Don't Claim to Understand Human Origins If You Don't Understand the Origin of Language

Noam Chomsky has for very long been a major and valuable voice in academia and US culture. A tireless writer, he has been an important voice of conscience in American politics for decades. In 1967 when few US professors were speaking out against the Vietnam War, Chomsky authored a long influential essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" that spoke out against that misguided war. Chomsky was by then a very famous linguist, and the essay and his later political writings attracted great attention in the world of US academia. Since then Chomsky has authored numerous books and essays that have made noteworthy and incisive criticisms of mistakes in US foreign policy and domestic policy. He was one of the leading figures opposing the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Chomsky became very famous through his work in linguistics. In linguistics (the study of language) we saw for many years a kind of "Chomsky club" or "Chomsky culture" that was an example of the tendency of professors in a field of study to become regrettably infatuated with the work of a single thinker. Just as evolutionary biology professors became over-eager apostles of Charles Darwin and cosmologists became credulous apostles of Alan Guth, it seemed that for decades professors of linguistics were under the spell of Noam Chomsky.  Chomsky claimed that humans had somehow acquired an innate ability to learn language. He claimed that this was easier because all languages shared the same structure, what he called a "universal grammar." The wikipedia.org article on Chomsky states this:

"He bases his argument on observations about human language acquisition and describes a 'poverty of the stimulus': an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic competence they attain. For example, although children are exposed to only a very small and finite subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first language, they somehow acquire the highly organized and systematic ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences, including ones that have never before been uttered, in that language.^[164] To explain this, Chomsky reasoned that the primary linguistic data must be supplemented by an innate linguistic capacity. Furthermore, while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky referred to this difference in capacity as the language acquisition device, and suggested that linguists needed to determine both what that device is and what constraints it imposes on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that result from these constraints would constitute 'universal grammar'.^"

Chomsky spoke correctly when he suggested that humans have an innate ability to learn language, and when he noted the failure of science to explain that ability.  He was correct in realizing that the amount of language that young children are exposed to is not at all sufficient to explain the astonishing ability of such children to start speaking grammatically and informatively in a particular language. But he seemed to have used words poorly when he referred so often to a "language organ" or "language acquisition device," as if there is some physical part of the body that can explain a young child's ability to pick up language so quickly. 

Scientists have not discovered anything in the brain that can account for a human's ability to learn language quickly. Indeed, scientists have never discovered anything in the brain that can account for a human being's ability to learn anything whatsoever, at any speed. We still have no credible theory of neural learning or neural memory. The "theories" that are given on this topic are more like mere catchphrase repetitions rather than credible theories. Neuroscientists keep muttering the phrase "synapse strengthening" when asked to explain how humans learn things. That is neither a detailed theory of learning nor a credible theory of memory formation nor a credible theory of memory retrieval.  Synapses bear no resemblance to a device for permanently storing information. Synapses are subject to constant random remodeling and stochastic restructuring. The average lifetime of the proteins in synapses is 1000 times smaller than the longest length of time that humans can remember things (50 years or more). No one has either an understanding or a detailed credible theory of how complex learned information (such as history lessons you learn in school) could ever be stored as synapse states or neural states. 

Lacking any understanding of how any type of learning or memory acquisition can occur in the brain, we have no warrant for saying that humans have a "language acquisition device," as if we knew of some physical thing that can explain the learning of language or the learning of any other skill or knowledge. 

The wikipedia.org article on Chomsky notes opposition to some of his theories about language, stating the following (there are numbered links in the original text):

"Multiple scholars have challenged universal grammar on the grounds of the evolutionary infeasibility of its genetic basis for language, the lack of universal characteristics between languages, and the unproven link between innate/universal structures and the structures of specific languages. Scholar Michael Tomasello has challenged Chomsky's theory of innate syntactic knowledge as based on theory and not behavioral observation. Although it was influential from 1960s through 1990s, Chomsky's nativist theory was ultimately rejected by the mainstream child language acquisition research community owing to its inconsistency with research evidence. It was also argued by linguists including Robert Freidin, Geoffrey Sampson, Geoffrey K. Pullum and Barbara Scholz that Chomsky's linguistic evidence for it had been false."

