Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id RAA10213 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 9 Nov 2001 17:42:12 GMT Message-ID: <3BEC144A.3060108@bioinf.man.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2001 17:37:14 +0000 From: Chris Taylor <Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk> Organization: University of Manchester User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011019 Netscape6/6.2 X-Accept-Language: en-gb To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: Fwd: Instinctive speech diminishes us not References: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3102A6D0FD@inchna.stir.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> I think there's a difference between saying language capability is
> genetic, and the form of language is genetic, e.g. the grammar etc., which
> is what Chomksy argued. I thought that studies of self-invented sign
> language amongst the poor deaf kids of (.... I don't recall where it was),
Somewhere in Central America IIRC (Nicaragua?)
> showed that their untaught sign languages consisted of grammatical
> structures similar to many languages, had more or less shown Chomsky was
> right? Ot at least was thought to by some.
But some structures just 'fall out'; legs always come in pairs - that's
a program in a sense, but not in a gene sense, it's bigger than that,
and outside the scope of evolution. We're back to the Goodwin thing
about exploiting 'out there' principles of the universe. Cars (with the
odd exception to prove the rule) always have four wheels etc. I think
what Chomsky missed is that the misapplication of 'rules' could prove
what he said (evidence of underlying genetic grammar), or could be
word-scale memes swapping parts of themselves until the definition of
'fitness' is refined a bit. Like bacterial plasmids. We mark out and
prepare a plot, but we don't plant the plants - they get themselves there.
'Language' genes, I think, will turn out to be like Dawkins' gene for
being poorly educated and unempowered (which is actually the 'gene' that
makes you black, in a racist society). I know that's a strange example,
but I do love it...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk)
http://bioinf.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris
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