This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 31 Aug 2008, by Rudy Garns.
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28 Jan 15
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03 Jan 14
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Chomsky has argued that an intermediate form of language--not fully encompassing the grammatical structures of today's langauges--is not possible.
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anti-evolutionary
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Stephen Jay Gould, who views it as likely that other brain functions requiring symbolic logic were the targets of selection, and that language later arose as an artifact of culture.
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31 Aug 08
Rudy GarnsDeacon's position is that the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language. So for him, explaining the evolution of language (and the brain features that support it) explains much of interest about humans.
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the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language
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the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities. But also intrinsic to Chomsky is the idea that the neural underpinnings of language were not themselves selected for their function in language but instead for some other function.
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The second approach is that of Steve Pinker, who basically takes Chomsky at face value--namely, that there is an innate brain capacity for learning natural languages--and claims that language function itself was the target of selection.
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when behaviors like symbol use or language fall within the range of some individuals in the population, the rest of the population may well be able to learn them. As the population changes behaviorally to learn these skills, natural selection can begin to act on the genetic variation that may be related to them, either because the genes underly the behaviors themselves or the ability to learn the behaviors.
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innate features of the brain
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grammatical organization
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symbols are logically connected to other symbols in an interlocking set of relationships.
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But Deacon argues that Universal Grammar is unnecessary. In his view, innate assumptions are not the only way to create learning biases that enable the acquisition of grammar rules. Biases in learning might instead stem from the constraints that young children typically face in interpreting speech. In his view, children ignore many of the details of syntactic relations in their initial attempts to interpret speech. Using a top-down approach, they focus on those elements that are readily understood and later fill in the details.
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What is essential in terms of human evolution is the overall expansion of the neocortex, and much less so the relative sizes of different parts, although the changes in relative extent in the parietal association areas and some specifically language-related features such as Broca's area may be even more important.
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Deacon has told a story that makes sense, but there is no strong empirical evidence that supports this view as opposed to other possible ideas about language evolution.
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