More Denton: A new book; language (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, March 14, 2016, 15:08 (3176 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: How can there be a “complete” theory when we don't have all the facts? These are the subjects we've been discussing for the last eight years, so you really don't need to keep on sniping at Darwin or propping yourself up on Nagel!-My 'sniping' at Darwin is to reduce your dependence on him. He made a tremendous contribution based on the evidence he had, and it turns out most of his suppositions are wrong, and you now admit them. RM and NS don't explain evolution. His key remaining contribution is the acceptance of common descent, but not how it works.-> dhw: I have always admitted that your side of the discussion is possible, though some of the details seem less likely to me than others. This is AgnosticWeb, not AtheistWeb.-I know.- Now I'm returning to Denton and language. He clearly relies on the research of Chomsky and Pinker, but primarily the former. They support his claim that language is a saltation: all very young children come with a language construction guide within their brains, so that all of Earth's thousands of languages have the same grammar, syntax patterns and recursive sentence structures. Further no genes have been found that cover language development, and language involves multiple 'modules' within the brain. Therefore, Denton notes the appearance of language required first the growth of the size and capacity of the brain to supply the necessary areas that are used for it. There are no prior homologs, but I'm sure you will point out that most animals make meaningful sounds which in your mind will mitigate Denton's point. This again is different in kind. A horse nickers at me to say hello, but we don't go on to discuss breakfast! He uses body language for that.-There are no prior homologs for human language. Of course we only know current history to see expressions of language, but he claims no one has expressed an evolutionary mechanism for its development. One major reason is the small human population in the past with a long time between generations and the strong probability that language developed in the past 200,000 years. It would need a machine gun fire of mutations to create the complexity we see in such a short time.-He quotes comments by Tattersall and Gould as supporting the possibility of saltation.-More evidence of difference in kind, and perhaps God's hand. Denton is agnostic and very anti-Darwin.