"Chomsky on Evolution", Stony Brook Interview #3 with Richard Larson

Chomsky's devastating attack on behaviorism launched the cognitive revolution. Chomsky expresses his skepticism about evolutionary "just so" stories about language and sets forth his own view that language did not evolve through natural selection for the purpose of communication but is instead a recursive linking of internal interfaces that evolved for the purposes of thought. Directed by Dini-Diskin Zimmerman, produced by Gary Mar, DVD design by Takafumi Ide.

[@johansjons3510]

This is gold. I think the short discussion he has with the biologist during Q&A is particularly illuminating.

[@joaosampaio4039]

Yeah I don't give a damn

[@SchutzBoysband]

When Chomsky just so quickly counters with "what if the person is dead" its really stunning. Dude's one of a handful of actual geniuses. I suppose you could counter by saying obsessing over the conversation is preparation for a similar conversation but good luck explaining how that is a survival advantage over not caring and just having a lot of sex.

[@distopiadnb]

@@SchutzBoysband it's actually the weakest line, I think. The idea that internal speak is training is surely not made less plausible by considering that people do internal speech involving or relating to dead people. Evidently, whether you are aware that your reflection has some fictitious elements or not, it might have still be adaptive training. Which is what you have in mind too I guess. Not caring and having a lot of sex might at some point have become something you need quite a bit of planning and manipulating to win. It surely is now with language. But sex apart, who care about language not being optimal for communication in some abstract mathematical sense, if it's better than its predecessor?

[@williamanakin1461]

i know Im randomly asking but does anyone know a way to get back into an Instagram account..? I stupidly forgot the password. I appreciate any assistance you can offer me.

[@sterlingkevin7446]

@William Anakin Instablaster =)

[@jerrymiller2346]

Chomsky, "well ... everything is arguable" I love that! That IS what the Biologist is struggling with, he wants EXACT definitions.

[@multinodser]

Holy shit this is fire. Many thanks to the person who uploaded this.

[@tarnopol]

Isn't it? This is very deep shit--in a world that claims depth for all kinds of mica-thin garbage. :)

[@michaeldebellis4202]

Just when I think I can't learn more about Chomsky's ideas I find another video like this. Thanks for posting, I've seen other Stonybrook lectures but this is the first time I've seen this one and he says some really interesting things about evolution and language that I haven't heard him say before. I also liked the interviewer, he really seemed to understand Chomsky's ideas unlike some other Stonybrook interviewers (i.e., Ludlam).

[@georgepetrou7206]

Every time I listen to Chomsky speaking, I feel as though I get a little more intelligent or a little less stupid!😂🙌🏾These discussions are fantastic!🙏🏾

[@JoePalau]

The Quality of Chomsky’s mind gives me pause and comfort that being is human it’s not as bad as one might think. There is even promise

[@accs4]

I think the last questioner is actually the biologist who came back wearing a disguise

[@LOLERXP]

That biologist really wanted his own podium debate with Chomsky

[@tarnopol]

All these years, I thought there were only the three that have been up for ages on KZbin. Thanks for these! This one is particularly relevant to my interests. You rock!

[@brandgardner211]

the purpose of language is learning -- along certain lines [not communication, but also not exactly "thought", but learning

[@haveaseatplease]

Could you elaborate or refer to a public accessible book or study / paper.

[@andrewash9318]

The perfect interviewer.

[@haveaseatplease]

In what year have these interviews taken place? Dated 2003 at the end of the video.

[@jayxavier6930]

The co-authored Science article came out in 2002 -- so 2003 or so feels about right.

[@diegooland1261]

wow, 6.28 language as a interface. that F*&% mind blowing.

[@philnewton4844]

The Mendelssohn chamber intro string music ; He and Sibelius are reputed to have said that music takes over meaning when words fail.

[@HeavyProfessor]

The ultimate genius

[@nyworker]

Note two things during the discussion: 1) Reference to sensorimotor system. 2) Noam constantly moves his hands. The human language is an emergent process of the freeing of the front limbs in the sensorimotor cortices. Human language also leads to symbols and writing.

