Epigenetics and Language: The Minimalist Program, Connectionism and Biology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chomsky claims that linguistics should be thought of as a branch of biology.Lorenzo and Longa claim that the Minimalist Program is better than previous approaches at connecting language to biology because it relies on epigenetic processes in development, which is the current trend in biology.Epigenetic processes alter gene expression in a heritable manner without changing DNA sequence.Recently, biologists have come to see epigenetics as extremely important to development.We agree with Lorenzo and Longa that inclusion of epigenetic processes in linguists' theories of language development is important if linguists desire unification with biology.However, Lorenzo and Longa do not discuss processes that alter gene expression in a heritable manner without altering DNA.A close examination of their position illuminates a large gap between the Minimalist Program and epigenetics.In contrast, there is a relatively small gap between connectionism and epigenetics.Language development in connectionist systems involves modifications of neural connections.Research shows that modification of neural connections involves processes that alter gene expression without altering DNA.It follows that connectionism is the superior paradigm for researchers interested in unification between biology and linguistics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".