Evolution of Language (General)

by dhw, Saturday, October 26, 2019, 12:58 (1641 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Do you honestly believe they were incapable of using sounds to organize themselves for all their activities, pass information to one another, make comments, communicate generally?

DAVID: The expert linguists think it took lots of time to develop rules of grammar. I'm sure they used sound-alike 'words' and gestures and slowly dev eloped, never all at once, which is impossible.

You don’t need to be an expert to know that it took lots of time to develop grammar! And who on earth has ever said that language developed all at once????

dhw: Yes, evolution takes time, but that does not mean there was no progress for 100,000 years. We have no way of knowing!

DAVID: Probably minor progress.

dhw:Progress is progress. I find it absurd to state that the apparatus must have lain “fallow” (see below) for 100,000 years when there is not one iota of evidence to call on.

QUOTE: "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: It progressed as above.

I am asking how anyone can possibly know that it did NOT progress (i.e. “lay fallow”) for 100,000 years. I presume you now agree with me. Thank you.

QUOTE: "As a result, the use of language and of any of its putative precursors has to be inferred from indirect proxy evidence furnished principally by archaeology."

dhw: […] I have no doubt that language evolves in accordance with an ever increasing range of things to be expressed. We have no way of knowing what the range was 200,000, 175,000,150,000, or 100,000 years ago, and this "major difficulty" is not resolved by "inferences from indirect proxy evidence".

DAVID: But that is what the linguists write! They may have used sound-alike, like mimicking the sound of an ax striking. Our word 'chop' sounds like that.

Of course they “may” have used onomatopoeic words, but there is no linguist on earth who can tell you that they didn’t use other sounds as well to communicate ideas, feelings, intentions, decisions etc.

DAVID: But it is humans using their new brain that evolved language, not evolution itself.

dhw: Evolution is a description of the process. It doesn’t have a mind of its own! As a believer in common descent, I would argue that all evolution is the result of new uses of existing organs, as in pre-whales’ new use of their legs to evolve flippers. I propose that the newly complexified brain (it was not a new brain) evolved because of new demands, and so did language.

DAVID: For H. sapiens it was a large just in size of 200 cc as well as all teh new complexity.

I have suggested that there must have been a stage at which the capacity of the existing brain was not great enough to fulfil all the demands being made on it. Additional cells were required – hence expansion. And just to anticipate your usual comment, as endless expansion would not have been possible, the cells improved their efficiency to such a degree that there has even been a small contraction in modern man.

DAVID: Needs do not automatically design answers. That is your leftover from Darwin.

dhw: Of course needs don’t design anything! I propose that it is the organism which designs its response to a need! And to anticipate your usual objection, it may have been your God who gave organisms the autonomous ability to design their own responses.

DAVID: Your usual neutral answer since you are not willing to explain design.

I would dearly love to be able to explain design. I am not willing to accept either the theory that the first cells that formed the basis of all subsequent life were designed by chance (I am not an atheist), or the theory that they were designed by an unknown, sourceless, eternal, immaterial conscious mind (I am not a theist). One way or the other, I must be wrong, but that does not mean you are right. Yes, agnostics are neutral.