Chimps'r' not us: they do not use speech or language (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 30, 2019, 07:18 (1945 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTES: “Distilling the meaning of those various sounds and gestures when put together, however, will be a much more challenging and drawn-out task.”

"Indeed, and it’s a task no ape would think to do. But we are expected to avoid considering the significance of that fact. And, to preserve the truthiness of the fairy tale, most readers gladly comply."

DAVID: We may look somewhat alike in body shape and form, but we are vastly different, despite all the attempts to try to make us seem much less different than we are. Our difference strongly suggests there is a God.

As regards language, if you ONLY use the word to denote human language, then of course chimps don’t have it. But some of us would say that ALL organisms have their own language, and there is plenty of evidence that the sounds, gestures, chemical emissions and movements used by other organisms serve the same purpose as human language. i.e. to communicate with their own species. No one could possibly deny that our human language is immeasurably more complex and advanced, but for the life of me I can’t see why this should be regarded as “strongly” indicative that there is a God. I thought you wanted to convince us that it is “strongly” indicative that your God’s one and only purpose was to produce us, and the poor old chimp was only there, chattering away to his mates, so that he could eat or be eaten until your God finally came up with the one and only organism he actually wanted to design.

Under "Big brain evolution"

Quotes: Wherever in Africa language may have been invented, all that was required for its spread was that recipient populations had the potential to acquire and exhibit the new behavior. That potential had probably arisen in the neural rewiring that occurred as part of the radical developmental reorganization that produced anatomically modern Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago. Language acquisition would almost certainly have been biologically possible for members of any structurally recognizable Homo sapiens population. (DAVID’S bold)

In our view, as well as in Berwick and Chomsky’s, the potential for modern human cognition was almost certainly born some 200,000 years ago with anatomical Homo sapiens. The archaeological indications are that this new potential lay fallow for upwards of 100,000 years, until it was activated by a cultural stimulus of some kind. (DAVID’s bold)

[…] They bolster this position with Riny Huybregts’s recent conjecture that “the language faculty emerged with Homo sapiens, or shortly thereafter, but externalization in one form or another must have been a later development.”

I don’t understand this at all. The purpose of spoken language is communication, which means externalization. What archaeological indications can prove that early H. sapiens did not communicate? (Perhaps this is explained elsewhere?)

DAVID: Note my bolds: brain capacity first, then language develops, not as dhw proposes, which is a drive to spoken communication changes the existing brain so language can appear.

I do not believe for one second that H. sapiens’ immediate predecessors did not communicate, or that he himself did not communicate for 100,000 years. ALL organisms communicate at all times – that is essential to their continued existence. The means are limited by their anatomies, but I would indeed regard it as far more logical that human speech organs would have changed in accordance with need (like pre-whale legs turning into flippers) than there being a sudden change by sheer chance (random mutation) or by divine preprogramming /dabbling. I don’t suppose you’d like to give us your theory as to why your God allegedly made the anatomical changes “appear” 100,000 years before they were needed, would you?