[@daveguy11]

Prof. Chomsky's constant hand movement while talking is more a result of cultural factors than of linguistic/sensorimotor.

[@imquantum8009]

You both sound like you're missing the point. The conditions in which a function is defined are too varied and complex to pin down any single factor. This entire lecture is to explain how we DONT understand those factors so we CAN'T make concrete statements like the two of you, but he does present some ideas to cross reference in the future, such as the relationship between the sensorimotor system and communication. He is NOT saying that linguistic function is definitively this relationship.

[@skronked]

William Buckley couldn't hold a candle to this guy!!

[@joeknockane8831]

It always amazes me that Noam can comprehend what even verbose, half-assed questioners are actually trying to say when nobody else can!

[@dramatispersonae1315]

Why do we have to use a commonly understood language in our thought if the primary purpose of language is to think? Most multi-lingual people think in their primary language and translate those words into a secondary one. Why doesn't everyone create an internal language of their own and just translate this into common language while speaking?

[@cuantrail]

Maybe for the same reason we dress the same or eat the same foods as the people around us? Even though the purpose of clothing is to protect us.

[@skronked]

These dudes are high!

[@nblumer]

The biologists who challenged him came from a time when it was almost sacrosanct to challenge the idea that language developed as a natural selection process to optimize communication. They took it as axiomatic and while the first biologist really questioned for clarification the second one decided to take a swipe by implying that Chomsky s view, namely that language was not developed for communication optimization, was somehow hostile (he amended that quickly to state 'indifferent') to what he assumed language was 'for'. There are 3 rebuttals effectively made by Chomsky. 1) Just because other systems found in nature likely developed by natural selective optimal response to the environment doesn't mean they're recursive. There are other mechanisms we can explore that still adhere to an evolutionary viiew 2) Just because human communication is sophisticated doesn't mean that this is its function. A better argument can be made is that it seems more facilitated for introspective thought. This can be demonstrated by internal observation. 3) The mechanics of langauge show that it's optimized for computational efficiency rather than communication efficiency. Syntactic relationships at a distance via movement (eg WH movement ) demonstrate this. These syntactic structures are optimized for computation not communication. His comments about how a perception system somehow connected to already linking interfaces was meant to be speculative. Other primates have sophisticated communication systems but they are not recursive so always based on sounds. This is why you can't teach chimp even simple grammar but you can teach it words.

[@nblumer]

Sorry I meant sacrilegous not sacrosanct

[@johansjons3510]

On conceptual grounds, it has hard to see how his one-mutation hypothesis could be wrong. Here's the argument: P1: Somewhere in the human mind there's a mechanism that can generate an infinite number of expressions. P2: One cannot go from the finite to the infinite in more than one step. C: This particular mechanism of human minds cannot have evolved in more than one step. One common objection here is language is in fact not infinite, but just very large. This, to me, is like saying the natural numbers do not go on forever. Also, even if true, we would have to explain why we live in the illusion of having infinity in language.

[@RWHsuzuki44]

Has Chomsky ever given a judgement on whether he agrees with Richard Larson's conception of the two argument conception and the vP shell? Would be interesting to know if he has incorporated it formally into Minimalist Program.

[@michaeldebellis4202]

Interesting question. I'm not familiar with Larson but I looked him up and I see that his work on this was inspired by some of Chomsky's work. At the same time I know Chomsky has radically changed some of his core ideas on Linguistics so not sure if he still would agree with the starting point that Larson used.

[@hirotakakawano7212]

Language, of course, has not only communication and expression of ideas, but a creative function such as「 דבר 」 which is called in Hebrew .

