I have posted
on the "languages wars" before...so I thought that I'd point out that Noam Chomsky, Marc Hauser W. T. Fitch have
responded (
full text) to Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff's
paper which was written in response to their
initial manifesto. Note that this is basically back-biting amongst the "innatist" camp as regards language. Though I think Pinker and Jackendoff have run ahead of the data as far as FOXP2 goes, I suspect their tack will be more fruitful. I am not necessarily one who believes that complex behaviors are necessarily straightforward adaptations or have strong fitness implications which can't be warped or distorted by social considerations (even if a given religious practice is functionally deleterious, if it makes you an outcaste when you dissent from the practice then your fitness drops). But, I am highly skeptical that language is such a trait, I simply do not believe that
serendipity is the source of our competence at speech (or recursive capacity).
Related: The children of Universal Grammar.
FOXP2.