Chomsky & Berwick's 'Siege of Paris'.

In a paper titled 'The Siege of Paris', Robert Berwick & Noam Chomsky write-

Every human language is a finite computational system generating an infinite array of hierarchically structured expressions.

Computation is a general term for any type of information processing that can be represented mathematically. This includes phenomena ranging from simple calculations to human thinking. A device able to make computations is called a computational system.

A language is not a computational system. A mind or a computer may be one. A language can be represented mathematically, but so can pretty much anything else- including cats and quarks and goats and galaxies.

The behavior of cats and goats and galaxies can represent 'a finite computational system generating an infinite array of hierarchically structured expressions'. However, like human languages, they don't coz it would be a silly thing to do. Computation is costly. Thus it gets narrowly channelised in a utilitarian manner on a fitness landscape.

This is the basic property (BP) of language.

It is also the basic property of the loose change in my pocket. It can be a 'finite computational system' if some device chooses to use it that way. Otherwise, not so much.

What does the following mean?

Every structured expression has a definite semantic interpretation and can be expressed by some sensory modality—speech when possible, gesture when not.

To Chomsky & Berwick, it means something profound. To me it is bullshit. Structured expressions have infinite semantic interpretations depending on stuff like what we think of the guy uttering it and what we need or how we are feeling at the time.

Suppose I am turtling and ask you, 'where's the loo?'. You reply, ''where's the loo', as a structured expression, has a definite semantic interpretation &c'. My response may be expressed by some sensory modality- a knee to the groin for preference.

On the other hand, if you design a voice activated kitchen robot which can make dosas like Mum's and pizzas like I had in Naples, then, sure, I'd nod my head appreciatively as you gas on about 'structured expressions'.

After all, you've just improved the quality of my life. You get a pass for talking hi-falutin bollocks.

The 'Basic Property' of human language is that tossers talking it try to make out they aren't tossers.

Stuff like this sounds smart but we think it is bullshit coz neither Chomsky nor Berwick have made us a better voice activated kitchen robot which could cook us pancakes like wot Mom made.

The BP is best explained, we argued, as the expression of an underlying computational system, an example of those innate repertoires to which Tinbergen, Lorenz, and Lenneberg called attention.

 Our 'innate releasing mechanism' is to call bullshit on this meaningless rigmarole. If we really had 'an underlying computational system' we would have little need to talk to each other or read stuff written by tossers.

The advent of sophisticated machine learning techniques has only served to justify their point of view. And ours.

But sophisticated machine learning is useful. Points of view aren't useful.

Lacking such repertoires, machine learning requires an enormous number of training examples.14 Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville thus remark that

As of 2016, a rough rule of thumb is that a supervised deep learning algorithm will generally achieve acceptable performance with around 5,000 labeled examples per category and will match or exceed human performance when trained with a dataset containing at least 10 million labeled examples.15

Whatever else children may be doing when acquiring their native language, they are not consulting ten million labeled examples.

No. They are running around screaming their lungs out and pooping their diapers. Their vocabulary may be limited. But it is highly effective.

Discoveries in genomics and cognitive biology have served to refine and buttress our conclusions

Discoveries can be useful. Unfortunately they can also buttress the conclusions of senile tossers. Evolution, however, has endowed us with the capacity to channel our own inner two year-old and to say 'You poopy-head' and then run around screeching our heads off.

Birds sing and humans speak; it is irresistibly tempting to see a connection. “This is an area,” Boeckx remarks, “where work linking genetics and neuroscience has been progressing rapidly.”It is an area, he goes on to argue, to which we have paid little attention. On the contrary. We have been nothing if not attentive:

Really? Have Berwick & Chomsky been making great strides in genetics or neuroscience? No. One is a Computer guy- but not a Gates or a Wozniak- and the other is a Linguistics retard. They write shite like this-

Thanks in part to comparative and neurophysiological and genomic studies of songbirds, the biological basis for vocal learning is well on the way to being understood as an evolutionarily convergent system: identically but independently evolved in birds and us.

