Origin of Language; second afterthought (Origins)

by dhw, Thursday, April 16, 2015, 20:14 (3292 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Innovation in general, though, does not have to be the result of need - it can also happen because of new opportunities offered by a change in the environment. Once more, the purpose is survival and/or self-improvement. We don't know why the apes descended, but if fins could be changed to legs, I don't see why a larynx couldn't be made to drop.-DAVID: Very hopeful and iffy suggestion. I don't buy it. Fins to legs required enormous changes. The larynx dropped but is not present on fossils, since it is soft tissue. The only fossil evidence is from the arched palate starting to appear at 1.5 million years ago. Speech possibly appearing at 100,000 years ago. I look at this as good planning and not fitting your hoped for 3rd way of producing evolution.-I know you don't buy it. You think it was all separately created (by dabbling) or planned 3.7 billion years ago in a programme inserted into the first living cells, along with the weaverbird's nest, the spider's silk, the monarch's lifestyle, the western grey whale's migration (I presume), and a zillion other innovations and activities too complex for anything but God to devise. How hopeful and iffy is that? -dhw: Cell communities coordinate purposefully in astonishing ways, as you have demonstrated repeatedly on your Nature's Wonders thread..... These explanations do not sound more reasonable to me than God giving organisms the wherewithal to do their own inventing.-DAVID: I'll stick with God.-I have offered you God as the possible inventor of the mechanism. You mean you'll stick with your hugely hopeful, awfully iffy 3.7-billion-year computer programme and an occasional dabble.