantiated purpose. Literally, they throw out a few half-hearted guesses ("If, however, one entertains the hypothesis that recursion evolved to solve other computational problems such as navigation, number quantification, or social relationships, then it is possible that other animals have such abilities") without providing a single rationale whatsoever for why it would have done so in any of these cases. Not even an undergraduate would get away with such a hand-wavy, completely unargued-for line of reasoning. And these guys supposed to be world-class experts. It's embarrassing. But they're not done. But that's just the first ridiculous line of non-argument.

The next utterly incredulous step they make is to say that having evolved for something else (who knows what or why?), this adaptation (which was decidedly not for language) became harnessed by humans for the purposes of language. How and why? Not. a. single. attempt. at. an. answer. Instead we get this shit: "During evolution, the modular and highly domain-specific system of recursion may have become penetrable and domain-general. This opened the way for humans, perhaps uniquely, to apply the power of recursion to other problems. This change from domain-specific to domain-general may have been guided by particular selective pressures, unique to our evolutionary past, or as a consequence (by-product) of other kinds of neural reorganization." (Quotes from "The Faculty of Language", Chomsky et. al.).

That's it. Literally this is a bunch of speculative conditionals stung together: "maybe this happened (how? no idea), and then once that happened, this other thing happened (how? No idea), and ta da! language." The linguist Daniel Dor comments: "Well, this is really not a solution. Not even a tentative one. There is nothing here but a weary and desperate attempt to keep the essence of language (whatever is left of it) in the realm of mystery—away from the domain of evolutionary explanation. Of course, capacities may evolve for one function and then be adapted for others, and they may also be by-products of other “kinds of neural reorganizations,” but in such processes the capacities evolve and change to fit their new functional contexts: they do not simply stay the same. What is even more problematic is the capacity itself that is thus salvaged from explanation." (Dor, The Instruction of the Imagination)

Or, to quote the evolutionary biologists Jablonka and Lamb: "There is no reason to doubt that combining several different preexisting faculties can lead to important and surprising evolutionary novelties. ... However, it is difficult to accept that an exquisite adaptive specialization like language is the result of emergence alone, without subsequent elaboration by natural selection. It is much more reasonable to adopt the traditional adaptive Darwinian explanation, which is that recruiting an existing system (such as the computational capacity of FLN) into a new functional framework (locomotion or communication) is followed by its gradual evolutionary refinement and adjustment within this new framework. One would expect the properties of FLN to become more adapted to the conceptual system, which would mean they would not be abstract and meaning-blind, as Chomsky’s UG theory says they are". (J&L, Evolution in Four Dimensions)

Like I said. Anyone who is takes science and evolution seriously simply cannot in the same breath take Chomsky seriously. That's the stark choice to be made - either Chomsky, or evolutionary science. To quote Dor once again: "After fifty years of research, all that is left is the original assumption of infinite generativity... This is a philosophical assumption, actually a religious assumption, that goes against the very idea of science. In this sense, the series of articles by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch might be more favorably read as joint statements of resignation: we have tried to find common ground between linguistics and evolutionary science; as far as the periphery of language is concerned, we believe there is no real problem; at its core, however, language still seems to defy the mode of explanation that is at the core of evolutionary theory; maybe, only maybe, what we believe about the core of language might be reconciled with something at the periphery of evolutionary theory; but beyond that, we really have nothing to offer."

Perhaps many dislike what he says as it is too analytic/theoretical? — I like sushi

Maybe leave your armchair psychoanalysing in the bin by the door where it belongs? No, my animus against Chomsky is simply that he's set the field of linguistics backwards by an order of literal decades, and we're only just beginning to emerge from the choking haze from which he conjured. I see no reason to pussyfoot around with niceties when more than 30 years of misdirected research has lead to utter intellectual disaster. We would not have left the Chomskian paradigm behind early enough if we started from tomorrow. As for politics, I have nothing but sheer admiration for him on that score, so you can bin your ruminations on that front too.

I have nothing to say about the continual comparison between walking and talking that you keep bringing up insofar as it bears precisely on nothing of importance here; again, the question is not about innateness or not, but over the mechanisms by which 'innateness' is cashed out. If you're incapable of having a discussion at that level, then we've nothing to discuss. And the analogizing to Larmack and so on are not worth engaging either; the issues involved are empirical and technical, and have nothing to do with superficial comparisons over personalities. And anyone who thinks that the sheer fact of punctuated equilibrium offers any licence at all to the otherwise utterly evidence-lacking idea that language just popped-out whole cloth from a misty period of anthropogenic history has forfeit their right to speak about the evolution of anything whatsoever.