We should always be asking this question of scientific theorists: what were their motivations in creating their theories? I think what was going on was that Chomsky had a "language acquisition dilemma" on his hands once he realized that young children acquire language without hearing sufficient examples to explain that, something he called "the poverty of the stimulus."  So he tried to lessen this "language acquisition dilemma" by teaching a theory which made it look like it's not so hard to learn a language.  If all languages follow some simple rules of a "universal grammar," that might make it more easy to explain a child's acquisition of not just one language but two languages. Many young children acquire two languages in their childhood, in cases when the father's favored language is different from the mother's favored language. 

But if such a "universal grammar" theory is not correct, then nothing has been done to reduce what we can call "the miracle of language acquisition." It is no surprise that in Chomsky's "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax," we have no use of the words "DNA," "evolution," "gene" or "genetic," and no mention of Darwin.  DNA and its genes cannot be the source of some innate ability to learn language. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information, not anatomical information, and not high-level intellectual abilities. 

Chomsky often seemed to be guilty of shrink-speaking when talking about language acquisition. Shrink-speaking is using words and phrases that makes some huge or impressive or complex or hard-to-explain reality sound as if it were small or unimpressive or simple or easy-to-explain. For example, if you described the dramatic works of Shakespeare as "just some marks on paper," you are engaging in shrink-speaking.

Chomsky seemed to be guilty of shrink-speaking when he tried to depict language acquisition as mainly the ability to correctly use grammatical rules. Language acquisition is something vastly more than that: it is the ability to state a vast variety of meaningful true statements, and the ability to understand a huge variety of ideas and statements expressed through language. The difference between a mere ability to use grammar rules and the ability to use a language as well as most people do is as big as the difference between learning how to use a hammer and a screw driver and having the ability to build a ten-story apartment tower with functional electricity, plumbing and elevators. 

An example of Chomsky's shrink-speaking on this topic was this statement on page 316 of his Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use: "To know English is, let us say, to know how to talk grammatically, how to understand what is said to us in English, and so on."  Knowing how to make complex true statements in  English is enormously more than "to know how to talk grammatically." If a person could only speak grammatically correct nonsense like saying "the rock is angry" or "the floor is hungry," that would be speaking grammatically. Actually speaking English meaningfully and truthfully involves learning a great treasure trove of conceptual knowledge and abstract ideas and word definitions, something many, many times more difficult than merely learning  the grammar rules of a language.   

In his interesting book The Kingdom of Speech, which can be read online here by those with a login at www.archive.org, the late Tom Wolfe discusses the failures of scientists to credibly explain language. He mentions Charles Darwin's extremely ridiculous claim that human languages evolved out of humans imitating the song of birds.  Chapter IV is entitled "Noam Charisma," and describes Noam Chomsky's domination of the field of linguistics. In Chapter V Wolfe discusses how Chomsky's ideas were challenged by the work of Daniel L. Everett.  Everett spent many dangerous years in the Amazon river area of Brazil studying a language called Piraha spoken by only a few hundred tribesmen.  The language seemed to defy Chomsky's dogmatic generalizations about languages. Chomsky bitterly denounced Everett. This goes on all the time in academia: scientists creating dogmatic edifices, and bitterly denouncing those who produce observational evidence against such dogmas. 

Wolfe mentions a 2014 scientific paper entitled “The Mystery of Language Evolution" co-authored by Chomsky. In that paper the authors stated this:

"We show that, to date, (1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity; (2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved; (3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes any time soon; (4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any insights into language's origins unverifiable. Based on the current state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses."

Co-authored by the most famous current linguist, what this amounts to is a laudibly frank confession that scientists do not understand the origin of language. This is the current situation:

(1) Scientists confess (as the statement above indicates) that they lack any credible theory of the origin of language.