[@michaeldebellis4202]

I disagree with Chomsky at around minute 23 when he's talking about optimum systems in organisms other than language. I don't know about the circulatory system but I do know about things like foraging strategies and the hypothesis by the vast majority of biologists is not that these just became optimal due to some laws of nature but rather that they became optimal after billions of years of evolution and small adaptations, i.e., the standard model of adaptations, which were constrained by physical laws. Also, the same for the evo-devo work that he alludes to when he talks about Turing and D'arcy Thompson. Yes, there are physical constraints that are essential to understand for why certain patterns are found in nature but those always go hand in hand with adaptations that occur to optimize reproductive success. Essentially, the physical (evo-devo) constraints serve to limit the possible space of adaptations. So that's why we don't find animals with eyes in the back of their heads. Even though such an adaptation would have been beneficial it was too much of a leap from the vertebrae design to ever happen but the thing that determines which adaptations persist and which don't is still ultimately maximization of inclusive fitness. This is one of the few areas where I disagree with Chomsky, he thinks it's not likely that language was an adaptation I agree with Pinker and others that it almost had to be because that's really the only way nature creates complex structures and behaviors.

[@huntsman8787]

Hold up, I thought he was arguing that language was not adapted for communication. It may very well be adapted to thought and thus persisted till now. Chomsky says something of the sort here kzbin.info/www/bejne/fX7NfYiAZ7Ble6c

[@dujondunn2306]

Natural selection optimizes at the level of a population. It maximizes the expression of a certain trait in the population. So overtime that trait will be more expressed on average. However, the trait had to exist in the first place. What Chomsky is talking about is how the trait arises in the organism to begin with. Why are sentences articulated the way they are? Natural selection may be able to explain why a population can do one thing and not another, but it does not explain the mechanics of how that thing works. What Chomsky is arguing here is that articulation of language is the way it is because of physical laws that may be at play at the interface between linguistic and articulatory systems. Nobody invokes natural selection to explain circulation.

[@j.mamana9877]

@@dujondunn2306 natural selection doesn't "do" anything. it is at the level of individual organisms that traits arise and persist. natural selection is a way of describing that peculiar process by which certain traits appear and others disappear over time in the population. but there is no such "thing" as natural selection that "optimizes" anything except insofar as that happens by chance.

[@dujondunn2306]

@@j.mamana9877 You seem a bit confused. Every concept you read in science book is a device to describe some physical process in nature. Absolutely nobody (I don't literally mean nobody less you parse that too) assumes natural selection is some 'thing' in the sky pulling strings. Nobody really thinks the concept is the real thing. However, the concept natural selection can be described as an optimization procedure. This is very elementary stuff.

[@HeavyProfessor]

Chomsky just completely destroys what most biologists accept blindly as the function of human language. And he commented on the major problem with modern scientists in another Stony Brook interview--that even if they are presented with rational arguments for why what they are studying is "folly," they simply ignore it. Modern scientists have lost philosophical thinking.

[@mathias4851]

Haha Chomsky power got damn that mind

[@basildwight1447]

Why don't I see a like button (for the video)?

[@dtaylor091489]

the point about signing children behaving counter-iconically around 11:05 should not be surprising. the child is merely mimicking adult behavior. if the adult points away from themselves, I as a child will also point away from myself.

[@notanemoprog]

At 33:13 a Biologist attempts to POUNCE!

[@michaeldebellis4202]

Also, I would make the same argument when he talks about how the eye evolved at minute 27. He emphasizes that there had to be a random (stochastic) mutation that allowed cells to respond to the strength of light and that this mutation in itself was random and driven by physical constraints. All true, but the reason that this mutation stuck around and evolved into not just cells that could respond to light intensity but into an eye that could focus, recognize colors, and integrate with a visual system that recognizes shapes, etc. All that was driven by adaptations. Each stochastic event remained in the vertebrae genome because it increased reproductive success and if it hadn't then it wouldn't have persisted. Actually, there is a good example of this in animals like blind mole rats and fish that live at great depths. Their ancestors had functioning eyes but over time they lost that phenotype because in their niche environment it wasn't worth the energy cost to maintain it.

