language parallax

Just found this New Yorker article (via Daily Kos) about the language of the Pirahã. There’s a lot in the article about the debate about the presence of recursion in the language, and what that says about Chomsky’s Universal Grammar.
This passage seems to be the core of the story:

Contemporary linguists have generally avoided […]

The word “meta” is more popular than ever – especially among computer scientists. I’m convinced that the use of this word is a subtle indication of deeply held and sometimes problematic world view.
The problem is the idea implicit to “meta” that the direction of “meta” is “more abstract”.
This is often tied to the idea […]

Just got a couple of links from the U. Michigan CSRG mailing list:
All Creatures Great and Small
Ecology’s Big Hot Idea
From the second:

Wouldn’t it be good if there were a simple theory that used life’s shared fundamentals to explain its large- scale regularities, via its diversity of individuals? In the past few years, […]