Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
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From: daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough)
Subject: Re: What's innate?
Message-ID: <1995Jan30.161337.18181@oracorp.com>
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Inc.
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 16:13:37 GMT
Lines: 41

rickert@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

>markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

>>>But the poverty of stimulus argument can be turned upside down.  If
>>>the child, with a process of trial and error testing, cannot find the
>>>grammar, then evolution, also using trial and error testing, cannot
>>>find it either.  Given the slowness of evolution, and the relatively
>>>short time in which homo sapiens evolved from other apes, the number
>>>of trial-and-error tests that could have been performed by evolution
>>>is smaller than the number of trial-and-error tests that a child can
>>>perform during the period of language acquisition.
>
>>The tasks are not comparable.  Consider the class of grammars as powerful
>>as that of a natural language.  To oversimplify drastically, the child 
>>has to determine which of these possible grammars is actually in use;
>>evolution need only pick one randomly.
>
>Ah, yes.  The "... and then a miracle happened" argument.  This seems
>to be consistent my earlier rhetoric about creationism.

Geez, Neil,

There is an annoying tendency in this newsgroup to abandon reasoned
arguments and resort to tarring by (dubious) association. Mark's
comment was perfectly valid, and it showed that you were just plain
wrong. Mark wasn't claiming that any miracle happened. He was just
pointing out that your "turning the poverty of stimulus argument
upside down" doesn't make any sense---there was no pre-existing
grammar that evolution was forced to discover through trial and error,
and so the case for evolution has nothing to do with the case for
children.

What I would consider a miracle is for all participants to avoid snide
comparisons with creationism or phlogiston theory for an entire
thread.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY

