Regurgitating Is Not Creative Thinking. In Chomsky And Other Chatbots

Those Who Regurgitate Thoughts Are More Akin To Chatbots Than Noble Thinkers

What is thinking? Using a brain to produce motion (e-motion, electric potential, jumping in the air…). That means cockroaches are thinking. Yes, they are. Cockroaches think, thus they are, as Descartes pointed out. Once a cockroach thought he had tamed me, so it wouldn’t flee when I appeared (that was revealed as a mistake in the fullness of time)..

Some “thinkers” believe that the quality of knowledge coming from Artificial Intelligence “Chatbots” is fundamentally flawed. Ironically, they exhibit what they pretend to censor. “ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.” (Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT, New York Times,March 8, 2023.) [1]

Chomsky then gives an example which is beyond strange. I quote it in full, and in context in the appendix [2]. Fundamentally Chomsky confuses knowledge and the most advanced creative thinking.

To claim, as Chomsky does, that: “ “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking.” is a very strange assertion. The notion of force pertaining to motion (force as the time derivative of momentum) was discerned only around 1350 CE by Buridan in Paris. Previously, Aristotle did not have the notion of momentum, or the correct notion of force. Let alone the modern notion of gravity.

Gravity was described as an inverse square of the distance, proportional to mass, by Bullialdus (Ismaël Boulliau) also in Paris in 1645 CE. Does that mean that people could not “think” about falling apples before 1645?

The authors claim that:  “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation.”

Do they view “whatever” as an “explanation”? 

Sorry but that opinion describes science as only a fraction of science. Kepler’s laws are highly non obvious (equal areas swept in equal times, planets follow ellipses with sun as focus, and a non linear relation between period and radius). However, they are just descriptions, curve fitting of what is observed: science starts with observation.

A baby observes, 24/7. Even when the baby dreams, the baby observes (inside the baby’s brain). Then the baby tries to re-create…. 

Tellingly enough, Chomsky quotes a minor author, Conan Doyle as the creator of the thought: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” So doing Chomsky exhibits QUOTATION MISATTRIBUTION, a basic problem with Chatbots (which steal content right and left, up and down on the Internet…) The thought is actually an idea written down, and widely advertised by Émilie de Breteuil Marquise du Châtelet… a major philosopher and physicist who discovered the concept of energy in the 1730s (Newton had confused momentum and energy; Émilie, arguably more important than say Einstein or Maxwell, or roughly any other physicist is not well known, on account of her gender… which caused her demise…).

AI Machines are like most people: they regurgitate what they picked up in a subset of the information space. As AI steals bits and pieces of data all over, that will include pieces of logic, whether flawed or not flawed. 

The banality of evil: plagiarism and apathy and obviation is something attached to culture, and will vary as cultures vary. For example, to ask for someone’s race is viewed as moral in the USA, whereas in most societies the notion of race is itself viewed as racist, and asking for someone’s race even more so (and is historically tied to genocide). So a US trained AI will automatically be racist… If it sticks to US convention. However if the AI reads somewhere a critique of the notion of race, it may hit on a moral ground higher than US convention…

The meta message Chomsky always gives is the same: only he knows how to speak, or even what is language. Better: only he and his ilk from MIT and other top universities  can think. The loud message is: you don’t know, but me, and thus, implicitly, my plutocratic sponsors from the establishment, know how to think.

The saddest part is that regurgitator Chomsky has achieved cult status among many progressives. And what of the Chatbots? They just lift stuff from the Internet and regurgitate. They are extremely advanced dictionaries… right now full of errors but potentially they may enlighten by helping listeners to get out of their information boxes. 

But chatbots can be more. Can chabots be innovative? Yes, by gluing together with fantastic logical connections disparate pieces of information. I am actually afraid that a Chatbot will (pretend to) fall on my Dark Matter theory…. And claim authorship…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Chomsky, a MIT prof,  is famous for the universal grammar (UG): a 50 year old theory in linguistics that claims that the ability to learn grammar is built into the human brain from birth regardless of language. In the 1960s, linguists became interested in a new theory about grammar, or the laws of language. UG is obviously completely false, as some languages have no grammar (Mandarin Chinese). Petit Negre.. French spoken long ago by African without French grammar whatsoever, but sill perfectly understandable, I speak it myself, ha ha ha…. When one speaks or has studied a dozen languages or more, as yours truly, one knows there is no universal grammar: grammars can be very different in languages which have lots of words in common… And this is why machine translation is still often imperfect, eighty years after its beginning… Chomsky is an error. Can Chatbots quote me, please?

