Steven Pinker covers this topic well. I highly recommend How The Mind Works; The Blank Slate may be more relevant, but I haven’t read it yet.
Essentially, the human brain isn’t a general-purpose learner, but one with strong heuristics (like natural grammar and all kinds of particular visual pattern-seeking) that are meta enough to encompass a wide variety of human languages and visual surroundings. The development of the human brain responds to the environment not because it’s a ghost of perfect emptiness but because it has a very particular architecture already, which is adapted to the range of possible experience. The visual cortex has special structure before the eyes ever open.
Honestly, the guys who never wrote any vision algorithm should just go and stop trying to think about the subject too hard, they aren’t getting anywhere sane with the intuitions that are many orders of magnitude off. That goes for much of the cognition evolution out there. We know the evolution can produce ‘complex’ stuff, we got that hammer, we use it on every nail, even when the nail is in fact a giant screw which is way bigger than the hammer itself, which ain’t going to even move if hit with the hammer—firstly, it is big and secondly it needs entirely different motion—yet one who can’t see size of the screw can insist it would. Some adjustments for the near vs far connectivity, perhaps even somewhat specific layering, but that’s all the evolution is going to give you in the relevant timeframe for brains bigger than peanuts. That’s just the way things are, folks.
People with early brain damage have other parts of brain take over, and perform nearly as well, suggesting that the networks processing the visual input have only minor optimizations for visual task compared to the rest, i.e. precisely the near-vs-far connectivity tweaks, more/less neurons per cortical column, that kind of stuff which makes it somewhat more efficient at the task.
edit: here’s the taster: mammals never evolved extra pair of limbs, extra eyes, or anything of that sort. But in the world of the evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary ‘cognitive scientists’, mammals should evolve an extra eye or extra pair of limbs, along with much more complex multi-step adaptations, every couple millions years. This is outright ridiculous. Just look at your legs, look how much slower is the fastest human runner than any comparable animal. You’ll need to be running for another ten millions years before you are any good at running. And in that time, in which monkey’s body can barely adapt to locomotion on a flat surface again, monkey’s brain evolves some complex algorithms for grammar of the human languages? The hunter-gatherer specific functionality? You got to be kidding me.
All of that evolutionary explaining of complex phenomena via vague handwave and talk of how beneficial it would’ve been in ancestral environment, will be regarded as utter and complete pseudoscience within 20..50 years. It’s not enough to show that something was beneficial. The extra eye on the back, too, would have been beneficial for great many animals. They are given free pass to use evolution as magic because brains don’t fossilize. The things that fossilize, however, provide good sample of how many generations it takes for evolution to make something.
We’ve drifted way off topic. Brain plasticity is a good point, but it’s not the only piece of evidence available. I promise you that if you check out How the Mind Works, you’ll find unambiguous evidence that the human brain is not a general-purpose learner, but begins with plenty of structure.
If you doubt the existence of universal grammar, you should try The Language Instinct as well.
You can have the last word, but I’m tapping out on this particular topic.
If you doubt the existence of universal grammar, you should try The Language Instinct as well.
While some linguistic universals definitely exist, and a sufficiently weak version of the language acquisition device idea is pretty much obvious (‘the human brain has the ability to learn human language’), I think Chomsky’s ideas are way too strong. See e.g. Scholz, Barbara C. and Geoffrey K. Pullum (2006) Irrational nativist exuberance
re: structure, yes, it is made of cortical columns, and yes there’s some global wiring, nobody’s been doubting that.
I created a new topic for that . The issue with attributing brain functionality to evolution is the immense difficulty of coding any specific wiring in the DNA, especially in mammals. Insects can do it—going through several generations in a year, and having the genome that controls the brain down to individual neurons. Mammals aren’t structured like this, and live much too long.
Steven Pinker covers this topic well. I highly recommend How The Mind Works; The Blank Slate may be more relevant, but I haven’t read it yet.
Essentially, the human brain isn’t a general-purpose learner, but one with strong heuristics (like natural grammar and all kinds of particular visual pattern-seeking) that are meta enough to encompass a wide variety of human languages and visual surroundings. The development of the human brain responds to the environment not because it’s a ghost of perfect emptiness but because it has a very particular architecture already, which is adapted to the range of possible experience. The visual cortex has special structure before the eyes ever open.
Honestly, the guys who never wrote any vision algorithm should just go and stop trying to think about the subject too hard, they aren’t getting anywhere sane with the intuitions that are many orders of magnitude off. That goes for much of the cognition evolution out there. We know the evolution can produce ‘complex’ stuff, we got that hammer, we use it on every nail, even when the nail is in fact a giant screw which is way bigger than the hammer itself, which ain’t going to even move if hit with the hammer—firstly, it is big and secondly it needs entirely different motion—yet one who can’t see size of the screw can insist it would. Some adjustments for the near vs far connectivity, perhaps even somewhat specific layering, but that’s all the evolution is going to give you in the relevant timeframe for brains bigger than peanuts. That’s just the way things are, folks.
People with early brain damage have other parts of brain take over, and perform nearly as well, suggesting that the networks processing the visual input have only minor optimizations for visual task compared to the rest, i.e. precisely the near-vs-far connectivity tweaks, more/less neurons per cortical column, that kind of stuff which makes it somewhat more efficient at the task.
edit: here’s the taster: mammals never evolved extra pair of limbs, extra eyes, or anything of that sort. But in the world of the evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary ‘cognitive scientists’, mammals should evolve an extra eye or extra pair of limbs, along with much more complex multi-step adaptations, every couple millions years. This is outright ridiculous. Just look at your legs, look how much slower is the fastest human runner than any comparable animal. You’ll need to be running for another ten millions years before you are any good at running. And in that time, in which monkey’s body can barely adapt to locomotion on a flat surface again, monkey’s brain evolves some complex algorithms for grammar of the human languages? The hunter-gatherer specific functionality? You got to be kidding me.
All of that evolutionary explaining of complex phenomena via vague handwave and talk of how beneficial it would’ve been in ancestral environment, will be regarded as utter and complete pseudoscience within 20..50 years. It’s not enough to show that something was beneficial. The extra eye on the back, too, would have been beneficial for great many animals. They are given free pass to use evolution as magic because brains don’t fossilize. The things that fossilize, however, provide good sample of how many generations it takes for evolution to make something.
We’ve drifted way off topic. Brain plasticity is a good point, but it’s not the only piece of evidence available. I promise you that if you check out How the Mind Works, you’ll find unambiguous evidence that the human brain is not a general-purpose learner, but begins with plenty of structure.
If you doubt the existence of universal grammar, you should try The Language Instinct as well.
You can have the last word, but I’m tapping out on this particular topic.
While some linguistic universals definitely exist, and a sufficiently weak version of the language acquisition device idea is pretty much obvious (‘the human brain has the ability to learn human language’), I think Chomsky’s ideas are way too strong. See e.g. Scholz, Barbara C. and Geoffrey K. Pullum (2006) Irrational nativist exuberance
re: structure, yes, it is made of cortical columns, and yes there’s some global wiring, nobody’s been doubting that.
I created a new topic for that . The issue with attributing brain functionality to evolution is the immense difficulty of coding any specific wiring in the DNA, especially in mammals. Insects can do it—going through several generations in a year, and having the genome that controls the brain down to individual neurons. Mammals aren’t structured like this, and live much too long.