[@j.mamana9877]

i'm worried that your answer makes it seem like the biological system is "deciding" whether to maintain some adaptation and mutations stick around and develop "because" fitness is increased. but of course this is wrong. the only reason adaptation corresponds to fitness is that organisms with some mutations survive and others don't. that has nothing to do with whether anything is "worth" maintaining, unless you're willing to argue that deep-sea creatures that do not have eyes have their fitness DECREASED by vision, which, who knows. i'm just dubious about this particular presentation of evolution and i think that it confuses laypeople.

[@michaeldebellis4202]

A valid point. I agree evolution is not some conscious entity that has end goals or anything like that. It is a process that creates the APPEARANCE of design via natural selection of mutations that increase reproductive success over time and I apologize that my previous comment implied otherwise. But regarding whether a phenotype is "worth" having: that is a very relevant question. Things like brains and eyes are complicated organs and they take a lot of energy to grow and maintain. So for a creature that lives in an environment where there is virtually no light then over time the organisms that don't bother expending energy growing and maintaining a useless organ (and can use that energy to grow other organs and capabilities such as smell, touch, sonar, etc.) will have higher reproductive success than those that still expend energy on useless eyes and the eyeless creatures will eventually replace those with eyes. That is the evolutionary explanation for creatures like Blind Mole rats whose ancestors had functioning eyes. Blind mole rats are interesting for other reasons as well (they also look creepy AF). They have the kind of highly altruistic eusociality that are typically found only in hive insects like termites. The reason is that they are highly inbred so a colony is all very closely related and Hamilton's model for kin selection explains why they are so altruistic. Another interesting point is that one of the biggest negative effects of in breeding is that it reduces resistance to diseases and parasites and the blind mole rats have evolved unique immune systems that enable them to not be adversely effected by in breeding the way most mammals would.

[@j.mamana9877]

@@michaeldebellis4202 thanks for the thoughtful reply!

[@michaeldebellis4202]

I know I'm beating this to death but I think it's a really interesting question (and I seldom disagree with Chomsky). So the first audience question at 32 essentially asks about the issue that I've been discussing. And again, I disagree with Chomsky's response. When he talks about something as basic as protein folding: yes, the way proteins fold (this is a fundamental step in the transformation from DNA into amino acids and then proteins and differentiated structures like livers, brains, etc.) is dictated by chemistry not natural selection. But the reason that protein folding persisted is because it allowed for the development of multi-cellular Eukaryotic organisms which could feed on the more primitive Prokaryotes (and then later on each other). I.e., it led to increasingly complex organisms that had better reproductive success, aka natural selection.

[@misterdemocracy3335]

Michael DeBellis Are you basically saying that protein folding, which is determined by physical laws, conferered adaptive advantages that paved the way for multicellular organisms and higher forms of biology, is analogous to language, however this phenomenon in humans precipitated, in that it provides an adaptive edge not present in prelinguistic primates? I don’t necessarily think Chomsky is saying language didn’t provide a certain adaptive edge, just that its manifestation was not prompted by environmental pressures and that language is instead possibly a phenomenon determined by laws of nature, like is the case with proteins and the way they fold into distinct structures just as a matter of physics. It’s possible I’m misunderstanding you.

[@michaeldebellis4202]

@@misterdemocracy3335 I think you understood what I was trying to say at the time. Let me try and rephrase it. When I wrote that comment, I got the feeling that Chomsky was trying to contrast physical constraints (evo-devo issues) with adaptations. Saying that you could explain any phenotype as a result of physical constraints OR because it led to increased Reproductive Success. I'm saying that biologists don't look at it that way. It's not that those two forces compete but rather they compliment each other. Physical laws provide the constraints over what kind of adaptations are even possible. Natural selection determines whether an adaptation will persist in the genome or not. So protein folding occurred because it was one of the few (or possibly only) ways to create complex organisms from simple ones. It persisted because complex organisms had good reproductive success. In hindsight, I'm sure Chomsky understands this. If you look at one of his most recent papers called The Faculty of Language: Who has it and what is it good for? with Hauser and one other person there are some excellent pseudo 3d graphs where they show that any specific adaptation can lie somewhere in a space where the cause can be viewed as physical constraints AND advantages to reproductive success. I think in this case (this happens frequently with him IMO) he was pushing so hard to make what he meant clear he ended up making it sound more extreme than what he really believes. I have a bit more to say but I think I'll create a second reply.

