I have no idea about the details of this debate, but even so it's obvious that this article screams warnings signs - it's full of tricky strawmen and other fall

I have no idea about the details of this debate, but even so it's obvious that this article screams warnings signs - it's full of tricky strawmen and other fallacies. For instance, it makes the absurd comparison between the supposed innate talent for language and a spiders web-weaving - spiders weave webs without examples, so why not kids? Spiders are about as poor a stand-in for a human as you'll find in the macroscopic world. Also, even if something is instinctual, it's hardly reasonable to assume that instinct will always overcome any situation, regardless of trauma, especially in a animals as impressionable as humans. Finally, just because an animal has an instinct and/or innate aptitude doesn't mean that practice is irrelevant. The girl that was held in a cellar until she was 13 only shows that either the instinct isn't absolute (no surprise there), or even just that the instinct still requires exercise. Then there's the flatly false statement that dna doesn't have the storage capacity to store a universal grammar. Oh really? The human genomes codes for on the order of a gigabyte of data. AFAIH, there's strong evidence that there's not a lot of evolutionary pressure to keep genomes small, IIRC based on the observation that even small, competing microbes have dramatically varying sizes of genomes (when you'd expect smaller-genomed competitors to have won if it really mattered). For some context: A compressed wordlist containing 350000 english words is less than a megabyte. In general, grammars tend to be much smaller, especially if you consider that it's not claimed that a full grammar is stored, but at most the "basics" that can get rehydrated based on learnt language. Another poster in this thread claimed his 500 line python program can generate a good approximation of human language given enough input data. I wouldn't be surprised if a few kilobytes would suffice to describe the components from which any grammar can be built - much smaller than the full grammar itself. There's another absurd misunderstanding of evolution in which the article manages to suggest that because evolution is necessarily continuous in the space of genomes, it thus must be continuous in the space of outcomes (i.e. language is so large a leap, it couldn't have evolved). I'm sure many creationists feel the same way about the eye - not to mention the fact that the article then proceeds to knock down some straw-men about when that language ability might have evolved according to chomsky (which is basically saying that because chomsky apparently doesn't know how language evolved, his other theory must be false. Really?) I have no idea about the details here, but this article is about as unconvincing as you can get. He may well be right - I'm not a linguist, and to be frank I'm not entirely sure why the claim even matters (not a great sign for a scientific hypothesis). But I'm sure this article isn't making a lot of sense.