https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Linguistic_theory
>The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited.[150] As such he argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences.[151] In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, who viewed behavior (including talking and thinking) as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments.
that reminds a similar theory that stone axe making is a result of genetic transfer (like 'bird song') and not social transfer https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/ . Curiously if one replaces "axe" with "language" in the article it would look a lot similar as how one would go proving Chomsky linguistic theory.
If curious, past related threads:
Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224117 - Feb 2021 (50 comments)
Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468639 - Sept 2020 (42 comments)
A Simple Structure Unites All Human Languages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030971 - Sept 2019 (53 comments)
‘Anumeric’ people: when a language has no words for numbers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14697453 - July 2017 (42 comments)
Grammar isn't merely part of language (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13615273 - Feb 2017 (68 comments)
Chomsky, Wolfe and me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13378341 - Jan 2017 (33 comments)
Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12511631 - Sept 2016 (36 comments)
Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12450033 - Sept 2016 (95 comments)
Tom Wolfe tries to take down Darwin and Chomsky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12402713 - Sept 2016 (12 comments)
The Chomsky Puzzle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12367289 - Aug 2016 (78 comments)
There is no language instinct (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10612447 - Nov 2015 (30 comments)
MIT claims to have found a “language universal” that ties all languages together - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10016052 - Aug 2015 (94 comments)
Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8772388 - Dec 2014 (30 comments)
What happens when a language has no numbers? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6569989 - Oct 2013 (53 comments)
Language may shape human thought - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2812011 - July 2011 (25 comments)
Pirahã: a non-Turing-complete human language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033741 - Jan 2010 (39 comments)
How does language shape the way we think? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804101 - Sept 2009 (1 comment)
Pirahã defies Chomsky's theory of universal grammar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740687 - Aug 2009 (6 comments)
Recursion and human thought - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283678 - Aug 2008 (6 comments)
MIT-led team finds language without numbers (update to earlier studies on the Piraha) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=246459 - July 2008 (2 comments)
Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Piraha Don't Have Numbers (quicktime video) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61237 - Sept 2007 (1 comment)
Btw, there are a ton more of these; the above are just the ones that got comments.
There's this one sentence in the article, that – I think – may give a hint on the difficulties explaining linguigenesis if constrained in the way portrayed by the article:
> The authors compared animal and human communication, eliminating the aspects of vocalization that are shared by both, and concluded that one operation alone distinguished human speech: recursion. In the course of working on the article, Fitch grew sympathetic to Chomsky’s ideas and became an articulate defender of the theory of universal grammar.
"(…) distinguished human speech(…)", if you think about it, that's a weird assertion/assumption to make. The idea, that there's a clear line between human and non-human communication, as if this was something binary.
We humans have this weird concept, that there's "something", that makes us fundamentally different from the rest of the animal life on this planet. Yes, we've got the largest impact on the biosphere, we can reason about it. But if you were to track back on the coginitive abilities of our evolutionary ancestors, I'd say it would be very difficult to put a hard threshold in the phylogenetic tree, where suddenly a whole subset of means of communication discretly vanishes.
Just my 2 cents…
Regardless of the discussion here, the biographical part of "don't sleep, there are snakes" is a rather good read.
I was only 19 then, but I remember liking it a lot.
Archive version: https://archive.ph/dHzkc
If you enjoy this article you may like the Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.
Wouldn't the quantum of language be the idea?
14 years later, the answer is still no.