Peachy Keen > Recent Status Updates

Not getting better. 1) Accepts without question a linguist's claim about homo erectus sitting around cooking in a cave for .3 mil years. Controlled fire didn't happen til homo sapiens, and not generally mastered til just over 100kya. 2) says it's important thay there's a "genetic predisp. to lang." This is like saying genetic pred. to breathing. We speak lang, obviously we have genetic capacity for it. So bad so far.

I'm a fan of McW, having read several well-written articles. I'm stunned at how bad this is so far. Self-indulgent intro, plus misinformation. Bees do not waggle their butts to communicate. Lang has been traced backed much farther than 150kya. We can't possibly know all human langs are equally complex, bc we don't know all the human langs (and prob can't). Yikes. I hope it gets better.

Very good til it gets into the details of Chomsky's linguistics. I went to go get some familiarity before continuing. The translator claims the book could be an intro to Chomsky's ideas-- only if you're OK with not understanding quite a lot.

Deacon observes, correctly, that the origin of language is an interdisciplinary problem beset by evidence that we can't get. But if he's gonna talk about the history of thinking on this matter, and the concepts still in use by philosophers and linguists that carry on from it, he's gotta do the work to get it right. He uses the "public audience" and interdisciplinary excuses to be sloppy. Don't just act like you know