Arash:
I agree, it seems pretty obvious something so complex as language capability had to be "designed" by natural selection, it has much too specific of an implementation to be just a random by-product of brain size or complexity increasing.
Jim F writes:
Chomsky's views concerning the evolution of human linguistic capacity have always been a mystery to me.
and Luke notes:
> Given
> that Chomsky isn't reflexively hostile to evolutionary psychology,
> I'm
> puzzled that he doesn't see this.
Well, he may actually be more hostile than he lets on. In 2002, Chomsky made his first attempt to seriously take on the evolution question with a paper in Nature that outlines a spandrelist approach to how language could have evolved. Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff came out with a lengthy rebuttal from the psycholinguistics perspective, rather convincingly demolishing the language-as-accident hypothesis and highlighting the strengths of the adaptionist paradigm. As to why Chomsky has taken to championing this hypothesis that is so weakly motivated by the findings of the field, a hypothesis at odds with many of the core ideas of the nativist position he staked out in the 1960s, they discuss how his latest approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, makes a spandrel somewhat more believable because it pares down the formal system central to language to it’s barest essentials, a special kind of recursive property, but they also make clear that his reduction goes way past what the psycholinguistic empirical evidence permits (Chomsky has gained a notorious rep for taking on language only in an abstractionist mode where the bulk of psycholinguistic findings are ignored).
What really suprised me though was their stance on why Chomsky's keeps clinging to this half-baked spandrelist hypothesis. They basically concluded that it came down to a deep conflict with his particular anarchist view of humanity, a conviction that “lies at the root of Chomsky’s belief system: a conception of human nature that spans his disparate writings in linguistics and in *politics.*
They go on:
“This view of human nature may be the hidden variable that accounts for Chomsky’s otherwise disparate beliefs. In the political arena, Chomsky’s “anarcho-syndicalism” assumes that humans are equipped with a spontaneous tendency to cooperate and to engage in productive, creative work for its own sake . In the linguistic arena, Chomsky posits a system for productive, creative generation of an infinite number of sentences, a system which allows for the expression of thought for its own sake but is not designed for (and not even particularly good at) the practical function of communication.”
I was pretty surprised to see people so important to the field making this kind of argument. I had considered this kind of reasoning too, but I dismissed it as an amateur’s mistake, that Chomsky is way too sharp and serious of thinker to succumb to that kind of error. I mean to drop some of the primary contributions that he has made to the study of language to appease some vague but reassuring intuitions about human nature? Then again Lewontin is certainly nobody to be slept on in the world of population genetics and he seems to have gone down a similar and even more extreme path (I have yet to hear of Chomsky engaging in any public smear campaigns against his opponents). But even then, consider how much time he has spent in his political activism on examining and discussing examples of people’s implicit ideological beliefs clouding their view of the obvious. If this really is the issue that is motivating him, it’s kind of disappointing that he would make the sort of lapse in judgment that he has taken pains to point out again and again.
P&J go on to describe how his conception of human nature puts him at odds with ev psych:
“In the first decades of the cognitive revolution, a vague notion of innateness was sufficient to distinguish Chomsky’s ideas from those of the behaviorists and other empiricists. He could point to a set of properties that distinguished language from generic learned behavior, such as its complexity, modularity, expressive power, and uniqueness among species. But with the rise of evolutionary psychology in the 1980s and 1990s, the origin of innate abilities began to be scrutinized. According to modern biology, complex innate traits arise because they were useful to the organism’s ancestors. This focus reveals a tension between a vision of human nature in which innate traits are exercised for their own sake and a Darwinian explanation in which innate traits evolved for their fitness benefits. Chomsky apparently has responded to this tension by emphasizing the recursive generative capacity that is at the heart of his vision of human nature and distancing himself from the features of language that call for a Darwinian explanation, namely, adaptive complexity in the service of communication. Thus language, for him, is not designed for communication, and the parts of language that had to evolve in humans are so minimal that invoking selection is unnecessary.”
Carl Zimmer has a pretty good recap of the relatively recent P&J exchange with Chomsky, http://loom.corante.com/archives/2005/02/25/building_gab_part_one.php It really doesn’t touch on the conception-of- human-nature issue, but it has a link to the P&J paper where it is discussed.
I realize you could invert P&J’s take on Chomsky being blinded by his philosophical-political beliefs, perhaps P&J are actually the ones with the ideological bias and are using this as an occasion to take a swipe at Chomsky, but that hardly feels like a satisfying answer after reading through the portion of the paper where they elaborate on their argument. I also want to point out Pinker is not an AEI speaker as Ravi claimed, he only participated in an AEI panel discussion on ethics and neuroscience, and I think he makes a pretty sincere effort at trying to pursue both sides of whatever political implications any study of human nature has. On the other hand, in a Guardian article he did describe himself as non-dogmatically, eclectically libertarian. I think Jackendoff is fairly left-wing from what I know of him, somewhere on the social democrat vs. democratic socialist spectrum, but I’m not 100% certain on that, I’ve never read anything where he made his politics explicit.