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"This is the only explanation that he can think of? Genetics?"

It sounds like he may be (unknowingly) espousing the views of Jerry Fodor, who argued in the 70s and 80s that the brain has native modules for things like language, music, math, etc. It was an extension of Noam Chomsky's similar views on language learning in the 60s. Both views have been pretty much shown to be wrong.

Jesse Prinz Is the mind really modular? http://subcortex.com/PrinzModularity.pdf

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson Philosophy in the Flesh http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/lakoff-philosophy.html

George Lakoff & Rafael Nunez Where Mathematics Comes From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From

Anthony Chemero Radical Embodied Cognitive Science starts so: "Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher. I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything." http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue15_BookReview_ZipoliCaian...

The Chomsky view in linguistics hasn't been shown as wrong - see for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12963265 where they talk about a specific grammatical construct which they claim (backed by some data) that can't have been learnt by babies using statistical inference due to them not having enough data.

Personally, I would prefer the statistical, generic computation viewpoint to be correct but it's unclear whether the data supports that viewpoint.

The problem with the Chomsky nonsense about how the syntax of a language can't be learned from input (so much, so fast, with such bad data!), so it must be innate, is that they are not proving that the input is insufficient. They're just claiming it. They just say that they don't see how we could learn so much from so little, so it can't be done, so it isn't learned, it's inborn.

That's just the creationist argument: I can't see any way that something as complex as a human could emerge randomly, so it must have been assembled deliberately by a super-human creator. There's no other way.

Well, no. The thing you're missing here is that there might be algorithms that can do more than you realize.

If the Chomskians proved that the information to be learned simply didn't exist in the input--not that they didn't see it, but using information theoretic methods proved that it could not be there, then the learning algorithm wouldn't matter. It would not be possible for any algorithm.

But unless linguists prove the needed info isn't there (which is probably not possible using our limited knowledge of information theory), the ockham's razor hypothesis for how kids end up speaking the exact dialect they're surrounded with is that they possess algorithms capable of extracting the information from their surroundings.

Declaring such learning impossible because it doesn't look possible is like declaring human evolution impossible for the same reason. We're just beginning to discover that there are spectacularly powerful algorithms capable of doing things we never imagined.

Look, what you say is roughly my point of view, and I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but you didn't actually respond to the article, but rather to some straw-man representation of "the Chomsky nonsense", to use your words. I'll try to elaborate the claims in the article a bit (and I'm probably overly simplifying it):

when you have a sentence like "I’ll play with this red ball and you can play with that one", one can ask whether "one" refers to "ball" or "red ball". The sentence doesn't give you information as to which option is true. But, say there are two kids, Chris, playing with a red ball and Max, playing with a blue ball, and someone says "Chris has a red ball but Max doesn’t have one." In that case, they can learn that 'one' refers to 'red ball' and not 'ball'. Their argument is that for a language learner (read: baby) to learn correct grammar, he has to encounter such situations, and yet, such situations are rarer than the rate of grammatical errors in similar uses of the word 'one' is higher than the rate of occurrence of scenarios where you could learn the distinction (this is not an assertion, it's backed by analysis of corpora of parents talking to their babies). And yet, their experiments show in a somewhat roundabout manner that the babies treat 'one' as referring the 'red ball' and not 'ball'. Their conclusion is that this means that out of the space of possible grammars, babies didn't consider the ones where 'one' refers to 'ball' and not 'red ball' - there's an innate preference towards those.

While I can poke some holes in the argument (mostly because of the implied assumption that the mental representation of grammar is in a generative grammar), your response read too much like http://xkcd.com/793/

http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

Well, that was an hour spent. Thanks!

Or it could be that babies learn to chunk noun phrases as units from hearing other types of speech. The corpora you mention only disprove one mechanism of acquiring antecedent skills, not prove that it is innate. Conflating the two is, in fact, typical Chomsky nonsense.

That piano player in the video is hardly what I'd call a savant, more like he hit his head and woke up as a douchebag but music is one of those things that gets stored way back in your brain somewhere, I think. I have songs stuck in my head all the time and I'll sleep for 12 hours and the damn thing will still be there. Maybe after a head injury some people can recall tunes they've heard throughout their lives more clearly which would make them easier to play.

Ummm.... I can 'recall' music in incredible detail - piano, guitar, horns, the works, and I've been playing a variety of instruments for 30 years. 'recall' doesn't make the stuff any easier to play at all. To go from no musical ability to what that guy was able to do in a day, assuming it's true, is pretty amazing.

You can 'recall' tunes hours after sleeping - does that make it easier to play them fluently on instruments you'd never had training on?

As a once-professional musician who later learned a different instrument from the one I grew up learning, I can say that his learning to play the piano, with all it's fine motor control, is nothing short of miraculous.

Yeah, my first thought was that since the "rules" of art are merely the discovery of what we as humans find pleasing, and since mathematics is the discovery of fundamental logical conclusions, there's no reason to assume it has anything to do with genetics (well, aside from the fact that we must somehow be 'genetically' predisposed to liking golden ratios, etc).

> the fact that we must somehow be 'genetically' predisposed to liking golden ratios, etc

This is not a fact. There is absolutely no research evidence that people tend to prefer the golden ratio of 1.618.. over other ratios. Especially it's very doubtful people would have a preference compared to the nearby simple ratios of small numbers 1.5 and 1.666.

Fibonacci-like sequences pop up in a few specific growth models in nature, which often converge to the golden ratio (if the growth is perfect and unhampered by external factors). Mostly in plants. Particularly not in nautilus shell spirals (that's a legend, based on cherry-picking and sloppy measurements) and also not in spiral galaxies, or fiddlehead ferns.

It's still fascinating stuff, but it's even more fascinating if you ask to see proof of all these outlandish claims, and learning about the underlying principles behind the actual phenomenon.