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[2] Here is Chomsky in full about his crazy apple example: “Indeed, such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.

Here’s an example. Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation: “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking.”

Musk Bot… Early director of “Open AI” a “non profit” which then evolved into Chat GPT…

PLUTOCRACY: EPIGENETICS, Not Just Wealth And Democide

CHOMSKY FINALLY Agrees With Patrice AYME: AMERICAN DREAM DIED BECAUSE OF PLUTOCRACY… But Chomsky does not go as far as using the word. And that makes him, and his devoted followers, miss the most sinister aspects of it all, and the reason why it is so hard to fix plutocracy, the EPIGENETICS OF EVIL. Thus they complain about the fleas, not the wolf carrying them. Details about how that instrument of US plutocracy, Nazism, came to be, thanks to US plutocracy and its banks, illustrate the demonstration: as long as something that big in the calculus of evil is altogether missed, there is little hope…

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English America did start as a plutocracy in the sense of an extremely wealthy class of the wealthiest investors sitting in England, after having ravaged Ireland. Jamestown was like that, Yes, it was a tiny hamlet fortress, but then the colony grew, mostly from using slaves for tobacco farming. Then England, wrecked by civil wars and revolutions, lost control of its American colonies until the 1700s. Attempts to make Lord Penn the ruler of Pennsylvania ended up in the American Revolution.

Washington, Jefferson, and Al. were very wealthy and somewhat satanic, as they held slaves, and killed Natives, but they were small fry relative to blue blood European plutocrats, who were much wealthier, and thus had to be much more satanic to stay in power.

So the English American republic became a not very plutocratic republic (if one doesn’t consider slavery, and the massacre of Native Americans, two huge ifs…) And on it went. The rebellious Confederacy was to some extent a plutocratic revolt centered around the idea of buying, selling and abusing people as if they were chicken: it failed.

The first US billionaire was Carnegie. Carnegie was far left, by today’s standards, advocating 50% tax on the wealthy, and punishing estate taxes. His widely advocated ideas brought a mood conducive to the passage of the anti-trust act under President Teddy Roosevelt. Here is how the top 0.01%, the top 30,000, are doing in the USA:

Inequality Fosters Plutocracy, The Rule, Not Just Of Wealth, But evil & Bad Genes

So when did the US democracy go bad? JP Morgan, a banker, escaped the anti-trust thrust.   Dr. Schacht, a German banker cum economist joined the Dresdner Bank in 1903. In 1905, while on a business trip to the United States with board members of the Dresdner Bank, Schacht met the famous American banker J. P. Morgan, as well as U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt. Schacht  became deputy director of the Dresdner Bank from 1908 to 1915. Meanwhile, when Wall Street collapsed in 1907, JP Morgan “bought all of it” (or at least a big part of it), bringing the market around.

By 1914, US plutocrats, and the racist president Wilson, conspired with the German Kaiser, enabling the Kaiser to hope to destroy his personal enemy, and the enemy of German, if not American and British plutocracy, the French Republic. That magnificent plot backfired on Germany when Great Britain declared war to the Kaiser within days of its attack on France.

But it did not backfire for the USA, just the opposite: the US supported the Kaiser for three years with ammunition components, etc., while the UK and France piled up debts to the USA. More exactly, US plutocrats made a fortune, while putting the UK and the French Republic in their debt.

In 1919, US plutocrats made it so that German fascists could have another go at the French Republic, by brandishing, of all things, the concept of peace.

Remember, for US plutocrats, the motto of the French Republic, Liberty, EQUALITY… sounded like a funeral bell tolling. They absolutely had to remove that menace: at the time, the French empire was larger in population and extent, than the USA itself, and had the world’s most powerful army and air force (yes France was then mightier than the USA in several ways).

