Humans Are So Innately Hardwired For Language

There Has To Be Innate Circuitry That Does The Learning, That Creates The Culture, That Acquires The Culture, And That Responds To Socialization.

When Time Permits, I Try To See Interesting People In The Cities I Visit. In Seattle, I Met Paul Allen, The Co-founder Of Microsoft, Who Is Shy In Personality But Flamboyant In His Philanthropy.

We Are All Members Of The Same Flawed Species. Putting Our Moral Vision Into Practice Means Imposing Our Will On Others. The Human Lust For Power And Esteem, Coupled With Its Vulnerability To Self-deception And Self-righteousness, Makes That An Invitation To A Calamity, All The Worse When The Power Is Directed At A Goal As Quixotic As Eradicating Human Self-interest.

When A Scientist Considers All High-tech Mental Machinery Needed To Arrange Words Into Ordinary Sentences, Prescriptive Rules Are, At Best, Inconsequential Little Decorations. The Very Fact That They Have To Be Drilled Shows That They Are Alien To The Natural Workings Of The Language System. One Can Choose To Obsess Over Prescriptive Rules, But They Have No More To Do With Language Than The Criteria For Judging Cats At A Cat Show Have To Do With Mammalian Biology.

Why Do People Believe That There Are Dangerous Implications Of The Idea That The Mind Is A Product Of The Brain, That The Brain Is Organized In Part By The Genome, And That The Genome Was Shaped By Natural Selection?