The pied piper of Cambridge

Abstract

The major “contribution” of generative grammar to cognitive science is negative. The hermetic disjuncture of linguistic research from biological principles and facts has influenced cognitive science. Linguists have followed the pied piper taking a different path from that pointed out by Charles Darwin. As Dobzhansky (1973) noted, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” The hermetic nature of much linguistic research is apparent even in phonology which must reflect biological facts concerning speech production. For example, studies dating back to 1928 show that tongue “features” do not specify vowel distinctions. However, the irrefutable findings of these cineradiographic and MRI studies are generally ignored by linguists. Chomsky’s central premise, that syntactic ability derives from an innate “Universal Grammar” common to all human beings constitutes a strong biological claim. But if a UG genetically similar for all “normal” individuals existed, one of the central premises of Darwinian evolutionary biology, genetic variation would be false. Concepts and processes borrowed from linguistics such as “modularity” have impeded our understanding of brain-behavior relations. Some aspects of behavior are regulated in specific localized “modules” in the brain, but current research demonstrates that the neural architecture regulating human language is also implicated in motor control, cognition, and other aspects of behavior. The neural bases of enhanced human language are not separable from cognition and motor ability. The supposed unique aspect of syntax, its “reiterative” productivity, appears to derive from subcortical structures that play a part in neural circuits regulating motor control. Natural selection aimed at enhancing adaptive motor control ultimately yielded a basal ganglia “sequencing engine” that can produce a potentially infinite number of novel actions, thoughts , or “sentences” from a finite number of basic elements. Recent studies suggest that the human FOXP2 gene, which differs from similar regulatory genes in chimpanzees and other mammals, acts on the basal ganglia and other subcortical structures to confer enhanced human reiterative ability in domains as different as syntax and dancing. The probable date of the critical mutations on FOXP2 is coincident with the appearance of anatomically modern human beings about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Humans thus can create more complex sentences than chimpanzees, but has anyone ever seen an ape dancing?