The appeal of P&P

[Mike Maxwell]

Sergei Balari writes:

>Chomskyan nativism is naive because the
>sort of genetic determinism it presupposes
>is hard to reconcile with most current views
>within developmental psychology and biology.
>The point is that strong nativism invokes a view
>that gives almost all the poser to the gene,
>whereas the developmentalists's work (both in
>biology and in psychology) is providing very
>interesting evidence that ther's no much sense
>in this conception of innateness.

This is news to me, although that could be because I haven't read much in
the way of developmental biology, and specifically the development of
behavior, in the last thirty years :-).  But I'd like to hear more, and
while "The Ontology of Information" sounds like a fascinating title, I can't
put my hands on it right now.

So let me ask some questions.  At one point there was work on the
acquisition/ development of birdsong by young birds raised in isolation and
exposed to no birdsong, or to recordings of other species' songs, or to
recordings of their own species' songs.  As I recall, there was variation
among species as to what they would learn under those circumstances.  All
the songbirds ended up with _some_ singing, regardless of the
environment--surely an innate behavior.  But the singing that resulted from
zero exposure to other birds' songs was badly distorted from normal singing.

As for the birds who had exposure to recordings of other birds' singing:
some species were fairly plastic, in that they could pick up most any song
(Mockingbirds, I suppose); others had a much more fixed ability, i.e. they
could only learn their own species' songs.  If I'm remembering this
correctly (big if), that sort of thing (esp. the species that could only
pick up their own species' songs) would seem to be reasonably good evidence
for an innate behavior, coupled with an ability for learning (and a critical
period for learning, as I recall, but perhaps I'm not recalling :-)).

Does anyone have any references on this sort of study?  Or am I making it
all up out of my head?

>It doesn't make much sense to say that genes
>code for such and such capacity, as it appears
>that development of such capacieties is best
>seen as a complex, dynamical, dialectical, process,
>where the end product is a function of the complex
>interactions that occurred among environmental
>and genetic factors.

I don't see how "coding for... capacity" is incompatible with "complex
interactions".  If we all ended up speaking the same language, one might
question the need for the interactions; but since we don't, it seems to me
to be a reasonable position--and in fact, Chomsky's position--that there is
a dialectical process.  In other words, isn't there a bit of a straw man
here, in calling Chomsky's nativism "naive" and "deterministic"?

                                         Mike Maxwell
                                         Summer Institute of Linguistics
                                         Mike_Maxwell at sil.org