Chatting with Noam Chomsky

Publisher Summary Several experts share their views on the evolution of modern human cognition. One of the experts—Ian Tattersall—mention that if there is an in-built language acquisition capacity in human infants, in what precise evolutionary context it was acquired. Another expert, Noam Chomsky, mentions that there are certain minimal conditions that faculty of language (FL) must satisfy to be usable at all. Noam believes that modularity surely doesn't require compartmentalization. The immune system and the circulatory system are components of the organism but are not compartmentalized. Even a particular gene can provide instructions for different proteins, depending on timing and circumstances of expression. Noam always assumes that poverty of the stimulus” (POS) is a universal property of growth and development.