Either Matt Ridley has misunderstood Steven Pinker or Jazzo's summary of Matt Ridley's book misrepresents Matt Ridley.
As I understand him, Steven Pinker's position (derived as has been noted from Chomsky) is that what is instinctual is not the particular rules of a particular language, but some sort of knowledge of what sort of syntactical and other rules are possible. Thus the child instinctively knows that adjectives could come before or after a noun and will then work out which is true for the particular language he or she is learning. The child also instinctively knows, for example, that languages do not form questions by pronouncing all the even-numbered words in a sentence backwards, and so he or she doesn't use that as a hypothesis for working out how the language concerned forms questions. In other words children innately know what clues to listen for when they are learning a language, but they still have to learn the syntax and other aspects of the particular language spoken around them.
Bingley
