Are there any good examples of what would be considered innate human abilities (cognitive or otherwise) that are absent or repressed in an entire culture?
This is for reasoning about criticisms to universal grammar, in particular the lack of recursion in the Pirahã language, so that one is kind of begging the question. The closest I can come up with at the moment (which really isn’t very close at all) is the high incidence of perfect pitch amongst native speakers of tonal languages.
Are there any good examples of what would be considered innate human abilities (cognitive or otherwise) that are absent or repressed in an entire culture?
For example, are there examples of culture-wide face-blindness/prosopagnosia? Are there examples of cultures that can’t apply the Gaze heuristic, or can’t subitize?
This is for reasoning about criticisms to universal grammar, in particular the lack of recursion in the Pirahã language, so that one is kind of begging the question. The closest I can come up with at the moment (which really isn’t very close at all) is the high incidence of perfect pitch amongst native speakers of tonal languages.