I went back and re-read Shag's original post about the book she's reading. The picture that emerged was quite unrecognizable. Chomsky, so far as I know, has never had anything to say about the "origin of language", a topic pretty much inaccessible to investigation.
And although he's never been interested in doing field work himself, I'm not aware that he's ever "laughed at" such work "as a waste of time." Harper's magazine as a source on the somewhat rarefied topic of syntactic theory may not be quite up to the task.
--
Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org