On a completely different note, and to continue a bit with the
creole argument: I'm just reading up on Salikoko Mufwene, who tells a very different story from Bickerton. He argues that "creoles have developed by the same restructuring processes that mark the evolutions of noncreole languages" and that "contact is an important factor in all such developments" (i.e., he treats all language change as driven by contact and competition - be it among same-language sociolects or among varieties of different languages).
Source: S. Mufwene,
The ecology of language evolution, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 1
(I haven't read the book yet, but I'm reading a paper by him on population movements and contacts in language evolution, and quite like what I've read so far.)
So even within creolistics, there are perfectly good rival accounts of the formation of creoles that do not pressupose anything like an UG. I suspected as much when it started to dawn on me that the story of creole formation was probably not quite as simple and clear-cut as Bickerton would have it, but it's nice to see there is actual research that bears out at least part of my ramblings.
ETA: Mufwene argues that the notion of an abrupt development of creoles from pidgins is a itself a myth (so much for my confident assertion at the beginning of the thread that this is well-established ...
):
"History suggests, instead, a gradual development from the colonial koiné ancestors spoken as vernaculars by the Creole populations of both European and non-European descent in the homestead communities that preceded the plantation communities."
("Population movements and contacts in language evolution",
Journal of language contact, 2007, p. 5; link to pdf
here)
edited for grammar