Evolution: a different view (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, May 15, 2015, 22:33 (3479 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Muscles can be made to grow with exercise; we know that many organisms change their structure in order to adapt.
DAVID: How does one adapt to something that is not present, the ability to speak rudimentary language. Once the changes appear, then one can see the progression you bring up by magical thinking and wishing.-dhw: Firstly, your objection applies to all innovations, and the answer I have suggested is that all the cell communities cooperate to enable the innovation to function. Secondly, your assumption that our ancestors did not “speak rudimentary language” is quite extraordinary.-DAVID: Perhaps you haven't noticed it but I have fully stated that McCrone describes how he thinks H. habilis and H. erectus spoke in their rudimentary language. And certainly we know that monkeys have hoots and grunts that have meaning to them. They are thoroughly described. Early hominids did the same thing, obviously.
-Then why did you ask: “How does one adapt to something that is not present, the ability to speak rudimentary language”? The ability to speak rudimentary language was already present.
 
DAVID: The point you refuse to accept/respect is that the very special preparations anatomically developed for future language introduced danger and the current language abilty began about 50-100,000 years ago.-I have discussed the danger earlier. Why do you assume that the very special preparations were made thousands of years before they were used? How do you know that the variety of sounds did not increase as the anatomy changed? Or that the anatomy was not changed by the need our ancestors had for a wider variety of sounds to communicate their ever increasing knowledge? What record do you have of language that was used 150,000 years ago? 200,000 years ago? 500,000 years ago? 
	
dhw And I still don't know why you think it must have hung around for (hundreds of) thousands of years doing nothing, as if our ancestors all stopped talking to one another.
DAVID: I repeat, have you followed everything I have written? It hung around all those years not being used at the level it was made for in advance. That is the key to the concept. -How can you or anyone know that when the vocal structure reached its present state, our ancestors did not use it in precisely the same way that we do, but the sounds they then produced increased in complexity in exactly the same way as the languages we now speak and write have increased in complexity since we were first able to record them?
 
DAVID: You must say it looks as if the anatomic changes were planned for in advance of our complex language.-Or the anatomic changes took place because our ancestors needed them to develop an increasingly complex language, just as anatomic changes take place when conditions dictate change or death (= adaptation). That would be how an autonomous inventive mechanism would work: cells cooperating to create improvements, and in this case no doubt improvements upon improvements.