Right in its headline, the article makes the powerful claim that there is no language instinct (which I assume is to be read as equivalent to "innate language k

Right in its headline, the article makes the powerful claim that there is no language instinct (which I assume is to be read as equivalent to "innate language knowledge"). Unless you use some very specific notion of knowledge that makes this false, this is a much stronger claim than the claim that there is innate language knowledge - the reason is the same as why the claim that humans are all born with equal abilities is a stronger claim than the claim to the contrary. Now, you could say that Chomsky actually made the claim that /all/ humans have /the same/ innate language knowledge, which then of course would be as probabilistically absurd as the claim that all humans have none - but this is so obviously false (considering mental damage, mutations etc.) that surely everyone involved will have understood that what was meant was not this but rather some statement like "most humans (...)" or "central examples of the category of humans (...)" or "humans with high probability are hardwired to have a probabilistic affinity to interpret language in terms of these structural universals". (edit: Note though that "All humans have no innate language knowledge" is still orders of magnitude more unlikely than "All humans have some common particular set of innate language knowledge" - the latter just requires the highly unlikely even that the random drawing of every single human's innate language knowledge came out to some particular value, but the former requires that the random drawing of all of humanity's innate language knowledge came out to the particular set of preconceptions that you consider to be "no preconceptions", and then that the random drawing of every single human's innate knowledge also came out to that value. Think likelihood of discovering an animal species all of whose living members have exactly the same colour of fur at 24-bit granularity, versus the likelihood of discovering one all of whose living members have #F45080 fur.)