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

by dhw, Wednesday, July 31, 2019, 12:24 (1943 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: We are in your words, 'immeasurably more complex and advanced'. This is exactly why Adler argued for God since we are different in kind not degree. You are still touting degree as an agnostic, ignoring the underlying argument.

The subject is language, and I am talking to you and not to Adler. Are you really saying that the complexities of human language prove that God exists, whereas the complexities of animal, insect, bird and cellular language do not? You use our complexities to bolster your case for anthropocentric evolution. You use design to bolster your case for God.

QUOTES: 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.”

dhw: 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: Archaeology judges aesthetic evidences of brain uses, and use that evidence to infer when language might have appeared.

Totally inadequate. Once more, do you really believe that for 100,000 years H. sapiens lived, loved, hunted, protected himself etc. etc. without communicating? And do you really believe that if he did communicate, he did not use the physical means at his disposal?

DAVID: The bold strongly points out my position that the brain appears with established complexity and later it is learned to be used.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: I have. Provide the instrument and let the organism learn to use it. You can't play a piano unless there is one in your house.

The proposal I object to here is that the instrument was not used for 100,000 years. How can you learn to play the piano without playing the piano?