Noam Chomsky Quotes

It's commonly assumed that the emergence of language was a key element of the great leap. We of course know very little about the sociopolitical conditions that existed at the time, but there's no scenario I can think of that suggests how a sudden change in these conditions could have led to the emergence of language.

Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?

My space chums think my unique hookup with humanity could be evolution's awkward attempt to jump-start itself up again. They're thinking just maybe, going crazy could be the evolutionary process trying to hurry up mind expansion. Maybe my mind didn't snap. Maybe it was just trying to stretch itself into a new shape. The cerebral cortex trying to grow a thumb of sorts.

Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language.

Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.

At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.

I have not suggested that the emergence of language is instantaneous. Rather, that the rewiring of the brain enabling an infinite array of structured expressions was in effect instantaneous. I have never heard of an alternative to this suggestion.

It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.

It is my firm belief that all successful languages are grown and not merely designed from first principles

Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually, as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?

If evolution was worth its salt, it should've evolved something better than 'survival of the fittest.' I think a better idea would be 'survival of the wittiest.' At least, that way, creatures that didn't survive could've died laughing.

Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

If the rewiring of the brain that yielded recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions took place in an individual, not a group (and there seems to be no coherent alternative), then interaction must have been a later phenomenon.

Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?

If evolution is true, you could not know that it’s true because your brain is nothing but chemicals. Think about that.

A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.

I thoroughly believe in evolution, and how we evolve and how our physical being is affected by time and use and by the environment... it's more than just challenging, it can be terrifying. We all struggle, but I think it's important to be there for one another.

I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work in Natural Selection, which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being.

College is such a unique time because you're learning a little bit how to be an adult. You're learning how to take care of yourself without parental influence, and you're exposed to so many great minds. I feel like I didn't even know how to think until I got to college.

ASTONISHING, said Death. REALLY ASTONISHING. LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS.

To think that humans evolved from lower species BUT the evolutionary process somehow came to a halt and we all arrived at the finish line simultaneously is to embrace a fiction possibly more implausible than Christianity.

I think nobody would claim that random genetic drift is capable of producing adaptation, that is to say the illusion of design. Random genetic drift can't produce wings that are good at flying, or eyes that are good at seeing, or legs that are good at running. But random genetic drift probably is very important in driving evolution at the molecular genetic level.

To suppose that man without language taught himself to speak, seems to me as absurd as it would be to suppose that without legs he could teach himself to walk. Language, therefore, must have been the immediate gift of God.