Isn’t part of that argument basically saying a humans ability to walk is cultural? — I like sushi

I don't know what 'that' in 'that argument' refers to. In any case, there's little to no use in simply pitting terms like 'nature' and 'nuture', 'culture' and 'innateness' against one another. They are too general and unspecific to do any interesting or useful conceptual work. One of the few bright spots of the Chomskian program is at least to (try) and give specific content to what constitutes 'innateness', which is cashed out specifically as 'universal grammar'. Except that what exactly that supposed to be has been so muddled and diluted that the only thing that seemed to be able to count as 'universal' is 'recursion'. Except it turns out that not only is recursion not universal (famously though not-uncontroversially lacking in the Piraha language), it even occurs in other animal communication (see Evans's book for more on this). And this to say nothing about the generality of recursion as something that supposed to be so 'specific' to language - it's two steps away form saying 'Ah ha, turns out words are really the key to language'.

There's lots of details that could be gone into, but the basic point is that if you leave the conversation at the level of 'nature and nurture', 'innate or culture', then you may as well be talking into the wind. They are useless terms unless cashed out in particular and specific ways. And it turns out that when they are, nothing of use there can be said either.

As for the neurological evidence, I'll simply quote Evans' article: "In his book The Language Instinct (1994), Steven Pinker examined various suggestive language pathologies in order to make the case for just such a dissociation. For example, some children suffer from what is known as Specific Language Impairment (SLI) – their general intellect seems normal but they struggle with particular verbal tasks, stumbling on certain grammar rules and so on. That seems like a convincing smoking gun – or it would, if it hadn’t turned out that SLI is really just an inability to process fine auditory details. It is a consequence of a motor deficit, in other words, rather than a specifically linguistic one. Similar stories can be told about each of Pinker’s other alleged dissociations: the verbal problems always turn out to be rooted in something other than language." More detail in Evans book, where aphasia is similarly dealt with.

Finally, exactly how all of this is even meant to be evolutionarily substantiated is similarly so thinly cashed out as to be effectively indistinguishable from pseudo-science. On the evolutionary front, it basically boils down to: "Well, evolution sometimes happens quite fast, so [something something promissory note] language probably happened that way too". As for exactly what underwent evolution, and more importantly how this mysterious X contributed to language and the deep structure that Chomsky supposed isolates - well, that goes entirely left unsaid. Were we talking about literally any other biological function, the very idea that 'something happened at some point in the past that made us do X good' ought to be taken seriously as a thesis would be laughed out of the room so fast as to leave any actual scientist censured from the discipline for the rest of their life. The entire Chomskian program is unscientific bunkum. Quick quote from Coolidge on this front:

"First, Chomsky’s contention has little or no genetic support. One gene does not suddenly cause hierarchically structured language. But that is one of their clever and slippery arguments: It is possible that some genetic mutation altered FLB at that time, but these authors rarely, if ever, invoke anyone else’s cognitive theory (e.g., working memory, a predominant cognitive model for over the past 4 decades). Further, because Chomsky has pronounced that language did not evolve, then it logically follows that it could not have been subject to natural selection. Note well that Chomsky has not elaborated upon why language was not subject to natural selection, and further, he proffers the cryptic argument it did not evolve for communication purposes. Chomsky and his colleagues do propose that it might have developed for spatial navigation but with little or no elaboration." (source).

If one good thing comes out of the new decade, it might hopefully be the wholesale forgetting of anything Chomsky wrote about language, ever.

Here and here [both pdfs] are some easy reading if you're interested in some rather straightforward critiques of the Chomskian paradigm. The long and short of it for me is that Chomsky's approach to language is evolutionary nonsense. Not only does Chomksy and his ilk almost entirely divorce language from function, but so too does he universalize utterly contingent aspects of language while at the same time making those aspects 'innate'. It's a Platonism of language that is, for me, indistinguishable from a theism. No one who takes evolution seriously can take Chomsky seriously.

Edit: A popular article by Vyvyan Evans, a summary of his book on the utter and complete waste of time that is Chomskian linguistics, can be found here, if you'd prefer some lighter reading: https://aeon.co/essays/the-evidence-is-in-there-is-no-language-instinct