While arguing that Germany should be protected from France, the US requisitioned giant amounts of German private property, then transferred that, with characteristic generosity, to US plutocrats, finishing the deal, by burning the records of these chummy transactions, in a highly convenient blaze, which made the transfer of these properties safe from retrospective consideration. I am not joking: the cause of the burning of the Commerce Building on January 10, 1921 was never determined: rats, smoking were excluded, and electric wires kept new and perfect. The fire started in the file room, was all over said room in a couple of minutes, and lasted five hours.

In any case, the US became the de facto overlord of the so-called “Weimar Republic” (the official name was “Second German Reich”; Hitler changed it to “Third German Reich” in 1935). That enabled US plutocrats (some of them Jewish) to turn around the US antitrust law.

The symbiosis between Nazism and US plutocracy was total, including the latter giving birth to the former. Dr. Schacht was central in this (and that’s why he was judged and exonerated, as one of the top 24 Nazi war criminals in 1945 at Nuremberg).

To win the war, the US became, de facto, a sort of social democracy. It slowly went back to plutocracy when Nazi operators and collaborators such as the Dulles brothers, took control of the USA in the 1950s. A quick learner and follower, Richard Nixon, became president in 1969, setting up the HMO system, while making an alliance with the Chinese dictatorship.

Ford, Carter, Reagan, ramped up the plutocratic pressure. The dam broke under Clinton, who actually dismantled the MOST IMPORTANT legislative piece of president Franklin D Roosevelt’s long presidency: the Banking Act of 1933 (“Glass Steagall”).

The Deep State, suitably plutocratized then established a number of evil corporations which were used as intelligence agencies (internally and externally). This is when Sheryl Sandberg was parachuted from the Treasury Department where she was the official girlfriend of Lawrence Summers (successor of R. Rubin, ex- Goldman Sachs chair) to Google and then Facebook (she will meet with Trump Wednesday).

Inequality grew.

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Chomsky, A Crow On Its MIT Branch, Crowing Lugubriously:

That was for the causes. Chomsky started to condemn the “financialization” of the USA for the acceleration of inequality in 2013, under Obama (Patrice Ayme explained that it was caused by the abrogation of the Banking Act, already more than 10 years ago; Chomsky vaguely describes, Patrice explains…).

Here is Chomsky’s latest description: “The ‘American Dream’ was all about class mobility. You were born poor, but could get out of poverty through hard work and provide a better future for your children. It was possible for [some workers] to find a decent-paying job, buy a home, a car and pay for a kid’s education… It’s all collapsed — and we shouldn’t have too many illusions about when it was partially real… The so-called American Dream was always based partly in myth and partly in reality.” Chomsky said, noting that Americans are losing their hope due to “stagnating incomes, declining living standards, outrageous student debt levels, and hard-to-come-by decent-paying jobs.”

“The inequality in the contemporary period is almost unprecedented. If you look at total inequality, it ranks amongst the worse periods of American history… However, if you look at inequality more closely, you see that it comes from wealth that is in the hands of a tiny sector of the population…

The current period is extreme because inequality comes from super wealth. Literally, the top one-tenth of a percent are just super wealthy,”

Chomsky describes. One of my trusted commenters asked me recently what I thought of Chomsky. A philosopher is not just a botanist. A philosopher would explain, and suggest new explanations. Chomsky also avoid to use the concept of “plutocracy”. He describes it, he describes how wealth, being powerful, grabs power… But he doesn’t label it… which prevents him to go at the bottom of things, as he usually focus on “imperialism”… a completely different notion (imperium, that is military command, may happen with or without plutocracy; initially the concept was from the Roman Republic, which was not a plutocracy). 

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Plutocracy, Epigenetics of Evil:

However, that comes short. Very short. Chomsky does not dare to cross the semantic Rubicon of calling it for what it is, plutocracy, the evil power, the genetics, and epigenetics, of evil.

This is why Chomsky clings to the idea that the American Founders debated what is at stake now. Now, they did not: the Internet has changed everything, starting with the minds, the moods, hence the genes, or the genetic expressions, to be a bit more precise. We know that fishes in a changed environment, change genetically. Females can become not just males, but super males.

