Chomsky’s notion that there is a grammar organ – that grammar is genetically hard-wired into the human brain – is a big thorn in the side of this view, the thin end of a wedge that recent discoveries (and pseudo-discoveries) in genetics are rapidly widening.

Almost certainly the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater by the current revisionism; the emerging Zeitgeist grants a much greater role to genes than they surely deserve, just as the previous Zeitgeist, the Standard Social Sciences Model which Pinker pisses on from a great height, granted Culture an absurdly overblown role.

Pinker’s book is very much a Chomskian view of language. It is also more accessible, and more amusing, than Chomsky’s (necessarily) exact, precise, almost legalistic style.

‘Extremely valuable, very informative, and very well written’, Chomsky is quoted on the blurb – especially perhaps the part where Pinker describes Chomsky as among the top-ten cited thinkers of all time, and the only one still alive.

He does diverge from Chomsky in one of the most interesting chapters in the book. Chomsky’s doubt over whether natural selection can explain the origins of the language organ is given a pretty hard serve by Pinker – hard, but fair.

As is the Whorf hypothesis that language is not the medium of thought but its determining factor – the hypothesis that the language we speak sets limits to what we can think. This notion was best articulated in Orwell’s 1984, in which the language of Newspeak goes one step further than merely banning politically incorrect thinking – it prevents the thoughts being thunk, since there are no words to think them.

We think without language, Pinker argues, conclusively – but surely we’ve always known that much of thinking is preverbal. ‘People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache – they think in a language of thought’, he writes. Language is not what we think in – it is what we use to tell someone else we are thinking. It is about communication. Of course, if we have a built-in grammar, why not a built-in vocabulary? Why aren’t we born speaking, as in the headlines he quotes, ‘Baby Born Talking – Describes Heaven’?

The fact that such headlines are not uncommon – Pinker quotes many similar – surely speaks to some collective need in us to believe in such things. We want to believe in simple explanations. Just as we want to believe in UFOs – they provide the barbarians at the frontier of Cavafy’s famous poem, barbarians that give our lives meaning.

We should be careful of these needs, that are possibly also hardwired in. There is evidence that pattern-seeking is the dominant mode of human thought – a pattern-seeking for simple, unifying explanations that often defies logic. We might be in danger of romanticising a conservative Genetics, as we romanticised a progressive Social Science.

Pinker debunks such popular Whorfian notions as that eskimos, with 300 words for white or for snow, see the world differently. He demonstrates that children have an inbuilt logic; their grammatical ‘errors’ are always errors of choosing logic against the irregularities of language: for example, ‘I holded the cup’.

Pinker is fascinating on irregulars, their cause, their nature. He also makes a good case against the language pedants who would, say, ban the split infinitive, or the beginning of sentences with ‘hopefully’. Hopefully, they will read this book and be able to radically alter their views – be able to listen to the language as she is actually spoken.

He is fascinating on much else besides, a true polymath, in touch with relevant disciplines across the board. Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks, Motherese, The Great Vowel Shift, mitochondrial-DNA dating of human ancestry – it’s all here. He offers an interested, if sceptical, view of the work being done on establishing a basic vocabulary of the ancient common language that we supposedly all shared 50,000 years ago, by tracing word-roots.

Much of this is guess-work, of course. It is often difficult to separate coincidence from inheritance. In one Australian Aboriginal language the pre-European contact word for dog was, in fact, dog. Thor Heyerdahl might have been able to make something of this, but given thousands of languages, millions of words, chance will always thrown up random synchronicities.

He also debunks the romantic notion, dear to my heart, that chimps have been taught sign language. What they have been taught, he suspects, is to imitate a few signs of their trainers. I’m not so sure about this. The truth may lie somewhere between the exaggerated claims of those such as Penny Paterson (‘The Education of Koko’) and those of the Chomskites who feel grammatical language is uniquely human.

Nim Chimsky, a chimp unable to be taught Sign, seemed to prove one side of the argument. Koko the gorilla, with her apparent grasp of the concepts of death and heaven, supports the other. I’m not sure if Pinker is familiar with all the most recent work in this field – the achievements in Sign of Chantek, an orang-utan, for instance. At the very least, the ape experiments support Pinker’s idea that thinking does not depend on language. Apes definitely think; whether they can also construct grammatical sentences is still in dispute.

One omission: the name Gerald Edelman does not crop up in the book, which is a little surprising. Edelman’s ideas of a neuronal natural selection that occurs in the developing brains of children may offer a bridge, or compromise, between the nature-nurture poles. We need a compromise. We are leaving relativism behind, and the simplification that our minds are cultural constructs – a simplification that resulted from the scientific illiteracy of many people working in the humanities – but we are in danger of moving too far in the direction of a ‘genes determine everything’ reduction. A belief in the absolute power of genes, like a belief in UFOs, may be a comfortable belief – it relieves us of responsibilities. But we should guard against needing to believe in it, like Cavafy’s barbarians at the frontier:

What is to become of us now,
now that there are no barbarians?

They were a kind of solution.