We seem to be arguing over a minor point. All knowledge comes from a combination of evolution and learning. We disagree about how much comes from one or the other.

Well, earlier, the way you had stated your position, it looked like you were saying that all knowledge acquisition (or nearly all) comes from sense data, and children use some method, superior to scientific experimentation, to maximally exploit that data. If you grant a role for evolution to be "passing correct answers" to human minds, then yes, our positions are much closer than I had thought.

But still, it's not enough to say "evolution did it". You would have to say how the process of evolution -- which works only via genes -- gains that knowledge and converts it into a belief on the part of the organism. Your research program, as you've described it, mentions nothing about this.

I'll say one thing about the POTS argument, though. ... they might be oversimplifying the data vs. competence comparison. What really happens is that the child absorbs a huge amount of visual and motor data, as well as a relatively smaller amount of linguistic data, and comes out with sophisticated competence in all three domains. So it may very well be that the linguistic competence is built on top of the visual and motor competences: the learning algorithm builds modules to understand visual reality, justified by the massive amount of visual data that is available, and then is able to reuse these modules to produce sophisticated linguistic competence in spite of the impoverished linguistic data source. Language, in this view, is a thin wrapper over the representations built by the learning algorithm for other purposes.

The problem of vision (inference of a 3-D scene from a 2-D image) is ill-posed and has an even more intractable search space. It doesn't seem like a child's brain (given the problem of local optima) even has enough time to reach the hypothesis that a 3-D scene is generating the sense data. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong by seeing an algorithm that would identify the right hypothesis without "cheating" (i.e. being told where to look, which is what I claim evolution does).

This argument is supported by the existence of mirror neurons.

How so? Mirror neurons still have to know what salient aspect of the sense data they're supposed to be mirroring. It's not like there's a one-to-one mapping between "monkey see" and "monkey do".