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<p>Chomsky raised creationist arguments:</p>
<p>-Personal incredulity (the eye / grammar is just too complex),
-Misunderstanding of basic math (randomness doesn’t mean uniformity, and can generate novel complex structures)
-An overestimate of the power of introspection and philosophical thought-experiments to elucidate brain function
-An overestimate of the usefulness of syntactic intuitions as an organizing principle for the combinatorics of language
-A belief, now falsified, that the combinatorics of (a few) human languages would correlate with brain structure
-A belief, now falsified, that the combinatorics of language would correlate (in a universal way) with child language learning stages </p>
<p>It is completely possible that Chomsky’s program would have been vindicated had they studied many more languages and developed a fundamentally finer-grained understanding of syntax. As it turned out, Chomsky and his intellectual descendants were too conservative; they assumed that an extension of the centuries-old approach to the grammar of a few well-studied languages would disclose the important concepts. This discouraged the study and preservation of the full range of human languages, in favor of empty buzz about “deep structure”, “principles and parameters”, and “cognitive science”. The destruction of scarce resources here has been pretty incredible.</p>