[@michaeldebellis4202]

@@misterdemocracy3335 This is my second reply. You said: " I don’t necessarily think Chomsky is saying language didn’t provide a certain adaptive edge, just that its manifestation was not prompted by environmental pressures and that language is instead possibly a phenomenon determined by laws of nature" First, I would quibble just a bit with your phrasing (perhaps I'm being too literal) when you say that language (or let's just say any phenotype) was or was not "prompted by environmental pressure". Biologists talk this way of course but it's really just teleological short hand. In reality no change in the genome results because of environmental pressure. They RESULT due to random errors in DNA copying. They PERSIST due to environmental pressure. E.g., it's not as if a new ice age caused grizzly bears to evolve lighter fur. But rather the new ice age meant that the random changes where some bears had lighter fur persisted and built up to the point where their fur went from brown to white. Where I still think Chomsky and I do have serious disagreement (it's one of the very few) is that I think for language to have persisted it had to have some benefit to reproductive success. I actually agree with him that communication probably wasn't the primary driver for language (or at least not for what he calls LFN, the ability for language to represent discrete infinity). However, what I think (and it surprises me how seldom I see others hypothesize this) is that LFN enabled more complex THOUGHT. I'm actually reading the Hauser book that Chomsky references in this talk (it's amazing btw, highly recommend it) and it's clear that while other animals can construct very primitive plans such as To do A fist do C which leads to B which leads to A. Humans can construct arbitrarily deep plans (e.g., look at the graph for the project plan of a software development project or a project to construct a bridge or the decision tree for a game of chess). I think it was this capacity for complex, arbitrarily nested, thought that gave us an incredible advantage and led (for better and worse) to us dominating the planet. There is an excellent (and unfortunately virtually forgotten) book by George Miller who worked very closely with Chomsky in the 50's and 60's called Plans and the Structure of Behavior that goes into this hypothesis and references Chomsky often. BTW, I mentioned this hypothesis to Chomsky once. He didn't jump up and down and invite me to write a paper with him about it (damn!) but he did at least think it had merit.

[@misterdemocracy3335]

@@michaeldebellis4202 I wish I could read that paper but it's behind a paywall. Maybe I can find it shared somewhere else. I agree with everything you're saying.

[@michaeldebellis4202]

@@misterdemocracy3335 Thanks. I'm pretty sure there is a version out there not behind a paywall. If not then I'll put it on my Google drive and leave a URL to it. Happy Thanksgiving btw. I'll try and post something soon with a URL you can get to

[@khuzaimakhan1894]

The biologist was rather narrow-minded like most students of biology are

[@lostsoul2184]

Jesus

[@mrooz7096]

"evolutionary fairytale" haha

[@TokyoShemp]

A boring narcissist ruined the atmosphere around the thirty five minute mark.

[@Dasein2005]

33:15 - Great discussion with goofy "biologist" teacher with major ego.

[@noamtrotsky9601]

Michael Simpson Incredibly pretentious beyond belief. I found him insufferable.

[@nyworker]

Actually it's an awesome interchange. Amazing how Chomsky can change gears and leave this guy in the dust.

[@jaazielegarciahernandez2035]

Noam is a genius. .. imo, Terence McKenna brings forward a legit hypothesis.. psychedelic mushrooms seem to have played a key role in the evolution of our early ancestors

[@jazzyj2899]

Noam himself doesn't see the feasibility of McKenna's hypothesis.

[@joeknockane8831]

Psychedelic mushrooms probably played a key role in the formulation of his hypothesis.