How children pick up a language: denying Chomsky 2 (Humans)

by dhw, Sunday, September 11, 2016, 13:09 (2994 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Because in the pattern of common descent, species appear without short steps, but the changes are not giant. The human leap of difference is giant, so extraordinarily large the leap is a difference in kind, and therefore strongly suggests an intervention.
dhw: Please explain what sort of intervention you are talking about. Are you saying that humans and apes do not have common ancestry, and humans were specially created? […] Degree versus kind makes no difference if - as you have consistently argued - every innovation and natural wonder required your God's preprogramming or intervention. So why single out human language if intervention is all you're concerned with?-DAVID: Humans and apes did descend from the same animals. The intervention is very obvious. Rapid Human development of a different anatomic skeletal posture, of a different vocal anatomy, of a large brain with self-aware consciousness are all parts of the evidence. We developed language tamed fire and control the whole of Earth. Apes are still apes little changed over six-eight million years. Is the evolution of humans purely chance? Not in my eyes.-I doubt if any of us would dispute the astonishing range and scale of human abilities. In my previous post, I tried to show how humans have developed various inherited forms of animal behaviour beyond all recognition. According to you, however, no innovation or natural wonder is purely by chance, and I agree. My proposal is that they were engineered by the possibly God-given intelligence of cells/cell communities. But once more, if for example you think your God also intervened to teach other species to communicate in their own unique ways, or to build their unique nests, why single out human language or even human anatomy as “part of the evidence”? EVERY complexity is part of the evidence for you. -May I make a tentative suggestion? Could it be that your insistence on “difference in kind, not degree” has nothing to do with proving that humans are the product of intervention and are not the product of chance, but has everything to do with your theory that God created life in order to produce humans? Although you cannot find any rational, logical pattern to gear the higgledy-piggledy history of life on Earth to the emergence of a single species, you cannot bear the thought that your God might possibly have given organisms the wherewithal to design their own evolution. Humans must have been the purpose from the very beginning, your God has always maintained control, and any other hypothesis fails to match your own personal interpretation of his mind and modus operandi. Just a tentative suggestion to explain why you are so keen to separate one intervention from all the others.