I am not well acquainted with Noam Chomsky and his work, but the dichotomy you refer to I'd like to call "design vs evolution". If the extreme "design" part th

I am not well acquainted with Noam Chomsky and his work, but the dichotomy you refer to I'd like to call "design vs evolution". If the extreme "design" part the spectrum is what Chomsky talks about: "develop a theory of how something happens and use it to find evidence that supports or refutes that theory", then the extreme end of the "evolution" part of the spectrum must be this: Choose a set of rules, use genetic programming techniques to rearrange those rules. Evidence you require will be acquired and utilised by the algorithm itself. The only crux is the set of rules to choose from and implementation of the technique. IMO, the more complicated the rules and the more they interact with each other, the better. ...only then can you get results like this: "...Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest– with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output– yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones." http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ While we don't know whether the design approach will work, we have examples of evolution creating working intelligence[1]. [1] You.