(2) Scientists very widely confess that there is an unsolved "problem of consciousness," that scientists lack an understanding of how brain activity can give rise to human conscious experience.

(3) Scientists lack any credible theory of memory, confessing that they cannot explain such basic things as how a human is able to instantly recall complex detailed information on a subject upon hearing a single word such as a person's name. 

(4) Scientists lack any credible theory of how there arises in humans such mental wonders as thinking, insight and imagination, there being no coherent reason anyone can articulate why such mental things should arise from any combination of merely physical neurons, no matter how well they are connected. 

(5) Scientists lack any credible theory of the origin of protein molecules, the complexity of which was totally unknown to Darwin.  In the scientific paper here, a Harvard scientist says, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."

(6) Scientists lack any credible theory of how a speck-sized one-celled zygote is able to progress to become the incredibly complex hierarchical organization of the human body. The often-repeated claim that this occurs because of a reading of a DNA anatomy blueprint is a myth and a lie. No such blueprint or recipe for constructing a human adult exists in DNA, which does not specify any anatomy information. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information, such as which amino acids make up a protein. 

(7) Scientists lack even a full explanation for how any adult human keeps living. For an adult to live, there must constantly occur protein folding, under which linear chains of amino acids form into the complex three-dimensional shapes needed for protein molecule function. But the protein folding problem remains unsolved. We don't understand how three-dimensional protein molecules are constantly arising from one-dimensional polypeptide chains (mere chains of amino acids). There has been some progress in protein structure prediction, the art of predicting the 3D shape of a folded protein molecule from its linear amino acid sequence. Although such progress is often mistakenly depicted as progress in solving the protein folding problem, it is no such thing.  Using deep-learning "frequentist inference" (involving massive databases created through analysis of countless thousands of proteins and their shapes) to predict 3D protein shapes from their amino acid sequence does nothing to explain how linear sequences of amino acids are able to organize into folded 3D shapes needed for protein molecule function. 

(8) Despite all of these shortfalls, which collectively tell us in the loudest possible voice that scientists do not understand either the origin of the human species or the origin of any single adult body or any single adult human mind, scientists continue to claim they understand human origins. 

Nothing could be more ridiculous than item (8) above. It is like someone claiming that they understand the origin of cars when they don't understand the origin of an engine and don't understand how parts are assembled to make a car and don't understand what a factory is and don't understand how tools are used to make cars and don't understand how the first cars were created. Why do scientists keep claiming they understand human origins? Because they got hooked on making a groundless boast that was an intoxicating conceit. Claiming that they understood human origins was a bad habit that scientists got hooked on, rather like a drug addict gets hooked on some drug. The origin of humans is a mystery a thousand miles over the heads of our scientists. The more we learn about the  stratospheric levels of  interdependency and fine-tuned organization within biological systems, and the more we learn about the depth and diversity within the full spectrum of human mental experiences and human capabilities, the more ridiculous-sounding are the explanatory boasts of biologists claiming to know how humans arose. 

Chomsky co-authored a book called "Manufacturing Consent : the Political Economy of the Mass Media." The book was an insightful look at how political opinions of the masses are shaped by a small group of opinion-makers in control of media cartels and media conglomerates, who often issue propaganda that is successfully passed off as "news." He described how this small group often acts in its own self-interest while hiding such bias and maintaining a facade of objective reporting. He described how such lords of thought control often achieve wonders of opinion shaping by simply focusing on a small group of stories that advance the story lines favored by such ideological puppet masters, while ignoring imporant events and facts that conflict with such narratives.  

Chomsky apparently failed to ever realize that a very similar situation exists in regard to the control of opinions about nature and scientific matters by a small corporate-entangled elite that acts in its own self-interest. The opinions of the masses about human nature and human origins is largely controlled by a small elite that is constantly passing off ideological propaganda that is not labeled as ideological propaganda but as "science news." Such a small elite has enormous bias, with a great interest in propelling whatever narratives further its boasts that a small priesthood of professors are "lords of explanation." Such an elite is entangled with a corporate profit system and academia profit system that gets enormous windfalls from things such as government grants, scientific publishing and advertising revenue from misleading clickbait "science news" stories.  Chomsky failed to realize how the same type of successfully disguised propaganda infrastructure that he had identified in politics also existed in scientific academia, with great similarities between the two. 

