> In particular, delineating humans has the same problems as separating any species. You can have a group B that can interbreed with A and C, but A and C can't. Has anything useful come out of getting worked up over what to call species A, B, and C?
That assertion is a good illustration of the problem some Continental philosophers tried to address - what is a "species" and how is it defined? It's an arbitrary labeling we put on a collection of individuals that we perceive to have similarities.
This kind of thinking is exactly what lead Chomsky into the erroneous theories of Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device. Studying real neurons in actual brains is what got linguistics out of the generative grammar dead-end: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_Wars
That assertion is a good illustration of the problem some Continental philosophers tried to address - what is a "species" and how is it defined? It's an arbitrary labeling we put on a collection of individuals that we perceive to have similarities.
This kind of thinking is exactly what lead Chomsky into the erroneous theories of Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device. Studying real neurons in actual brains is what got linguistics out of the generative grammar dead-end: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_Wars