Chomsky's computational approach to LA (and thus, to HN) debunked?

[ish mailian]

As Chomsky was developing his computational theories, he was
simultaneously proposing that they were rooted in human biology. In
the second half of the 20th century, it was becoming ever clearer that
our unique evolutionary history was responsible for many aspects of
our unique human psychology, and so the theory resonated on that level
as well. His universal grammar was put forward as an innate component
of the human mind—and it promised to reveal the deep biological
underpinnings of the world’s 6,000-plus human languages. The most
powerful, not to mention the most beautiful, theories in science
reveal hidden unity underneath surface diversity, and so this theory
held immediate appeal.

But evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching
toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as
physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the
old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”


http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-learning/
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l