Dennett vs. Chomsky on Language and Evolution?

Question

I was wondering if anyone had any information about the disagreement between the two regarding the status of language and evolution?

And more importantly - did the disagreement go anywhere or did they just ignore each others comments?

Answer 1

Dennett sees evolution as a kind of all-encompassing force. He exempts NOTHING from evolutionary pressures and suggests essentially that it should be the underlying base for every kind of science anywhere.

Chomsky has trouble seeing how certain things necessarily evolved and is willing to allow that some phenomenon - particularly those associated with the brain and language - might be the result of accident or other forces than evolution. For example, our cognitive capacity may just be an emergent property of having a lot of neurons, and not necessarily something that was specifically selected for.

To my knowledge, there has been no overt resolution of the two views, though I would say that Chomsky's is by far the more popular of the two (it's shared by Searle, Gould, and others). The idea that evolutionary processes cause us to (for example) spell and use words in specific ways is as difficult for biologists as the idea that the universe as a whole evolved into its current shape would be for astronomers... and both of these are ideas that Dennett would seem to support.

Answer 2

So far as I understand, which I admit isn't very much, Chomsky thought language is mostly hard-wired, while Dennett thinks it's evolved both culturally and biologically from another function and is a "virtual machine" running on the brain's massively parallel hardware.
Dennett believes that memes shape the brain, and clever cultural tricks used to help structure the brain are mostly responsible for our modern abilities. The fitness of the brains genetics is determined by its fitness to absorb such memes, and genetic learning has nowadays been superseded by much faster cultural evolution.
I don't remember anything about Chomsky in Consciousness Explained, but apparently Dennett attacks Chomsky's ideas in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which I haven't read yet.