The 'biological basis 'of stuff is understood by biologists. It is 'well understood' if those biologists then do something useful.
'Vocal learning' is not 'well understood' as 'an evolutionarily convergent system' unless monogenesis is false and humans evolved independently on different continents. However research on birds or dolphins or bees may give Biologists fresh insights and they may then go on to do something useful. Writing shite like this is merely defensive ego aggrandisement-

It may well be that vocal learning—the ability to learn distinctive, ordered sounds—can be bootstrapped from perhaps 100–200 genes (Pfenning et al. 2014).

'Why Only Us' (the book these tossers have written) cites a long list of recent research results, including well-regarded surveys and analyses written by Berwick and various birdsong experts, who concluded that birdsong is similar to human speech.

It is also similar to noises made by other animals. Indeed, any sort of noise has a 'linear order'.

Birdsong and speech follow linear order rather than hierarchical structure and, for this reason, they are remote from the BP.

WTF? Human speech is 'remote from the Basic Principle of Language'? Then this principle isn't basic at all! On the contrary, it is concerned with an 'i-language' which nobody has ever seen. Currently, we have A.I's which can write as well as a journalist. But they have 'e-language' and thus the 'Basic Principle' does not apply to what they are doing. On the other hand, the same could be said of Chomsky's entire oeuvre. It is all idioscyncratic, arbitrary, bullshit from start to finish.

 There is a common, conserved genetic toolkit for building vocal learners, one aligned with neurological wiring.

Computers can be 'vocal learners'. All living things have a 'common conserved genetic tool-kit'. This is a completely contentless sentence. But for these two shitheads it is 'progress'.

To have understood this is surely progress. With the externalization apparatus for language in place, the rapid emergence of language itself is far easier to explain.

Explaining stuff is easy- for tossers.  They get a lot of practice coz they keep getting caught with their pants down & porn on the screen instead of an Excel sheet.

Once this part of the story is complete, we will understand in some detail how the printer for human language works and how it evolved.

There is no 'printer' for human language. That's why it could evolve.

On this, Boeckx agrees with us.

Very good of him, I'm sure.

Gene duplication of this sort, according to Boeckx and his colleagues, “may have contributed to the establishment of a critical aspect of the vocal learning circuit.”

Gene duplication of what sort? Do these guys read over their shite before pressing send?

The authors believe this an argument for the gradual evolution of human language, but their conclusions, if true, confirm our judgment that the antecedents for language were in place 300 million years ago.

So a Computer guy and a Linguistics guy have their ultracrepidarian judgment confirmed by what they think some other guys wrote. Big whoop!

It remains true that we do not have a soup-to-nuts, or gene-to-neural-circuit-to-phenotype account for any trait of interest, let alone the BP.

BP is not a trait. It is meaningless.

Even in the case of FOXP2, we do not know the mapping from genomic to phenotypic expression, except in the most general terms.

This is true of every gene. The point about FOXP2 is that it decisively showed that Chomsky was utterly wrong. Language had not evolved recently and only within our species.

Some scientists have looked at non-coding mutations in order to account for the differences between human and nonhuman primates. This makes sense. Known protein differences between humans and nonhuman primates are small. A few years ago, J. Lomax Boyd and his colleagues engineered a mouse version of some of the enhancers that alter the development of the human neocortex.43 Lucía Franchini and Katherine Pollard noted that while Boyd et al. succeeded in their basic goal of demonstrating that humanized mice did, indeed, display increased neocortical size when compared to chimpanzeed mice, “[w]hat has not yet been done is to show the molecular pathways or developmental processes through which the genetic differences are expressed.”44 Thus, “linking human-specific genetic changes to unique cognitive traits” remains “a long and twisted road.”45
We would be the first to welcome progress on this front. Absent a more complete, concrete understanding of the space of genomic, developmental, and neurological possibilities, it is difficult to go beyond the phrase that we have so often adopted: the BP emerged by means of a slight rewiring of the brain.46

Why adopt the phrase in the first place? It is wholly useless. People doing actual genetic research don't need it. Nor does anybody else. There was no 'slight rewiring of the brain' because the brain does not have wires. This is merely an ignorant figure of speech.

This phrase, although promissory in part, is not entirely so. A slight rewiring can sometimes result in a large transition. This is a point that Boeckx dismisses, although there is considerable evidence for major transitions in evolution, a point long stressed by evolutionary biologists such as John Thompson, John Maynard Smith, and Eörs Szathmáry.

