Tom writes,
“Chomsky Contra Darwin”
MIT emeritus professor Noam Chomsky made his name in the field of linguistics over 50 years ago. Some are put off by his left-wing politics, but he’s worth studying for other reasons. Less well known than his political views are his criticisms of Darwinism.
Daniel Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, in a section titled “Chomsky Contra Darwin,” wrote that there have long been “signs of Chomsky’s agnosticism — or even antagonism — towards Darwinism.” To some, Dennett said, Chomsky “even appeared to be a ‘crypto-creationist,’ but that didn’t seem very plausible especially since he had the endorsement of Stephen Jay Gould.”
Dennett added:
If Darwin dreaders want a champion who is himself deeply and influentially enmeshed within science, they could do no better than Chomsky.”
Dennett also saw that Chomsky has been “unwaveringly hostile to artificial intelligence.” For example, Chomsky has said of the chess playing “abilities” of computers:
What’s going on with the chess is about as interesting as the fact that a front end loader can lift more than an Olympic champion — weight lifter or something. You know, these are just not interesting questions.
Morton Hunt, in his admirable compendium The Story of Psychology, noted the irony that Chomsky is a leftist; for the central thesis of his theory, “advanced in Syntactic Structures, is that certain aspects of linguistic knowledge and ability are innate, not learned.” It’s a doctrine “that leftists, liberals and behaviorist-trained psychologists considered mentalistic and reactionary.”
B.F. Skinner had argued in Verbal Behavior (1957) that language evolved by a series of reinforced grunts. The child says “eek” and the parent “reinforce” this by saying “good,” thereby encouraging improved versions of such utterances. Behaviorism, which dominated the field of psychology in the mid decades of the 20th century, in effect expanded Darwinian ideas into psychology. Animals pressing levers in Skinner boxes showed how it could be studied. “Stimulus” and “response” roughly corresponded to the evolutionist’s “mutation” and “selection.”
To psychologists, the good news was that behaviorism sidestepped the mind, which could not be observed directly. But the relationship between the mind’s “inputs” — sense perceptions — and its “outputs” — behavior – gave scientists a way of studying the mind indirectly.
“Every native speaker of a natural language is capable of producing and understanding infinitely many sentences that he has never heard or spoken before.”
Chomsky’s best known response to Skinner’s book came in a 1959 review in the journal Language. Here is one paragraph:
It is simply not true that children can learn language only through “meticulous care” on the part of adults who shape their verbal repertoire through careful differential reinforcement, though it may be that such care is often the custom in academic families. It is a common observation that a young child of immigrant parents may learn a second language in the streets, from other children, with amazing rapidity, and that his speech may be completely fluent and correct to the last allophone, while the subtleties that become second nature to the child may elude his parents despite high motivation and continued practice.
David Berlinski described his encounters with Chomsky at Princeton in the 1960s. In Black Mischief, Berlinski records Chomsky as saying at one point:
“Every native speaker of a natural language is capable of producing and understanding infinitely many sentences that he has never heard or spoken before.”
The claim that there is nothing special about humans or the human mind has been one of the great dogmas of our time, and one that directly descends from Darwin: We are animals, and no more elevated than other animals, even if in our conceit we are disposed to think otherwise.
That dogma has been challenged by Chomsky, who has argued that language demonstrates a gulf between animals and humans that seems unbridgeable. Not for him the sentimental effusions of Jane Goodall raptly listening to chimps from her hideaway in the African bush.
The nothing-special-about-humans dogma has also been challenged, more recently and in a negative way, by environmentalists who insist that there is indeed a gulf between humans and the rest of nature. For we are the merciless wreckers of natural habitat. Nature, although red in tooth and claw, is innocent at heart. We, on the other hand, are guilty as sin. Therein lies a curious echo of the story of the Fall in Genesis, in which the majority of environmentalists surely do not believe.
A recent book, Chomsky Notebook [Columbia U Press, 2010], updates some of the linguist’s views on Darwin. He says, for example, that the claim that natural selection leads us “to the truth” about the world is “quite unconvincing.” Natural selection is unproblematic, he continues, but only as long as we recognize how little we are saying when we repeat the slogan:
“organisms could not survive long enough to reproduce if they were so poorly adapted to their environment that they could not survive long enough to reproduce. This is undoubtedly true but not very informative.” [p. 103]
To put it mildly. Chomsky here rephrases, in language that is if anything less polite than usual, the old accusation of tautology leveled against Darwin’s claim that natural selection means that “the fittest” survive; fitness being defined in terms of survival. Jean Bricmont, a professor in France, said to Chomsky in the same Notebook:
There is a new intellectual trend in the social sciences loosely called ‘Darwinism,’ whose supporters have been very disappointed by your attitude. On the one hand, they were grateful to you for having brought back the issue of human nature into the intellectual debate. They applauded your criticism of behaviorism, for example. But you seem to refuse to take the next step, which is to admit that human nature has been shaped by evolution and that the only known mechanism that drives evolution is natural selection.
Chomsky replied that he does not “admit” but insists that human nature has been shaped by evolution. “What alternative is there? That it is created by some divinity?” Chomsky won’t go that far. But he also won’t “’admit’ that ‘the only known mechanism that drives evolution is natural selection. . . . There is no point in worshipping at a shrine that every biologist knows to be that of a false god.”
Chomsky … assumes that all life must be interpreted within a naturalistic framework. But he also sees that the standard Darwinian account of how life developed within that framework looks inadequate.
Prof. Bricmont then inquired: “So why not use adaptive thinking in order to guess what elements human nature might contain?”
Here he was inviting Chomsky to propose some “just-so stories,” in which evolutionists are encouraged to invent plausible scenarios that seem to account for adaptation.
“How could anyone object?” Chomsky replied. “Those who find such thinking helpful for their guesses should by all means proceed that way. The task is both too easy and too hard. Too easy because there are innumerable guesses that quickly come to mind in any interesting case — say the evolution if human language. Too hard because we know much too little to be able to evaluate the guesses.”
Which is an excellent criticism of just-so stories. These, by the way were introduced into psychology in a big way by the more recent field called evolutionary psychology, in which, for example, either monogamy or rape can be said to be adaptive, depending on preference.
Summarizing, one can say that Chomsky, like almost everyone else in the secular academy, assumes that all life must be interpreted within a naturalistic framework. But he also sees that the standard Darwinian account of how life developed within that framework looks inadequate.
Others within the academy who must deal with Darwinism may find themselves in the same position but less willing to say so openly. No divinity permitted is the strict rule within the biology departments. Yet life in all its (irreducible) complexity is out there, and it got there somehow. At the same time the Darwinian cupboard seems bare. Life is adaptive when it adapts, and it’s extinct when it doesn’t adapt. (That’s pretty much it. Any further questions, class?)
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