At Phys.org: Genes and languages aren’t always found together, says new study

Whatever CD, split hairs if you must but I'll gladly let my comment, with references, at 26 stand. Again, Neanderthals are now known to have been able to interbreed with humans and, therefore, the Christian is fully justified in believing Neanderthals were human instead of some brutish ancestor as was falsely portray for decades by Darwinists. I.e. The fact of the matter is that 'brutish' Neanderthals were ‘invented’ by Darwinists, via their usual ‘just-so stories’, to fill a yawning chasm in the fossil record between the ape-like and the human-like fossils. See post 26 for references. bornagain77

CD at 34, Really? Then stop reading. I, for one, get a lot of information from Ba77. And so what if cut and paste occurs? People do that to make their point(s) and include links to the original source material. Nothing wrong with that. relatd

BA77 This is your original comment: "CD appeals to an article about neanderthals (sic)..." The Coolidge article is not "about" Neanderthals. Neanderthals are mentioned parenthetically related to human brain size--that's it. That mention does not "an article about neanderthals" make. As usual, you perseverate on minutiae and miss the larger picture. But I give up, you win. I can't drag myself through another of your cut and paste tracts......... chuckdarwin

CD, "BA77 You are unbelievable. The review I linked to by Coolidge has nothing to do with Neanderthals.",,, Well CD, perhaps you should take your own advice and read the articles that you cite? Coolidge, in the article that you yourself linked to, does indeed reference Neanderthals to support his belief that Human language 'emerged' gradually.

I suppose we must forgive such a superimposition because the figure is labeled “A crude plot….,” but nonetheless, it seems unforgivable since paleoneurologists have repeatedly shown not only about a 10% bigger brain in Neandertals than extant Homo sapiens but also parietal enlargement in the latter but not the former (e.g., Bruner, 2004, 2010). That there is empirical ‘neurophysiological’ evidence for the parietal lobe involvement in spatial working memory, number appreciation, sense of self, and many other higher cognitive functions seems to me very consequential.

The rest of his article after that reference to Neanderthals is the usual unsubstantiated conjecture, and 'just-so story' telling, as to how our innate capacity for language might have come about. For instance,

When the australopithecines (“Lucy") made the transition to full terrestrial life about 2 million years ago (becoming Homo erectus), bigger brains were again naturally selected for their social uses in bigger groups (i.e., the social brain hypothesis) and for extracting more resources from the environment (i.e., the extractive foraging hypothesis). Then, a genetic event (epigenetic or otherwise) did occur in the recent ancestors of Homo sapiens such as Homo idaltu around 200,000 years ago. This genetic event was small but significant and may not have occurred directly in the faculty of language per se but in some important and related cognitive mechanism, such as working memory capacity (see Baddeley, 2002; Wynn & Coolidge, 2010)

It is all 'just-so story' telling on his part. Darwinists simply have no real-time empirical evidence to support any of it. For example, Darwinists have no realistic, i.e. 'scientific', clue how a 'simple' neuron accomplishes what it accomplishes, much less can they explain, with any scientific certainty, how it is remotely possible for a chimp-like brain, with trillions upon trillions of neurons, to gradually morph into our significantly different human brain that is capable of abstract, immaterial, language.

