What is "Mind?"

The limits are you need big populations in order for selection to be dominant. If you have small populations, then random drift is actually more important than selection. That’s the Kimura theory. Kimura called it the neutral theory of evolution and he wrote a book about it which was widely ignored by all the orthodox biologists.

HFCS: Not for the faint of heart. Stunning, shocking if not destabilizing.

Larry Nelson: What is reality?

The problem with embracing the rationalist as opposed to the empiricist side of the major philosophic divide is that you give up any hope of independent refereeing. Once you give up empiricism, anyone can start invoking "special insight" and such as "evidence" for their position.

Good stuff

traditional scientific vantage.

I think that that's a reasonable summary.

It’s interesting to me that so many of us want to be radical, revolutionary, to be our own thinkers, to think for ourselves—yet we are one of the pack socially, psychologically, mentally, even spiritually. We can’t help ourselves.

Each of us is born with genetic programming. The programming isn't the experience. It's something different that Descartes and Kant and Hume and the rest could not have foreseen. I'm guessing that if Kant knew this, he might have come to somewhat different conclusions.

I can confidently say that empirically-thinking philosophers of language have no idea how language as we know it could have emerged. And that is because language as we know it depends upon semantic structures that could not have emerged piecemeal depending upon ever more complex brains.

It is hard to see how the system emerged. But there it is.

Actually, the "programming" to which you seem to be referring is consistent with Kant's perspective, as I understand it. The difficulty, though, in talking about "programming" is that you seem to conflate "knowing" in the sense of something like computer processor program a computer runs.

Empiricists believe that that's it: the programming. That's the story, or something like it. All nicely packaged and deterministic.

However, for our purposes, none of that impinges upon Kant's model of "knowing," because ALL of that merely provides PART of the framework of the content of knowing, the empirical part.
But to know anything, even by experience, still requires "microcode," the "structuring" and processing that cannot in principle, according to Kant, BE empirical (in the realm of space/time).
Says who? I don’t believe that you have followed the counter-argument sufficiently here.
That other part, call it the "syntactic" part of "knowing" is not anchored in genetics, nor can it be. In other words, the question emerges: "What IS that microcode and HOW did it come to be what it is?"

However, for reasons that are FAR too complex to go into here, I can confidently say that that model is absolutely not what could have happened. Moreover, I can confidently say that empirically-thinking philosophers of language have no idea how language as we know it could have emerged. And that is because language as we know it depends upon semantic structures that could not have emerged piecemeal depending upon ever more complex brains.

So, the best empirical model now is that there is a "threshold" of brain complexity. Once a brain becomes sufficiently complex, "suddenly" language as we know it becomes possible. Below that "threshold" you have at most simple utterances. Above that "threshold" you get genuine "microcode" in the robust sense.

but given the fact that human language seems to be at least 50,000 years old