Yet these guys didn't posit a BP. It would have been foolish if they had because only the fitness landscape matters. They would need to show that it changed dramatically such that a particular trait was selected for.

The ability to process sequential information is shared across many vertebrate species—perhaps all.

Plants process sequential information- stuff like where the sun is in the sky. So what?

A slight alteration in the wiring of a simple sequential processor is sufficient to endow it with a push-down stack.

Wiring won't cut it. You need memory. It does not matter whether this is last in first out or first in last out or wholly random.

This makes for a significant improvement in its computational power. It is a point of some significance: a push-down stack is needed to process hierarchical structures.

Why? A memoryless heuristic may do just as well. It depends on the nature of the structure. That is why, most of the time, language isn't particularly helpful. Discussing stuff is a waste of time. The more tossers talk the worse the outcome.

What are the crucial distinguishing features of language? The answer is that we can learn them and find learning them to be useful. But this is because of the nature of our fitness landscape. Suppose coordination problems could be more efficiently solved telepathically or by a 'Hive Mind'. Our species might be wiped out in competition with a species which possess this trait. It may be that some of us mutate or find a different form of social existence such that language shrivels up and disappears.

There is no evidence that great apes, however sophisticated, have any of the crucial distinguishing features of language and ample evidence that they do not.⁴⁸ Claims made in favor of their semantic powers, we might observe, are wrong.

They are not even wrong. They are meaningless. But so are statements like the following-

Recent research reveals that the semantic properties of even the simplest words are radically different from anything in animal symbolic systems.⁴⁹ 

Semantic properties are imputed to words. They could be imputed to growling or purring. Such properties have no independent existence outside the mind of the 'researcher'. But then it is likely that this sort of researcher will stop getting funding and will disappear because nothing useful is produced by their labor.

As for pragmatics, there are of course numerous similarities between us and other primates, for example, regarding turn taking and communication.

If the pragmatics are similar, then the semantics could be to- if we could be bothered to make such an imputation.

Dog owners are quite familiar with their pet’s ability to attract their attention by some repetitive behavior; one does not have to turn to recent research for such examples. These examples have no bearing on the crucial distinguishing properties of human language.

In that case, nothing observable could have a bearing on 'the crucial distinguishing properties of human language'. Indeed, it is likely that the very phrase will drop out of human language because it is a meaningless as 'the crucial distinguishing properties of true devotees of the Great God Marduk'.

One more word before we go. The basic computational operation of Merge, Boeckx argues, “is more complex than it sounds,” because it can be analyzed into as-yet-unknown building blocks—cellular structures of some kind, for example.⁵⁰ 

Merge operations have high computational complexity. Sytactic Merge may do so, but a better path is to regard it as nonsense and move on to doing something that might prove useful.

He does not spell out what these more primitive elements might be or why they are of evolutionary importance. Evolution itself fares no better. “[Charles] Darwin’s explanatory logic,” Boeckx asserts, “conflicts with assertions that some species are unique.”⁵¹ 

Species are unique in the same sense that individuals are. But it isn't a useful sense so sensible people stop talking about it. Chomsky wasted his life and so keeps banging on about how he didn't at all. Everything that has subsequently been proven does not refute his stupidity because he can twist words to show he meant something different from what he said and anyway, everybody else is stupid and doesn't get how truly wonderful he is.

It does nothing of the sort. The thesis that the BP is unique to humans, along with other core properties of language, is entirely consistent with Darwin’s theory of evolution, just as the waggle dance is unique to the genus of Apis (honeybees) and not to other insects.

The waggle dance is something human beings impute to a particular species at this moment. It is perfectly possible that it may come to be used to describe the behavior of some other insect.

There may be life on other planets. It is not at all consistent with Darwin's theory- though it is consistent with the Bible- that a Basic Property of Language will not be found somewhere else in the Galaxy.

The conventional definition of animal species since Theodosius Dobzhansky and Hermann Muller requires the uniqueness of species-differential traits that work to ensure reproductive isolation.⁵²

No it does not. Only reproductive processes need to be co-evolved. It is sufficient to hack the relevant genes to produce hybrids and thus end reproductive isolation.