"Complexity Brake" Defies Evolution - August 8, 2012 Excerpt: Consider a neuronal synapse -- the presynaptic terminal has an estimated 1000 distinct proteins. Fully analyzing their possible interactions would take about 2000 years. Or consider the task of fully characterizing the visual cortex of the mouse -- about 2 million neurons. Under the extreme assumption that the neurons in these systems can all interact with each other, analyzing the various combinations will take about 10 million years..., even though it is assumed that the underlying technology speeds up by an order of magnitude each year. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/complexity_brak062961.html "The brain is not a supercomputer in which the neurons are transistors; rather it is as if each individual neuron is itself a computer, and the brain a vast community of microscopic computers. But even this model is probably too simplistic since the neuron processes data flexibly and on disparate levels, and is therefore far superior to any digital system. If I am right, the human brain may be a trillion times more capable than we imagine, and “artificial intelligence” a grandiose misnomer." - Brian Ford research biologist – 2009 - The Secret Power of a Single Cell How Computationally Complex Is a Single Neuron? - Sept. - 2021 They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron. Even the authors did not anticipate such complexity. “I thought it would be simpler and smaller,” said Beniaguev. He expected that three or four layers would be enough to capture the computations performed within the cell.,,, Unfortunately, it’s currently impossible for neuroscientists to record the full input-output function of a real neuron, so there’s likely more going on that the model of a biological neuron isn’t capturing. In other words, real neurons might be even more complex. “We’re not sure that between five and eight is really the final number,” said London. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/ NIH Director: Each Neuron is Different - July 11, 2015 Excerpt: Things are astronomically more complicated in the brain, as its “wires” are not merely a conduit of electrical charge but an incredibly complex cell called a neuron. And each neuron does not merely attach to two distant connectors, but rather to hundreds or thousands of connectors. And each connection is nothing like a simple soldering attachment. In the brain they are called synapses and with thousands of molecular-scale switches researchers compare them to microprocessors. But on top of all that, each neuron is different. A hundred billion different, unique neurons, each having a different, unique function. Each forming a different, unique set of synapses. We have not even begun to understand all of this neural circuitry, let alone how to design or build anything like it. And yet (Darwinists) insist it all must have arisen spontaneously, as a result of random mutations. That is not science, that is absurdity. http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2015/07/nih-director-each-neuron-is-different.html The Human Brain Is Something New - Ann Gauger - September 18, 2018 Excerpt: Physically a human brain is three times the size of a chimpanzee brain, and uses considerably more energy. Our brain represents 2 percent of our body weight but uses 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe. However, our brains are not merely enlarged ape brains — there are other differences. Our brains contain neural structures, enhanced wiring, and forms of connectivity among nerve cells not found in any animal.1 Our neurons continue dividing well into adulthood and have a 10-fold higher density than chimps. The human brain is something new, something different, as can be seen by the things we do that animals don’t.,,, David Premack, the late psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania said: "In examining claims of similarity between animals and humans, one must ask: What are the dissimilarities? This approach prevents confusing similarity with equivalence. We follow this approach in examining eight cognitive cases — teaching, short-term memory, causal reasoning, planning, deception, transitive inference, theory of mind, and language — and find, in all cases, that similarities between animal and human abilities are small, dissimilarities large.2" Our brains have vastly more ability than is needed for survival, most notably the capacity for language and abstract thought. We are orders of magnitude beyond anything animals can do. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/09/beyond-adapation-the-human-brain-is-something-new/

bornagain77

There’s a point at which your attempts to be clever demonstrate just how unclever you are

Whoa! I wasn't being clever. I was just making an observation. You deviated from your usual and into content and that is a no-no for you. You then reverted to form, with criticizing, that is what you seem most comfortable at. jerry

BA77 You are unbelievable. The review I linked to by Coolidge has nothing to do with Neanderthals. It is a review of one of Chomsky's articles. Perhaps if you had read the review, you would have realized that. "How to Think like a Neanderthal" is the title of a book by Coolidge and part of his (tongue-in-cheek) tagline for his column with Psychology Today. So, before you pop off again with another polemic against evolution, at least check your facts........ chuckdarwin

Language obviously follows human development. So it is there that one should look to the origin of language. Humans differ from any other animal due. to expression of genes involved in neural development. And it is not a gradual or a small difference. It must have happened fairly quickly. An article on language and development is Tattersall, “An Evolutionary Context for the Emergence of Language,” Language Science 46, Part B (2014): 199–206 Tattersail is mentioned above as part of another reference. The abstract of Tattersail's article

Abstract Modern human beings process information symbolically, rearranging mental symbols according to rules to envision multiple potential realities. They also express the ideas they form using structured articulate language. No other living creature does either of these things, reflecting a qualitative cognitive gulf between modern Homo sapiens and all the other species – including their own closest living relatives – that compose the Great Tree of Life. Yet it is evident that we are descended from a non-symbolic and non-linguistic ancestor. How did this astonishing transformation occur? Scrutiny of the fossil and archaeological records suggests that the transition to symbolic reasoning happened very late in hominid history – indeed, within the tenure of anatomically recognizable Homo sapiens. It was evidently not simply a passive result of the increase in brain size that typified multiple lineages of the genus Homo over the Pleistocene. I thus propose that a brain exaptively capable of complex symbolic manipulation and Universal Grammar was acquired as a byproduct of the major developmental reorganization that gave rise to the anatomically distinctive species H. sapiens, and that this new capacity was later recruited through the action of a cultural stimulus. In evolutionary terms this would have been a rather routine happening: after all, structures must necessarily be in place before they can be used for new purposes. Given the intimate interdependence of modern cognition and language – both are intrinsically symbolic activities – the most plausible cultural trigger for symbolic thought processes was the invention of language in an African isolate of H. sapiens at (very approximately) 100,000 years ago. I enumerate several advantages that language has in this role relative to other putative stimuli such as theory of mind.