Plutocracy is not just the rule of wealth. We know, from studying epigenetics in other species, that animal behavior influences genetic, let alone neurohormonal expression.

The absolute power of enormous wealth does not just corrupt absolutely, it corrupts genetically.  

Complaining about the fleas is good, but seeing the wolf carrying them, better. Wisdom is not just about seeing what’s wrong, but doing better what can be improved.

Patrice Ayme’

Chomsky: MIT Bimbo?

Some praise Chomsky as the “Socrates For Our Times“. Before unleashing a deep and scathing critique to the heart of Chomsky’s mind, let me hasten to point out that I do agree with a lot of Chomsky’s remarks. Let me quote him in an interview posted June 16, 2014:

“This war hysteria has never ceased, moving seamlessly from a fear of the German Hun to a fear of communists to a fear of Islamic jihadists and terrorists.

“The public is frightened into believing we have to defend ourselves,” Chomsky said. “This is not entirely false. The military system generates forces that will be harmful to us. Take Obama’s terrorist drone campaign, the biggest terrorist campaign in history. This program generates potential terrorists faster than it destroys suspects. You can see it now in Iraq. Go back to the Nuremberg judgments. Aggression was defined as the supreme international crime. It differed from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows. The U.S. and British invasion of Iraq is a textbook case of aggression. By the standards of Nuremberg they [the British and U.S. leaders] would all be hanged. And one of the crimes they committed was to ignite the Sunni and Shiite conflict.”

The conflict, which is now enflaming the region, is “a U.S. crime if we believe the validity of the judgments against the Nazis. Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor at the [Nuremberg] tribunal, addressed the tribunal. He pointed out that we were giving these defendants a poisoned chalice. He said that if we ever sipped from it we had to be treated the same way or else the whole thing is a farce.” 

Today’s elite schools and universities inculcate into their students the worldview endorsed by the power elite. They train students to be deferential to authority. Chomsky calls education at most of these schools, including Harvard, a few blocks away from MIT, “a deep indoctrination system.””

What is there not to like for someone such as me? Did I not just said the same over and over again, even yesterday (before the Chomsky interview was published)?

[I agree, with all the preceding, especially what I emboldened. Actually, I have said these things vociferously, for years. I am happy Chomsky has joined the show. He should add MIT, and… himself, to the parade. Let me explain.]

My objection to Chomsky is that we need a Death Star to destroy the plutocracy, and that Chomsky is a deeply malfunctioning Death Star.

Proof?

Chomsky’s analysis of World War One. What happened then bears and informs completely upon what is going on today: a few manipulating plutocrats, in one of the deadliest and deepest conspiracies ever, ganged up together, and achieved their objectives.

(There was actually a hierarchy in the manipulative order, conspiracies within conspiracies: the half dozen Prussians, and the grandson of Queen Victoria who, technically launched WWI all by themselves, were manipulated by a number of higher level creatures… from the other side of the Atlantic! The very failure of Chomsky to know of the existence and nature of this meta-conspiracy mindset is his greatest failure. That makes him bark all day along, at the foot of the wrong tree.)

Chomsky as Socrates? Some will see in that an innocent way of expressing oneself. Instead I view in this not just the pursuit of false prophets, but of a false analysis of humanity.

Having a false evaluation of humanity makes oneself into a lambs ready to be devoured by plutocrats. The basic approach of Chomsky is the same as the one of Russell. It’s a variant of the one inaugurated by Kant, no less. Kant (following Confucius) said the state defined morality, so should be obeyed.

Russell and Chomsky say:”All states are the same, so let’s just do away with them.”

OK, they say: let’s do away with the military mindset; however, a state worth of its name, is, first of all, an army. Thus an anti-military posture is pure anarchism, and, thus pure impotence, hence the greatest help a fascist, plutocratic, oligarchic state can have. That makes Russell and Chomsky more like vaccinations rather than aggressions.

In the end, they leave the state perhaps even stronger, and more unscathed, than Kant did.

Chomsky and MIT mean well. Perhaps. But I doubt it.

Indeed, Chomsky did not get the history of World War One (or Two) right yet. He makes the exact same mistake as the major plutocrat, pseudo-philosopher, Lord Russell. It’s the same grotesque call to turning the other cheek, after the first one has been torn out, and made into a gory mess, with some brains showing (maybe that’s why they lost their minds?)

