The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

Chomsky is currently among the ten most-cited writers in all of the humanities (beating out Hegel and Cicero and trailing only Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, the Bible, Aristotle, Plato, and Freud) and the only living member of the top ten.

But language does not work that way—at all times, in all communities, language changes, though the various parts of a language may change in different ways in different communities.

I would guess that most other human “cultural” practices (competitive sports, narrative literature, landscape design, ballet), no matter how much they seem like arbitrary outcomes of a Borgesian lottery, are clever technologies we have invented to exercise and stimulate mental modules that were originally designed for specific adaptive functions.