nwr writes:
I'm not claiming to be able to prove a negative. At present, I don't see that a hypothesized grammar organ explains anything, and I can find no evidence that there is such.
I guess most researchers take the ease with which young kidds learn a language as evidence for it.
Not really. Some do, and some don't.
I also remember seeing many other lines of evidence in Steven Pinker's book "The Language Instinct" which were quite convincing.
Whereas I tend to think of Pinker's book as an evo-psych fairy tale.
Pinker gets mixed reviews in the literature. There is a deep split here. It is, in part, a split between rationalist philosophy and empiricist philosophy. Pinker and other Chomskyans are on the rationalist side, and consider much of knowledge to be innate. Those on the empiricist side consider knowledge to mostly be acquired by experience. I'm on the empiricist side, except that I think traditional empiricist philosophy is a bit wacky.
One that springs back to my mind is the fact that some people are born with specific languages impairment which does not prevent them from performing in any other areas in an observable way.
Nobody denies that there are physiological changes that evolved that are important to language. What is argued is the nature of those changes.
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