  In light of all this, it is important to recognize that Chomsky’s advances undercut both these supposed shortcomings of Nativism. On the first point, Chomsky repeatedly stressed that claims about internalized grammars and universal grammar were unexceptional empirical hypotheses about the internal causes of the observational evidence. The question of what is built in and what needs to be learned is a straightforward scientific question. It goes without saying that there is no hint of the supernatural in Chomsky’s linguistics: we have the innate structures we do because we are evolved biological organisms.