 Boeckx has succumbed to the view that evolutionary change must necessarily be gradual: this is the infinitesimal continuity hypothesis favored by Darwin and Sir Ronald Fisher.

These guys have succumbed to the view that they haven't been talking stupid nonsense all these years. They get very worked up coz they think some other guy has succumbed to thinking that two genuinely smart people were smart.

For Fisher, this led to a micromutational view. But this is only an empirical hypothesis.⁵³ There is no necessary condition that evolutionary change be continuous and infinitesimal, except in the sense that viability is preserved at each step. Evolution need not always proceed at a snail’s pace.

Its pace depends on the fitness landscape. What can't happen is that a mutation spreads more rapidly than the species itself. But this is the silly view Chomsky had earlier taken.

Allen Orr and other evolutionary biologists have shown that the first step in the adaptive walk of a single gene changing over time might actually have the largest phenotypic effect of all.⁵⁴

Or it might have no phenotypic effect. Only the landscape matters.

 Jordi Bascompte’s review of Thompson’s Relentless Evolution, which we did not quote, bears quoting now.

Why does it bear quoting now? The answer is that Chomsky thinks it justifies his stupidity. But nothing can do that. He was wrong then and is wrong now precisely because he can never admit he is wrong.

Bascompte opens by noting,

 The book’s contents will strike many readers as novel. That is because in the past few years we have largely changed our views about the tempo and nature of adaptive evolution. For example, whereas a couple of decades ago almost everyone would claim that ecological and evolutionary timescales were uncoupled, we now know that evolution can proceed very rapidly.⁵

 The rest of humanity has no problem changing its views even though doing so shows it was wrong in the past and is probably wrong at the moment. Evolution can proceed rapidly- but not magically in a manner which saves the face of a senile pedant.

Why only us? Why only us? Why only us? One question has three parts.

But all three parts are silly. We should only answer a 'why' question if we get to a Structural Causal Model which enables us to change the thing about which the question is asked. Genetics can do that. But they aren't asking 'why only us?' because to do so would be to blinker themselves. Instead they ask 'why us and such and species'. That's useful. They can then identify a particular gene and think about ways of changing it so as cure medical problems affecting certain lineages.

There is no 'Only' in Science. Philosophy may have its haecceity which only a particular individual instantiates, but philosophy is a waste of time.

'Us' is a dangerous word. It leads an in-group to conclude that its own particular shibboleths are universal features of all existence. Chomsky & Berwick represent failed research programs. They speak of 'Us' as if they are part of successful, or not yet failed, programs. This is delusional simply.

They are precisely the appropriate ones to ask regarding the evolutionary origin of language.

Nonsense. If language evolved, then it must be the case that it evolved on all planets similar to ours. The correct question to ask is 'why on planets with the following characteristics does language evolve?'

We were not, of course, the first to ask them. We echo in modern terms the Cartesian philosophers Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, seventeenth-century authors of the Port-Royal Grammar, for whom language with its infinite combinatorial capacity wrought from a finite inventory of sounds was uniquely human and the very foundation of thought.

These guys were Christians. Christianity believes that Adam gave names to things and then ate an apple and then was chucked out of Heaven and had to get a job and then some of his descendants decided to build a big tower to get to Heaven and then God smote them and confused their tongues.

Combinatorics was well advanced in ancient India as was linguistics. As an empirical matter, Indians saw that one could translate Religious texts into any language. The Christian West made a like discovery when it sent out missionaries to diverse lands.

However, it is not true that combining phonemes can allow us 'to express all that we can conceive' which is why we need maths and music and Art and making rude gestures.

It is subtle enough to express all that we can conceive, down to the innermost and “diverse movements of our souls.”

No it isn't.  In the same issue of the Inference Review, the mathematician, David Michael Roberts, writes of the difficulties faced by those of his peers who are trying to verify Mochizuki's proof of the abc theorem. His conclusion is that the language of maths co-evolves with its subject matter. Mochizuki may be wrong or, like, Kurt Heegner, it may be that he is right but that the language of contemporarty maths constrains us from seeing why. More generally, understanding is not conveyed at the same time as an alethic expression. Thus, the 'diverse movements of our souls' are seldom things we can adequately communicate.