The Kaiserreich that made a surprise attack on August First 1914, deliberately launching a world war (that’s the way they had planned it since December 1912) was a regime that had long engaged in holocausts and Nazi style war crimes, and proceeded to do this exactly in Belgium and France in the following days.

Weirdly, Chomsky, who recognizes that “Aggression was defined as the supreme international crime. It differed from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows,” seems astonishingly unawares of the elementary fact that it is the Reich of the Kaiser which deliberately attacked in August 1914 (even Austria took several more days to declare war, despite Berlin’s frantic urging!)

Yet, the bare facts are obvious: the envoy of the USA president told the Kaiser, June 1, that the USA would support him and proposed an alliance against France. Next the Kaiser attacked, and the USA became immensely rich, feeding the Kaiser, with, among other things, ammunitions, through the “neutral” Netherlands.

When the USA saw that France and Britain were going to win, it came to the rescue of victory, and grabbed the spoils.

Then the USA, by a somber public-private pirouette, transferred much German property into private American plutocratic hands… who then, basically, organized Nazism, as an occasion to indulge in business far removed from Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-monopoly laws!

By forgetting, ignoring, or simply not knowing those basic facts, Chomsky makes himself a major ally of Wall Street plutocracy (the prime profiteer of the preceding; headed by JP Morgan).

To claim, as Chomsky does, that the racist, mass murdering, war crime indulging, anti-Judaic dictatorship of the Kaiser was just the same as the French republic it attacked to destroy, out of sheer computation, to pursue its reign of terror and exploitation, is sheer madness.

And it’s nothing new: that was the line of that major plutocrat, Lord Russell. And, implicitly, dear at heart of many British plutocrats (before their sons, over-represented in the officer class of the British Expeditionary Force, died by the thousands on the battlefields of Belgium and France; the sons were idealistic, the fathers, cynical… But, after they had to bury their progeny, they started to sincerely hate the Huns.)

By attacking on August 1, 1914, the Kaiser actually broke the unity of plutocracy. It’s only being reconstituted now… And in danger of being broken again, not by Thomas Picketty’s rather bland remarks, but by that other major war minded plutocrat, Vladimir Putin.

Chomsky is a false prophet, an objective accomplice of un-truth.

Un-truth has never helped revolution. Moreover, the un-truth of Chomsky (war is bad, we are manipulated into it), is exactly the opposite of what we need in the realm of emotion.

Plutocrats can easily brandish wars that have to be fought. Say World War One, or World War Two. Yes democracies had to fight them, just as the Secession War had to be fought, or the defense war of the French Republic in 1792, fighting for survival against all the plutocrats of Europe united, had to be fought.

The mistake, in World War One, or in World War Two, was not to see that the plutocrats themselves had craftily organized it (just as they organized the plutocratization of the ex-USSR, and, Chomsky could notice, that oligarchization of the ex-Soviet Union was indeed directed from Harvard!)

By saying war is the problem, and refusing to engage in an intricate causality debate Chomsky is enjoining us to enjoy the furious bleating of sheep against the wolves. That won’t do. Except for the wolves. Not only do wolves enjoy eating sheep, but they love killing them, with wild abandon, just because it’s fun. Something about bleating invites the humiliation of being torn open, and being unable to do anything about it.

Our plutocrats are not any different. Bleating to their faces, thus, won’t do.

Oh, by the way, Socrates was executed for his troubling role during Athens 30 year  desperate fight for survival. The dictators that came to rule Athens, and collaborate with her enemies (Sparta, etc.), were all Socrates’ students. Socrates, the pseudo-great philosopher, spent most of his career bitterly criticizing Athens total democracy, while dining, feasting, getting drunk, and having sex with Athens’ Golden Youth (such as the Syracuse tyrant friendly Plato).

Half of Athens’ population died during the war. A general amnesty was proclaimed when (under victorious Sparta’s supervision), democracy was re-established. The amnesty was scrupulously respected, but for one exception: Socrates.

So to be called a “Socrates” is not necessarily a compliment. Or rather, if one is on the side of the plutocrats, it is. And that’s no compliment.

