Origin of Language; second afterthought (Origins)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 15, 2015, 10:18 (3508 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: ...it is patently absurd for anyone to claim they know how long it normally takes for apes to evolve into humans. 
DAVID: The Wistar Institute's presentations have never been refuted. Judgments about human mutation rates are published from time to time as relatively accurate assessments.
dhw: How can you refute a hypothesis about or assess the accuracy of judgements on events without precedent or points of comparison? Besides, once again, we are not dealing with random mutations.-DAVID: Purposeful mutations mean teleology. Are you joining me?-If by teleology you mean that certain phenomena are best explained in terms of purpose rather than cause, yes - that is the whole point of my inventive mechanism hypothesis, the purpose being survival and/or self-improvement. If you mean evidence for the existence of God, I remain agnostic.-DAVID: Epigenetics research tell us that organisms do adapt and subsequent generations carry those adaptations. As I've noted before this means changes are environmentally driven by changing environmental challenges. This is still a chance driven evolution, in which the odds for human consciousness seem insurmountable.-This means you are once more faced with the question whether your God organized environmental change. If he didn't, he left evolution to chance, or he continuously dabbled, which = Creationism. The occasional dabble is always a possibility, but that would suggest to me that either things weren't going to plan, or there was no plan. According to you, even the odds against the weaverbird's nest seem insurmountable.-DAVID: You keep skipping over the knowledge we have about the stages of development. Tell me about the conditions that told the larynx to drop well before speech developed. Speech also required a brain to learn speech. Your claim seems to be all of this happened because the environment demanded it?!-Apes also have brains and their own form of speech. I thought I'd explained the condition. My suggestion (claim is far too strong) is that whatever it was that caused a group of apes to descend from the trees (if that's what happened) set in motion a process whereby “with their ever expanding intelligence and acquisition of information”, they “needed a more sophisticated method of communicating”. That was the condition that “told the larynx to drop” etc. Adaptation proves that organisms can change their structures according to need. Innovation demands a far more drastic reorganization than adaptation, but the same mechanism may have been at work. 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.-dhw: I offer a mechanism which is known to be capable of adaptation and may therefore also be capable of invention.
DAVID: "May therefore", without recognizing the coordination of stages of development which reek of purpose is very unreasonable to me.-Cell communities coordinate purposefully in astonishing ways, as you have demonstrated repeatedly on your Nature's Wonders thread. In cases such as the monarch butterfly's lifestyle, the spider's silk, the weaverbird's nest, you have rejected the possibility of autonomous invention, and insisted that either God preprogrammed them 3.7 billion years ago, or dabbled, or gave them a list of options and preprogrammed them to choose the right one. These explanations do not sound more reasonable to me than God giving organisms the wherewithal to do their own inventing.