How children pick up a language: new review of Wolfe (Humans)

by David Turell , Friday, October 21, 2016, 21:57 (2953 days ago) @ David Turell

This is a favorable review:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/were-only-human/

Wallace wrote, possessed powers that were radically discontinuous with the kinds of adaptations that natural selection could account for. Abstract thought, the use of language, the creation of music and art, and consciousness as we know it are absent from even the highest primates. More, Darwinian theory couldn’t show how these distinctively human attributes might have evolved step by step from lower species, through a steady series of environmental adaptations, to their present advanced state. Wallace concluded that some process must be operating in nature in addition to the materialist machinery of natural selection.

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Human exceptionalism has a lot to do with their relative reputations. Wallace embraced it and so did Muller; indeed, they thought it was self-evident. Darwin didn’t. And most scientists, especially fundamentalists like Jerry Coyne, have inherited Darwin’s materialism as dogma. It’s a good deal for scientists. After all, if everything we consider uniquely human is a consequence of purely materialistic processes, then the guys who study materialistic processes for a living hold the key to every human question. It’s nice work if you can get it.

There’s a problem, though. Evolutionary theory is no closer than it was in Darwin’s day to explaining in materialist terms how traits like self-consciousness and language came to be. The scientists keep trying, of course, as scientists should. One of the most advanced efforts to explain language as an evolutionary adaptation has been undertaken by the linguist Noam Chomsky of MIT. After 80 pages chaffing Darwin, Wolfe turns his attention Chomsky-ward, and the result is brutal.

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Chomsky’s effort to explain human language in evolutionary terms, and thus reinforce the case against human exceptionalism, has largely failed. Wolfe outlines the reasons in jaunty style....Chomsky’s armchair theorizing is being dismantled by the accumulation of empirical evidence, which is how scientists told us science works all along....Chomsky’s armchair theorizing is being dismantled by the accumulation of empirical evidence, which is how scientists told us science works all along.

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Clearing the popularizers from the field, as many specialists would like to do, would cede all scientific argument to scientists, who in many notable cases have not earned the deference they demand. The danger is doubled when scientists use science to draw metaphysical lessons—when, that is, they assert that human beings and primates are in essence the same kind of creature. A flurry of data and polysyllabic detail shouldn’t obscure the fact that such a thesis defies human experience and devalues the noblest human endeavors (including science, by the way).
Wolfe joins a small and hardy band of writers and other high-brows who take joy in staring down the bullies of scientism: Marilynne Robinson, David Berlinski, Wendell Berry, Thomas Nagel, a few others. But Wolfe is the best of them.

Comment: The debate continues. Chomsky appears to be losing. Humans are exceptional and the reason it happened in evolution is not explained at all by Darwin.