LANGUAGE AND GENETICS – MUTANTS OF THE MIND

The “great mutant hunt”

We have argued that principles of universal grammar (i.e., of syntax, morphology, semantics, and phonology) have, with respect to the nervous system, a status much like that of Mendelian laws of classical genetics (Jenkins, 1979).That is, they are an abstract characterization of physical mechanisms which, in this case, reflect genetically specified neural structures.

Moreover, we argued that it made no more (or less) sense to ask whether what we then called “Chomsky's laws” were “psychologically real” than it did to ask whether “Mendel's laws” were “physiologically real.” If you were convinced by the evidence from the argument from poverty of the stimulus, or by other nonlinguistic evidence, that UG represented the genetic component or initial state of the language faculty, then it made sense to talk about the genes involved in the specification of the initial state. And one could ask the usual things that get asked about genes – what chromosomes are they on? Do they act in a dominant, recessive, polygenic, or other fashion? What do they do – are they structural or regulatory genes? And so on.

Objections were raised that Mendel's laws were either outmoded or else, if they still were operative at all, they didn't have much to do with UG: