Evolution and humans: our speech is highly complex (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 02, 2018, 14:16 (2364 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID’s comment: All the hoopla about possible ape or monkey speech pals beside these findings. Like our consciousness our speech mechanism is amazingly complex and was developed from an enlarged brain ready to learn about 50+ thousand years ago , after our arrival 315,000 years ago. Earlier in our evolution our palate started to arch and our larynx began dropping, both to the advanced positions they have today. Why did that happen unless the future was planned for by a designer?

dhw: Perhaps it happened because as humans learned more, they found they needed more sounds to convey what they were learning. A dualist who believes in a thinking soul would argue that it is the soul and not the brain that “learns”, and the soul instructs the brain to give material expression to its thoughts, and the brain passes the message on to the rest of the body. Just as we know that new thoughts can make changes to the brain, the demands of the dualist’s soul would also result in changes to the rest of the body (as opposed to your God having preprogrammed the changes 3.8 billion years ago, or popping in to do a bit of one-to-one fiddling). The same process would apply to the materialistic section of my theory of intelligence, in which the cell communities of the brain engender thought and also implement and express thought through their connections to the rest of the body. We know for a fact that cell communities adapt to changing demands. We don’t know to what extent they are capable of doing this, but I would say that an arching palate and a dropping larynx are not major innovations – they are adaptations to the need for a wider variety of sounds.

The Bible for me is the book : "The Ape That Spoke" by John McCrone, in which he describes the massive changes in anatomy and all the muscles involved to produced today's clipped speech of words at high speed. How many mutations do you think are needed to drop the larynx and invent the epiglottis at the same time to provide the necessary prevention for choking? Both changes occurred simultaneously in the fossil found, not a chance occurrence. I've described all this in the past.