Finally submitted my new research plan. I am especially proud of the last few lines that read: [...] given that evolution proceeds by tinkering with existing systems, and natural selection is a robust process confirmed by palaeontology and genetics over and over, it is highly unlikely that once endowed with an advanced evolutionary structure an organism will not make use of it. No such records exist in palaeontology, evolutionary biology or even genetics. It is, thus, useful to go around the animal kingdom and count up how many times something has shown up during evolution -- vision about thirteen times, echo-location exactly 4 times, and intelligence and language of the human type only once. The decreasing frequency is a testimony to the decreasing number of relatively simpler mechanisms for evolution to improve upon. Each new breakthrough is achieved by linking an ability or two to the already existing structures. Bats, for example, very likely hear in colour. Bats have a mammalian brain, one perfectly capable of impression responses of the type seen in humans with regard to visual stimuli. Within a bats brain, it is highly probable, that the contrast in echo reflection caused by a hard woody beetle and a soft leathery moth is encoded as a contrast between, say, blue and yellow. It is a wonderful testimony to the uniqueness of evolution -- by perceiving continuous stimuli as they were, but by encoding them discretely, the bats brain is able to reduce both storage and online calculation demands to a minimum while making use of a highly transformative computational system whose sole function is to map type A on to type B and vice-versa. Given such a scenario, all that remains of Articulatory Phonology, Laboratory Phonology and Experimental Phonetics are empty, hollow shells. There is absolutely no reason for the human (mammalian) brain to encode stochastic processes, and thus take a regressive step, when lower level mammals are capable of circumventing that step. All the noise made by articulatory phonology about features having articulatory basis is simply a lot of edgy quotes and deliberate ignorance of hard evolutionary facts by a certain sections of the intelligentsia, in an effort to avoid cognitive dissonance. There is no reason why mature scientists should fall victim to such charlatanism. In fact, this, in my opinion is the prime responsibility of the Generative Enterprise and the Biolinguistic Network -- to completely integrate Linguistic Theory with the Hard Natural Sciences. After all, to use Chomskys words, there is little more to Linguistics than Biology, Chemistry and lots of mathematics.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 01:07:22 +0000
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