On Chomsky as a linguist: Some have it right, that there is a bit of a cult around some of his ideas. However, generally the Chomsky cult isn't people who agree with his idea of Universal Grammar (which is this hypothesis of an innate language faculty that keeps being mentioned), but rather the ones following a particular approach that Chomsky came up with in the '90s called the Minimalist Program. Some linguists would agree that, in hindsight, the idea that language is innate should have been obvious all along, but the fact is it was Chomsky who had the idea and wrote the book (or rather books, see my mention of Sound Pattern of English below) that effectively founded modern linguistics. While I've got no problem with valid criticism of his works in linguistics, I don't take kindly to barbos, someone who demonstrates very little understanding of the field, dismissing my entire field out of hand, as he seems to do in his posts. As such, I've got some counterpoints for his most recent posts that I hope are somewhat educational.
I don't doubt that being a linguist he can write a lot of good books.
I doubt his contribution to science.
In US there are a lot of "scientists" who now write books. And most of them are lousy scientists if any, they are only famous because of their books, not because of their contribution to science. This Hollywoodish aspect of science in US annoys me a little.
A. Being a linguist doesn't mean shit about how good you are at adeptly using language. A linguist is someone who studies the human facility of language using the scientific method. A linguist's study of language helps them with writing about as much as a physicist's knowledge of physics helps them with playing sports. Reading Chomsky's books would make that clear, as his prose is famously opaque in his academic books about linguistics. Hell, practically any paper would tell you that. Even papers about topics that intensely interest me are capable of putting me to sleep, they're so dry.
B. Chomsky wrote those books in the 50s and 60s for an academic audience, not for a popular one. And quite frankly, they are still hugely important in the field of linguistics today. For instance,
The Sound Pattern of English (co-authored by Chomsky and Morris Halle) is so important that it's often simply abbreviated as SPE, and the powerful method it provides for describing phonological alternations (i.e. the feature theory framework) is still the gold standard in phonological notation, even if phonological theory itself has moved on to deeper things.
consensus especially in such a flimsy and inexact field as linguistic is not worth much in terms of certainty.
And I am glad you called it hypothesis.
His contribution is this rather obvious hypothesis and no decent attempt to make it a theory or even extract practically useful results.
A. I don't see how one can characterize linguistics as "flimsy" and "inexact", unless you're talking about diachronic linguistics (in which case even the strongest hypotheses will remain quite speculative until a time machine is invented). Linguistics concerns itself with figuring out the fundamental rules behind language, and as a result examines the phonological and grammatical rules governing the languages we see in the world. Our ability to describe the rules governing the grammars and phonologies of specific languages is very exact, and I am perfectly willing to show an example of this if desired (but I do not want to waste a long time writing a novel about, say, English word order if my efforts will go unappreciated).
B. Who cares if the hypothesis has practically useful results at the moment? Many hypotheses don't currently have practically useful results, but that doesn't mean they never will. In particular, if we are able to figure out all of the ins and outs of the language faculty in the human brain, that would have major implications for the field of machine language. Subtract the field of linguistics, and you wouldn't even have the relatively poor language abilities seen today in computers' ability to utilize language.
Can't find the article but apparently scientists disproved Chomsky hypothesis.
They linked language to ancient genes which are present even in drosophila.
In drosophila it is responsible for contextual memory, helps it to navigate to food or something.
Linking language to genes doesn't hurt Chomsky's hypothesis, it supports it. I question your grasp on the idea of Universal Grammar if you fail to understand that. I'm guessing you're talking about the
FOXP2 gene which appears to have some sort of link to language and does indeed appear in both Drosophila and humans. However, our version of FOXP2 isn't exactly the same as the Drosophila, meaning that if this is what you're talking about, this is no argument against UG.