In the diagram below the purple area represents not just a host of observations of the paranormal (such as two hundred years of well-documented evidence for human clairvoyance written by distinguished credible witnesses such as doctors and scientists), but also a great body of biological evidence such as neuroscience evidence that conflicts with the dogmatic high-level claims of neuroscientists. You may not have heard much about such observations, because our professors have been busy "manufacturing consent" by excluding many of the most important observations from what they discuss in their articles, papers, lectures and books.  

Chomsky's speculations have done very little to reduce the great mystery of language origin and the great mystery of rapid language acquisition by small children. Because learning a grammar is only a small part of using a language, you would never explain language acquisition by merely explaining an acquisition of grammar rules. Trying to make it sound like "learning a language=learning grammar rules" is the kind of shrink-speaking error that goes on all the time in the silly thinking of reductionists: using misleading talk to make it sound like enormous complexities are something very simple. It's the same kind of misleading talk that goes on when people speak as if bodies are just bags of chemicals, or when people speak as if cities are just a bunch of buildings.

 It is not true that all languages use the same grammar. For example, a page discussing differences in language grammars states this:

"In Chinese, a typical sentence is SVO (subject + verb + object). Time is expressed in individual words such as tomorrow, yesterday, in the past. Meanwhile, time expression in English is through different verb tenses and verb forms. This explains why Chinese students often get confused and overwhelmed with past tense, future tense, and perfect tense." 

But despite such differences in grammar, I know two who were able to speak both fluent English and fluent Chinese by the age of three or four. And many people can speak six or more languages fluently. 

It is probably a "fool's errand" to have "straw hole scholars" who call themselves linguists try to study language in isolation, to try to figure out how language originated and how a child picks up a language. You can only get realistic ideas about language as part of a broader study of the human mind and human mental behavior. Study the entirety of reported human behavior (including all the important paranormal observations senselessly branded as taboo by our professors), and you may get some good ideas that may help explain the orgin of language and the marvel of a child's quick acquisition of language. 

Below are a few ideas (some speculative) that may be of some use in trying to clarify the origin of language and the acquisition of language by small children.

(1) Language acquisition by a small child may occur partially through telepathy or extrasensory perception (ESP), which may occur more powerfully in small children, and may occur more powerfully between small children and their parents. So, for example, when a parent tells their small child "do not spill your food," and the child gets the idea without the parent ever having explained the concept of spilling food, there may be telepathy occurring between parent and child that helps the child to learn the word "spill." There exists two hundred years of very convincing evidence for ESP and telepathy (discussed here, here, here, here and here and the series of 54 posts here) which our mainstream scientists have senselessly ignored. Scientists should focus very carefully on testing ESP between small children and their parents, which could provide more evidence for the hypothesis of ESP assisting the language acquisition of a small child. 

(2) Language acquisition by a small child may occur partially because of some previous life lived by the small child, either on Earth or in some non-earthly realm of existence in which languages such as English may be spoken. Scholars such as Ian Stevenson did some work that may provide some evidence in favor of such a hypothesis. Further work should be done to search for evidence of a non-earthly pre-existence of human souls before earthly life. There exist anecdotal reports of small children reporting to their parents accounts of living in some non-earthly place before they began to live on Earth. Some examples of such accounts can be found in the scientific paper "Paranormal Aspects of Pre-Existence Memories in Young Children" which can be read here or here.  A systematic effort should be made to try to find out whether such reports are common or very rare flukes. 