How many times did Tattersail beg the question in the above abstract? Essentially it just magically happened. Also Cedric Boeckx and Antonio Benítez-Burraco, “The Shape of the Human Language-Ready Brain,” Frontiers in Psychology 5, Article 282 (2014)

Abstract Our core hypothesis is that the emergence of our species-specific language-ready brain ought to be understood in light of the developmental changes expressed at the levels of brain morphology and neural connectivity that occurred in our species after the split from Neanderthals–Denisovans and that gave us a more globular braincase configuration. In addition to changes at the cortical level, we hypothesize that the anatomical shift that led to globularity also entailed significant changes at the subcortical level. We claim that the functional consequences of such changes must also be taken into account to gain a fuller understanding of our linguistic capacity. Here we focus on the thalamus, which we argue is central to language and human cognition, as it modulates fronto-parietal activity. With this new neurobiological perspective in place, we examine its possible molecular basis. We construct a candidate gene set whose members are involved in the development and connectivity of the thalamus, in the evolution of the human head, and are known to give rise to language-associated cognitive disorders. We submit that the new gene candidate set opens up new windows into our understanding of the genetic basis of our linguistic capacity. Thus, our hypothesis aims at generating new testing grounds concerning core aspects of language ontogeny and phylogeny

Sounds like gobbledygook. Then

Johan J. Bolhuis et al., “How Could Language Have Evolved?,” PLoS Biology 12, no. 8 (2014): e1001934, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934; doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934; Abstract The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000-100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}

And

Philip Lieberman, “Language Did Not Spring Forth 100,000 Years Ago,” PLoS Biology 13, no. 2 (2015) Language evolved over millions of years by Darwinian processes, and its primary role is communication.Speech is the default mode by which we share our thoughts with others. Thecommunicative role of language is apparent in that the neural structures that code a word’s meaning in the brain are activated by the sound pattern of its name [1]. In their essay [2], Bolhuis et al. [2] argue that speech and communication are irrelevant and instead describe a “language faculty” that consists of a single operation, “merge,” which is argued to have suddenly\ come into being 70 to 100 thousand years ago. Bolhuis et al. [2] and Chomsky [3] therefore argue against natural selection playing a role in the evolution of language.

jerry

Belfast @16, Thank you for your insightful, content-rich post! Very much appreciated! Bornagain77 @17, Thank you for your informative reference to the paper, “The mystery of language evolution” and the quotes from Noam Chomsky’s paper. I’m also intrigued by the nature and transfer of information, which I think is poorly understood (Shannon information is about data compression, not information). A famous designer once noted that people seem to instinctively recognize the presence of substantial design by what might be termed, “charm.” When you slide behind the wheel of a modern, well-engineered, design-rich automobile cockpit, you immediately become aware of how everything is natural and convenient. Everything seems to fit like a glove. Everything is convenient and incredibly charming. This didn't just happen by accident. In contrast, one often has the exact opposite experience with modern software and apps, which can be incredibly frustrating. There are good reasons for this and it's not your fault! In fact, I've often been tempted to write some software companies to encourage them to require mandatory drug testing for their designers. (smile) -Q Querius

Ba77, Fictional, "modern" human father to his boys: Now boys. I don't wanna see you hangin' out with those Neanderthal girls. Genesis 2:20 "The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him." relatd

Querius at 25, I made it a point to not talk like the cool kids in high school. I also make it a point to not repeat words and phrases invented by the the Woke Mob, which are easy to identify. relatd

CD appeals to an article about neanderthals to try to get around the sudden appearance of language in humans. But alas, it is now known that Neanderthals and humans could interbreed,

New method confirms humans and Neanderthals interbred - April 8, 2014 Excerpt: Technical objections to the idea that Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of Eurasians have been overcome, thanks to a genome analysis method described in the April 2014 issue of the journal Genetics. http://phys.org/news/2014-04-method-humans-neanderthals-interbred.html

And since it is now known that Neanderthals and humans could interbreed, then the Christian is fully justified in believing Neaderthals were human.

Neanderthal Myth and Orwellian Double-Think - Jeffrey Tomkins PhD. - 2012 Excerpt: Modern humans and Neanderthals are essentially genetically identical. Neanderthals are unequivocally fully human based on a number of actual genetic studies using ancient DNA extracted from Neanderthal remains. The DNA data fully confirms the numerous anatomical studies performed on a wide variety of skeletal remains found in diverse geographical regions across Europe and the Middle East. The anatomical data not only shows that Neanderthals had fully human bone structure, but larger brains and more robust features. In fact, to the uncritical observer, they appear superior to modern humans. http://designed-dna.org/blog/files/3455fa8d785a887abd8316c1505a8b8c-33.php

The fact of the matter is that Neanderthals were 'invented' by Darwinists, via their usual 'just-so stories', to fill a yawning chasm in the fossil record between the ape-like and the human-like.

