It's impossible to have an intelligent discussion without the original paper.
Chomsky didn't claim that all grammars obey the same word order, so it sounds like they're making bigger claims than they should be, assuming they're just showing that word-order is mostly lineage-dependent.
The original paper is always at the bottom of Ars articles. That's one reason I subscribe.
Anyway, there seems to be a growing body of evidence contrary to Chomsky's universal grammar–see Dan Everett for some more, e.g. It's interesting to see some more about it.
EDIT: As pointed out below, you probably can't view this unless you're at a university/college with access to Nature. Sorry about that. Open Access is something you should support if this pisses you off.
I will say: Putting the link at the bottom of the article automatically makes this better than 90% of the "science journalism" I ever see.
Now for problem number two: I don't have thirty-two dollars (!) to spend reading this one paper. Neither do most other people who aren't already in the field.
For so long as the primary literature is behind these enormous paywalls, science will continue to consist of a tiny tiny percentage of humanity talking to themselves.
Oh yeah! Working at a university pays off again. I'm glad you raised that point, I was about to start commenting about the text of the article and now I realize that everyone may not have access.
Or check the local Barnes & Noble. The one in my small town at least has "Nature" in the magazine section, at around $20/copy (but of course you can read it while standing in the magazine section...).
At first I thought "this can't be the well known peer reviewed journal!?", but it was full of full research papers and sure appeared to be a peer reviewed journal. I don't know if it is the exact same edition as universities get, or some special edition aimed at members of the general public who happen to like reading research papers. It did have a section in front full of general science news and articles, and the part with the papers didn't seem to have a table of contents which struck me as odd.
This wouldn't be the first unexpected thing I have found at a "normal" bookstore. At either a small Waldon's or B. Dalton's in a mall I found a copy of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's tome "Gravitation".
There is here on HN a user that makes freely available for download papers behind pay wall, but can't find his account name (I thought I had it bookmarked).
Chomsky didn't claim that all grammars obey the same word order
I didn't get the sense that the article was saying he said that. It does seem pretty clear from the article that the research suggests that the Generative theory is wrong.
I don't get the impression that it's refuting the generative grammar theory as a whole, though, just the assertion by (many? most?) generative linguists that grammars are governed by a set of innate constraints. Granted, I'm not familiar with how much of the basis for acceptance of generative grammar theory hangs on the concept of a universal grammar.
Yeah - so the claim was that the deep structure of the grammar would be persistent - is that right? And this deep structure is something akin to that which is revealed through logical analysis. Is that the gist?
I understand the related language of thought arguments better... and have for a long time thought that their empirical credentials were dubious. A straightforward syntactic analysis (as it seems to be described in the article) - isn't going to settle dog meat.
Chomsky didn't claim that all grammars obey the same word order, so it sounds like they're making bigger claims than they should be, assuming they're just showing that word-order is mostly lineage-dependent.