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To: rhetor

Well put, rhetor. Just another way of evading responsibility for our decisions. Liberals always seem to come up with them.


111 posted on 11/13/2004 9:06:00 PM PST by speedy
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To: speedy

A similar thing happens occasionally in linguistics. Lefties like Steven Pinker (author of "The Language Instinct") have written of a "grammar gene" that causes us to use, for example, prepositions in a certain way. In theory, if the gene is faulty, such a person would consistently misuse this part of speech, despite training; additionlly, the bad gene should be transmissible to offspring. Pinker et al. became very excited back in the 1990s when such a family was in fact discovered (in Britain, I think) and wrote that this proved the existence of such a gene. On closer study by a different group of researchers, however, the family turned out to be simply SEVERELY mentally handicapped -- not just in language, but in everything, including an inability to tie their shoelaces correctly. Would this therefore point to the existence of a "shoelace tying gene?" It turns out Pinker and his fellow libs simply selected which parts of the data they wanted to look at and ignored the rest.


147 posted on 11/13/2004 11:05:10 PM PST by rhetor
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