The Evolution of Neanderthal Spin - Jonathan Witt - November 27, 2019 Excerpt: So why did they (Darwinists) often depict them (Neanderthals) as ape-like? Darwinism desperately needs to fill in a yawning chasm in the fossil record between the ape-like and the human-like. At one point many hoped Neanderthals could serve as a crucial link in that lengthy stretch of missing chain between the fully ape-like and the fully human. Coached by the Darwinian paradigm, many assumed that Neanderthals did. But those uncooperative cave men refused to stoop, got the big head (average brain size slightly larger even than modern humans), and got caught red-handed in the fossil record behaving in various ways like intelligent humans. Neanderthals even appear to have had children with Homo sapiens, with something like one to three percent of their DNA remaining in most modern humans outside of sub-Saharan Africa.,,, https://evolutionnews.org/2019/11/the-evolution-of-neanderthal-spin/ Neanderthals were stereotyped as savages for a century — all because of one French scientist - Sep 20, 2016 Excerpt: Ever since that scientific description was published in 1911, we humans have told the story of Neanderthals in a way that makes us look good: We were smarter, less savage, better equipped to inherit the Earth than the Neanderthal.,,, The dominant narrative about Neanderthals is based on the work of a French paleoanthropologist, Marcellin Boule. Boule is one of the premier paleoanthropologists at the beginning of the 20th century.,,, ,,, all the different characteristics he could have emphasized, he emphasized the primitive. His conclusion is that this Neanderthal is going to walk with a kind of hunched posture. He's going to have really divergent big toes, which is considered a more primitive characteristic. We look at it today and say, "Geez, that was really biased.",,, Later, in the middle to second half of the 20th century, scientists and anthropologists begin to go back and look at Boule's original material. They’re starting to reexamine Neanderthals and look at their culture and look at their sophisticated tool use.,,, We now say, "Oh, look, they have culture. They bury their dead. They can start fires. We're interbreeding. They're more human than we first thought." There was a great publication a couple of months ago that points out Neanderthals carried fire starters. That's fascinating, right? I think that what happens is we keep saying they're more like us. It's a very additive thing. We keep adding all these characteristics. They're not so different from us,,, http://www.vox.com/2016/9/20/12968814/neanderthals-savages-stereotype-boule Review of “Contested Bones” (Part 3 – Chapter 3 “Homo neanderthalensis”) 2-10-2018 by Paul Giem – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2OOt2qFdu4&list=PLHDSWJBW3DNU_twNBjopIqyFOwo_bTkXm&index=3

ChuckyD also stated, "(Chomsky's) “one-step” theory about the development of language via a single mutation has been universally ridiculed by biologist, neuroscientists and developmental psychologists." Okie Dokie ChuckyD, not that morphology and/or phenotype is reducible to mutations to DNA in the first place,

Darwinists simply have no evidence that morphology, and/or biological form, is reducible to mutations to DNA. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/evangelical-scientists-getting-it-wrong/#comment-740247

,,, not that morphology and/or phenotype is reducible to mutations to DNA in the first place, but how many mutations to DNA do you personally think it took to transform a monkey-like brain into a "beyond belief*" human brain that is capable of abstract, (i.e. immaterial), language? 2 mutations? 3 mutations? 4? 5? 6? 7 mutations? etc..,, etc... There is a small problem for you ChuckyD that grows exponentially for every additional mutation that you think was required to produce the "beyond belief*" human brain that is capable of abstract, immaterial, human language,,

