Comment by ForHackernews
8 years ago
Just because we have evolved the neurological substrates that can be applied to those behaviours doesn't mean those behaviours themselves are instinctive. If navigating reciprocal relationships and acquiring mates are instinctive behaviours, why are so many humans so terrible at those things?
In contrast, something like breastfeeding really is an instinctive behaviour that infants can do automatically without being taught.
Rather than engage on the behaviors that require more writing, I'll just go for the easy kill:
Are you really arguing that we don't have an instinct for acquiring language?
That's a matter of much scientific debate, in fact: https://www.grsampson.net/BLID.html
> My book assesses the many arguments used to justify the language-instinct claim, and it shows that every one of those arguments is wrong. Either the logic is fallacious, or the factual data are incorrect (or, sometimes, both). The evidence points the other way. Children are good at learning languages, because people are good at learning _anything_ that life throws at us — not because we have fixed structures of knowledge built-in.
> A new chapter in this edition analyses a database of English as actually used by a cross-section of the population in everyday conversation. The patterns of real-life usage contradict the claims made by believers in a “language instinct”.
> The new edition includes many further changes and additions, responding to critics and taking account of recent research. It has a preface by Paul M. Postal of New York University.
> The ‘Language Instinct’ Debate ends by posing the question “How could such poor arguments have passed muster for so long?”
So the difference between humans and parrots (who can make all of the same sounds as humans) is that parrots simply have different life experiences?
And how do you explain the fact that humans can only gain native fluency if they learn a language before a certain age? Or the fact that zero instruction is required for children to learn to speak a language fluently? Or that children of immigrants will always prefer to speak in the language of their peers (rather than their parents)? Or that children of two separate groups of immigrants, when mixed socially, will spontaneously create a creole language?
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