The Necessity of Syntax

[Steve Long]

In a message dated 12/10/02 7:50:55 AM, jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES writes:
<< I think it was N. Jerne who won the Nobel Prize for a selectionist model
of the immune system. His reception lecture was significantly published as:
Jerne, N.K. (1985): "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System", Science,
229: 1057-1059. >>

In that lecture, NIELS JERNE stated:
"When we place a population of lymphocytes from such an animal in appropriate
tissue culture fluid, and when we add an antigen, the lymphocytes will
produce specific
antibody molecules, in the absence of any nerve cells....

I find it astonishing that the immune system embodies a degree of complexity
which suggests some more or less superficial though striking analogies with
human language, and that this cognitive system has evolved and functions
without assistance of the
brain."

What Jerne was analogizing here was the immune systems ability to generate
and store specific information that was not within its prior experience.  His
use of "cognitive system" to describe immune response here doesn't correspond
to the notion of cognitive as much as it does intelligent.  It should be
obvious however that there is nothing here that contradicts the notion that
the immune system is totally functional in origin or operation.  That is, the
immune system clearly developed to protect the body from the environamental
causes of infection and its structure is totally dictated by that function --
to the extent that it is not dysfunctional.

In that lecture, Jerne also stated:
"It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any
environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar,
pioneered by Chomsky..., argues that this is only explicable if certain deep,
universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human
brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to
learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our
chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then linguistics
would become a branch of biology."

Just a note on the logic of this proposition as Jerne understood it.  If we
were to find or design a language that a young children could NOT learn (as a
natural language), would that disprove the hypothesis as stated?  Or would it
mean that this unlearnable language was NOT a natural language?  Is the
statement "young children easily learn the language of any environment into
which they were born" falsifiable?  Or would contrary evidence simply mean
that a child cannot learn a natural language if it is not a natural language?
 I'd suggest that the circularity is the result of the omission of
functionality in defining the terms.

Steve Long