Evolution of Language (General)

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 30, 2019, 14:53 (1632 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You seem to be supporting my approach. We had the brain to develop language with grammar rules, and then they developed by usage of word sounds.

dhw: I have refined your own statement, which ended with you agreeing with my statement! There is no disagreement between us on the above. The disagreement is as follows, though this again takes us away from language in particular to evolution in general:

dhw: The difference between us is that you think your God preprogrammed or dabbled each expansion in anticipation of new demands, whereas I propose a natural sequence of brain responding to new demands - which I see as one logical cause of all evolutionary change, the other being exploitation of new opportunities.

DAVID: You always use Darwin in your thinking: Nature's demands drive evolution.

dhw: You’ve left out exploitation of new conditions, and I will remind you that I also subscribe to Margulis’s theory of cooperation as a crucial factor in evolutionary development. You seem to think that the very mention of Darwin somehow eradicates the logic of the thinking. I wish you would consider the argument itself. You now digress from language altogether and try to find a butterfly/moth example to prove that your God makes changes in anticipation of demand. I admire your research, but this is a very time-consuming exercise which, as it turns out, provides confirmation of my own view anyway. Here are the relevant quotes:

"Their findings show that flowering plants did drive much of these insects’ diversity. In a surprise twist, however, multiple moth lineages evolved “ears” millions of years before the existence of bats, previously credited with triggering moths’ development of hearing organs.”
“This study helps us see if prior hypotheses line up, and what we find is that the plant hypothesis does [dhw: one up for cooperation], but the bat hypothesis does not.”

This is the point at which you think the example supports you. It doesn’t.

“The ancestor of butterflies was likely nocturnal, and our results indicate that butterflies became day-flying in the Late Cretaceous (∼98 Ma). Moth hearing organs arose multiple times before the evolutionary arms race between moths and bats, perhaps initially detecting a wide range of sound frequencies before being co-opted to specifically detect bat sonar. (David's bold)

dhw: And there is your answer, kindly bolded by yourself. Moths are nocturnal. It’s therefore perfectly logical to assume that they needed “ears” if they were to function smoothly in the darkness. When bats came on the scene, their already existing ears (previously used to help them work in the dark) had to find ways of dealing with the new threat, or they would perish.

DAVID: […] This shows what can be present before its use by God's design of evolution.

dhw: No it doesn't. Your authors explicitly (and perfectly logically) allow for the possibility that moths used their ears before bats came on the scene, to detect a wide range of sound frequencies to help them in their nocturnal way of life, and then they adapted their “ears” to combat the new threat.

And what provided an original species of moths and later bats with ears at the start? Assuming needed ears requires anticipatory design, doesn't it?

DAVID: Brain first, use second, as in the development of language. Demands of evolution drive adaptations, not giant steps in evolution as in speciation, which are much more than accumulations of adaptations. I still say Darwin is dead except for our evolutionary descent from common ancestors.

dhw: I have already agreed many times over that we do not know to what extent cell communities are capable of the innovations required for speciation. (You told us, however, that James Tour says cells easily create something new all the time.) But you were trying to prove that your God made changes in anticipation of new problems, whereas the example shows quite clearly that this was simply an adaptation of an already functioning organ in response to a new problem.

I asked above, how did speciating cell committees know ears would be needed when the new organisms arrived on the scene? Requires analysis of future needs, which Darwin-thinking folks consider magically happening, like Margulis. You are still full Darwin, and don't recognize the problem.