Origin of Language (Origins)

by dhw, Monday, April 06, 2015, 12:04 (3307 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: However and whenever, language syntax seems to e universal throughout the very many human languages and built in at birth. Up to age 8-10 children can sop them up like a sponge and without an accent appearing. It allows us to think in word concepts and express the most complex of ideas, and only we humans have it. It involved many changes in tongue muscles, changing the shape of the palate and throat, dropping the larynx so inhaling food became a problem, requiring the development of a trap door over the main airway that closes it off as we swallow. It requires short clipped bursts of air carefully produced to express the sounds. Grunts and bellows and barks are not like it at all.This is a major example as to why I cannot accept unguided and unplanned evolution.-Thank you for bringing a piece of serious scholarship to the debate, though I know you have described all this before. Just a very minor disagreement: accents appear much earlier than 8-10. No-one would question the complexity of human language, as opposed to that of other animals - just as no-one would question the complexity of our technology, our society, or our ability to learn, create, interpret etc. Our superior intelligence has led to all these attributes, enabling us to outstrip the abilities of our fellow animals to an almost immeasurable degree. But we should never lose sight of the fact that all of these abilities are inherited from the animal kingdom, no matter how much more sophisticated they have become.-As always, I agree that the necessary physical changes can hardly have been the result of random mutations. Whatever it was that led a group of apes to descend from the trees (if that's what happened) and start the whole process of “humanization” would undoubtedly have required an increasingly complex form of communication to make use of an ever expanding volume of information (conventional use of the word). Perhaps this is where the inventive mechanism would have come into play, changing structures in the same way as it changes structures in response to environmental pressures or opportunities. Your idea of “guided” or ”planned” evolution entails God preprogramming the changes to tongue, palate, throat, larynx etc. 3.7 thousand million years in advance, along with the weaverbird's nest. Your alternative is God doing a dabble - and if he exists, there is no reason why he shouldn't have done that, since he would have dabbled in the first place to create the inventive mechanism. But that causes problems for your preconceived notion that he planned humans from the start and always knew exactly what he was doing. Of course, if the mechanism is autonomous, it would have made its own adjustments, as the need arose. We are back to the vexed question of evolutionary innovation.