(3) As an alternative to the ideas in item (2) above, language acquisition may occur partially because humans are born with souls that are in some sense pre-loaded with conceptual knowledge, rather than being "blank slates." When studying the matter of animal instincts, you may get many reasons for suspecting that many types of organisms are born with knowledge they never learned. For example, babies know as soon as they are born to suck their mother's breasts; bees know how to make hives; birds know how to fly with other birds in perfectly synchronized formations; beavers know how to build dams; salmon spending most of their lives in the ocean know to swim upstream to return to their place of birth to reproduce; and some birds know how to engage every year in very complex migrations spanning huge distances. Material science lacks any credible explanation for complex animal instincts, which are behaviors that cannot be credibly explained as arising from genes. Genes merely specify low-level chemical information, not high-level behavioral instructions. 

Among more than 200 dreams I have had that seemed to suggest the idea of life after death, described here, more than fifteen have seemed to suggest the idea of the non-earthly pre-existence of a human soul. This idea is also suggested by numerous accounts of those having near-death experiences, where there often occurs someone saying that he seemed to briefly visit some unearthly realm he identified as his "real home," as if his soul had previously existed there.  

The following investigations might provide clues that help shed light on the abnormally easy acquisition of language by small children:

(1) Rigorously test ESP or telepathy between children and their parents.

(2) Attempt to determine exactly what percentage of those having near-death experiences report feelings or thoughts seeming to hint at some possibility that human souls may exist in some non-earthly realm of existence before birth.

(3) Do more research to search for evidence for the possibility of reincarnation.

(4) Have more people (particularly older people and terminally ill people) keep daily dream journals (updated both in the middle of the night and upon waking), and study whether either the doctrine of reincarnation or the doctrine of the soul's non-earthly pre-existence is suggested by dream content. The claim that all dream content is random neural activity is one of many dubious dogmas of the modern neuroscientist, who has no idea of how neurons could produce either ideas or dreams. It is possible that our dreams provide us with important metaphysical clues from some mysterious source outside of our brains.

(5) Do more testing to determine whether humans and other organisms are born with knowledge they never learned.  

Postscript: The day after posting this post I said to one of my daughters, "You'll never guess what I saw down the street." I gave no clues, but asked her to guess. After a wrong guess of an orange cat, her second guess was "a raccoon," which is just what I saw. No one in our family has seen such a thing on our street before. Later in the day I asked her what I saw in a weird dream I recently had, mentioning only that it involved something odd in our front yard. After a wrong first guess of a snowman, she asked, "Was it a wild animal?" I said yes. Then she asked, "Was it an elephant?" I said yes. The dream I had was of two baby elephants in our front yard. These were the only two times that day she tried to guess what was in my mind. This night was one of several times in which it seemed as if there was ESP between me and her (two similar cases are described here).

One or two times during the 13 days after the elephant guessing,  I asked the same daughter to guess what I was thinking, without success. Then on the 13th day I asked her to guess what I had dreamed about, without giving any clues. I thought of a dream involving my father playing baseball catch with my sister. My daughter's first guess was wrong. Then she asked whether it was something that happened in my childhood. I said yes. Then she asked whether it was something happening in my back yard. I said yes. Then she asked whether it was some kind of sport. I said yes. Then she asked whether it was playing catch or some kind of baseball. I said yes. This was the same performance level noted above: one wrong guess, followed by all other guesses correct. On a test with my other daughter (the only telepathy test I can recall doing with her), I simply asked her to guess a thing I saw today, telling her only it was something that I hadn't seen in years. On her fourth guess, she got the correct answer: a grasshopper. 

Page 5 of the scientific paper here describes a 7-year-old girl who is "fully bilingual in Turkish and Danish" despite having had most of half of the left side of her brain removed in a hemispherectomy operation at the age of 3. We are told that except for a slight spasticity, "she leads an otherwise normal life." On page 63 of the book Bright Splinters of the Mind by Beate Hermelin, we read this about a gifted subject: "Christopher can understand, talk, read, write and translate from Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Welsh." We then read about detailed tests of this subject. Cases such as that clarify the inadequacy of all mainstream explanations for human language acquistion.