Posing to look pretty, as bimbos do, does not bring the Cave Bear down. Any Neanderthal could have told you that. If MIT differs in this evaluation, MIT ought to go back to study the jungle.

Against plutocracy, action without violent violation nor subtler comprehension, contends in vain.

Patrice Aymé

Gene Obsession

Recent discoveries have shown the importance of genetic variations (mostly “alleles”) for (say) physical performance. Many, if not most top sportspersons have a genetic advantage. That’s the dirty secret of sports.

However some have tried to explain everything with genes, or “instinct”, or “innate behavior”. That’s what I call the genes’ obsession. A curious thing, as it’s well known to be erroneous:

Genetic Controls Everything NOT

Three patterns observed when studying the influence of genes and environment on traits in individuals. Trait A shows a high sibling correlation, but little heritability. Trait B shows a high heritability since correlation of trait rises sharply with degree of genetic similarity. Trait C shows low heritability, and also low correlations generally. Notice that even identical twins raised in a common family do not show 100% trait correlation.

The curious thing is that the nature versus nurture debate has degenerated. A century ago the autodictat biologist Favre was famous for his studies of insects’ behavior. Skinner and behaviorism tried to displace him, with learning, and then Lorentz and Tinbergen received the Nobel for exhibiting unexpected behaviors in animals, with subtle entanglements of nature and nurture.

What’s the genes’ obsession? It consists into believing that one could code for zillions of behaviors with a few thousand genes. My answer: you don’t, because you can’t. The mind is the answer to nature (as I will show in the next essay).

A particularly silly example of the genes problem is Chomsky’s ‘Universal Grammar’ according to which ‘grammar,’ or linguistic ability, is hard-wired, and comes without being taught.

Even more silly, Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, pushed for the gene-centered view of evolution. Said he: “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.”

Then he contradicted himself: “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to…”

And how are we going to do that, Mr. Dawkins? If our “biological nature” is to be “born selfish”, how come we can “teach” the opposite? With the help of God? And what of your mother? Was she selfish too?

Dawkins sounds hopelessly confused and dissembling in his “Selfish Gene’ Chapter One. Here is another extract:

“Among animals, man is uniquely dominated by culture, by influences learned and handed down. Some would say that culture is so important that genes, whether selfish or not, are virtually irrelevant to the understanding of human nature. Others would disagree. It all depends where you stand in the debate over ‘nature versus nurture’ as determinants of human attributes. This brings me to the second thing this book is not: it is not an advocacy of one position or another in the nature/nurture controversy. Naturally I have an opinion on this, but I am not going to express it, except insofar as it is implicit in the view of culture that I shall present in the final chapter. If genes really turn out to be totally irrelevant to the determination of modern human behavior, if we really are unique among animals in this respect, it is, at the very least, still interesting to inquire about the rule to which we have so recently become the exception.”

In truth the genetic approach to everything, a la Dawkins, helps nought (as Dawkins more or less recognizes, when lucid enough). Besides, it is completely implausible.

It’s not just that there are other inheritable geometric structures than genes (say: proteins, prions, organelles, etc.).

The result of a few thousand genes may be a million proteins. Impressive. However, that’s it. But it’s simply impossible to imagine how proteins would be transformed into complex behaviors. A pile of construction materials does not a castle make.

That’s why I am anti-Chomsky (although I approve of his hypocritical anti-imperialistic whining)… and anti-Dawkins (although I approve of this anti-theism).

In a way Dawkins, Chomsky and their followers make the mistake theists did before Lamarck’s theory of evolution (erroneously known as Darwin’s theory of evolution).

They believed a deus ex-machina out there, coded for everything, that there is something as “innate behavior”. They understand learning naught. In a way their superstitious attitude is a variant of the “Grace of God” problem of the Seventeenth Century: if God is omnipotent, what have humans to do with it? If genes are omnipotent, what has humanism to do with humanity? How can Dawkins learn anything, if he is just a selfish gene?

As the graph above showed, genes are never omnipotent.

Even suckling is not really “innate”. Any mother finds out that it takes a bit of training on both sides… As I will show next, much, if not most, “instincts” are just, most probably, fast learning.

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Patrice Ayme