The origins of language are not what inherited disorders seemed to suggest
nautil.us
nautil.us
A module can be functional, in that it behaves as a module even if not implemented as one (and certainly need not an isomorphism between genes and anatomical or behavioural features).
Chomsky argues for theories that make sense; whereas Norvig accepts impenetrable machine learning model as theories. http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f...
Unfortunately, biology is messy. But I think we should at least try to decompose it into what it is trying to do.
You're going to get yourself into hot water with that "trying" word in there. It's a mistake to look at this as a designed feature with a goal, when in fact what's going one is emergent, just doing whatever the heck it does, in concert with other features of the organism, in such a way that its chances of having successful offspring is increased.
As George Box put it, "All models are wrong, but some are useful".
Perhaps Aristotle and George would have been good friends?
I agree that using our agency-processing abilities can easily lead to wrong answers. But that's true of any of our abilities. We have a lot of hardware for visual processing, so we make graphs. Sometimes graphs mislead. But that doesn't mean we should stop using them. Instead, I think it means we should be aware of the limits of any particular cognitive mode and be energetic in cross-checking.
I think of it in terms of bias vs bias bias, and getting caught up in my own reflection; or, it's turtles all the way down (rationalism).
Chomsky has argued that this module could be standing alone, or it could be something that actively recruits from other mental faculties. There is nothing in his writings that suggest that this module can only be separate one, or that language as a whole must be reduced to one gene. In fact, Chomsky and few others are strong believers that whatever gave rise to language did give rise to a whole set of other mental capabilities, and this is exactly what research into complex tooling is confirming.
This article does not contradict the ideas that originated with Chomsky in the slightest, despite some paragraphs claiming otherwise.
I wonder what kind of superpower-like abilities we're just one nucleotide away from.
OK, maybe "superpower" is too much. What I mean is this: what if the "normal" version of FOXP2 was the one without the nucleotide? People with that extra nucleotide would be seen as geniuses.
> just three amino acids distinguish the human version of the FOXP2 protein from that of mice. When he engineered the FOXP2 genes of mice to produce proteins with the two human FOXP2 amino acids, it resulted in functional differences in brain areas critical for carrying out fine motor tasks and controlling muscle movements, as well as altered function in regions involved in sending and receiving reward signals. […] mice with human FOXP2 learned faster than regular mice.
I found it quite funny that there's been all these news reports on FOXP2 being "the language gene", and then someone goes ahead and makes mice with human FOXP2. Unfortunately the mice did not learn to speak :-)
I think we're a little further away than that. Just think of a huge computer program. Modify one line of code in the right place and you introduce a showstopping bug. On the other hand, adding a random line of code anywhere in the program is unlikely to produce a complex new feature.
I'm not complaining about the quality of the content, but many of them don't seem like "hacker news". I'm a little suspicious....
anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosityThe cultural argument contends that complex behavior (including communication) is merely the result of consistent sharing and learning throughout a population over time. Basically, familiarity allows mutual understanding and eventually communication, verbal or otherwise.
Did you even read TFA? It actually does the contrary... the whole last part is about the cultural development of language...