The waiting time problem in a model hominin population – 2015 Sep 17 John Sanford, Wesley Brewer, Franzine Smith, and John Baumgardner Excerpt: The program Mendel’s Accountant realistically simulates the mutation/selection process,,, Given optimal settings, what is the longest nucleotide string that can arise within a reasonable waiting time within a hominin population of 10,000? Arguably, the waiting time for the fixation of a “string-of-one” is by itself problematic (Table 2). Waiting a minimum of 1.5 million years (realistically, much longer), for a single point mutation is not timely adaptation in the face of any type of pressing evolutionary challenge. This is especially problematic when we consider that it is estimated that it only took six million years for the chimp and human genomes to diverge by over 5 % [1]. This represents at least 75 million nucleotide changes in the human lineage, many of which must encode new information. While fixing one point mutation is problematic, our simulations show that the fixation of two co-dependent mutations is extremely problematic – requiring at least 84 million years (Table 2). This is ten-fold longer than the estimated time required for ape-to-man evolution. In this light, we suggest that a string of two specific mutations is a reasonable upper limit, in terms of the longest string length that is likely to evolve within a hominin population (at least in a way that is either timely or meaningful). Certainly the creation and fixation of a string of three (requiring at least 380 million years) would be extremely untimely (and trivial in effect), in terms of the evolution of modern man. It is widely thought that a larger population size can eliminate the waiting time problem. If that were true, then the waiting time problem would only be meaningful within small populations. While our simulations show that larger populations do help reduce waiting time, we see that the benefit of larger population size produces rapidly diminishing returns (Table 4 and Fig. 4). When we increase the hominin population from 10,000 to 1 million (our current upper limit for these types of experiments), the waiting time for creating a string of five is only reduced from two billion to 482 million years. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4573302/

Of supplemental note, anyone who thinks the "beyond belief' human brain can possibly be the result of random mutations and natural selection must be on hallucinogenic drugs,

The Human Brain Is 'Beyond Belief' by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * - 2017 Excerpt: The human brain,, is an engineering marvel that evokes comments from researchers like “beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief”1 and “a world we had never imagined.”2,,, Perfect Optimization The scientists found that at multiple hierarchical levels in the whole brain, nerve cell clusters (ganglion), and even at the individual cell level, the positioning of neural units achieved a goal that human engineers strive for but find difficult to achieve—the perfect minimizing of connection costs among all the system’s components.,,, Vast Computational Power Researchers discovered that a single synapse is like a computer’s microprocessor containing both memory-storage and information-processing features.,,, Just one synapse alone can contain about 1,000 molecular-scale microprocessor units acting in a quantum computing environment. An average healthy human brain contains some 200 billion nerve cells connected to one another through hundreds of trillions of synapses. To put this in perspective, one of the researchers revealed that the study’s results showed a single human brain has more information processing units than all the computers, routers, and Internet connections on Earth.1,,, Phenomenal Processing Speed the processing speed of the brain had been greatly underrated. In a new research study, scientists found the brain is 10 times more active than previously believed.6,7,,, The large number of dendritic spikes also means the brain has more than 100 times the computational capabilities than was previously believed.,,, Petabyte-Level Memory Capacity Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.9,,, Optimal Energy Efficiency Stanford scientist who is helping develop computer brains for robots calculated that a computer processor functioning with the computational capacity of the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate properly. This is comparable to the output of a small hydroelectric power plant. As amazing as it may seem, the human brain requires only about 10 watts to function.11 ,,, Multidimensional Processing It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc. The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materializes out of the sand and then disintegrates.13 He also said: We found a world that we had never imagined. There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.13,,, Biophoton Brain Communication Neurons contain many light-sensitive molecules such as porphyrin rings, flavinic, pyridinic rings, lipid chromophores, and aromatic amino acids. Even the mitochondria machines that produce energy inside cells contain several different light-responsive molecules called chromophores. This research suggests that light channeled by filamentous cellular structures called microtubules plays an important role in helping to coordinate activities in different regions of the brain.,,, https://www.icr.org/article/10186

Verse:

Psalm 139:14 I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well.

bornagain77

Sir Giles @14,

Languages certainly do evolve. Words and phrases mutate and become fixed in the population by a selection process.

I already addressed this in @11. Chuckdarwin @15, Your objection is self-refuting when you think about it. • Humans synthesizing and modifying language is an observed fact. • The “emergence” of language out of no language is not observed. • The origin of the profound human capability for language is not observed. • The development of more and more complex and sophisticated languages from simpler ones is not observed. • The decline of language from complex and sophisticated languages to simpler, less expressive forms is indeed observed. Science is about observation, thus your objections are from faith and ideology. -Q Querius

CD at 15, You're not making any sense. So-called evolution does not have the power to do anything by itself. IF there was a process it was entirely guided by God. Whatever your personal beliefs are, there is no science behind language. Our fictional 'evolutionary cousins' (chimps) had two scientists trying to teach this animal to talk. They finally got it to say "cup," but that's it. Big non-win for so-called evolution. Facts are facts. But made-up stories are not facts. relatd

"Jerry There’s a point at which your attempts to be clever demonstrate just how unclever you are………." But alas, Jerry's criticism of your claim is directly on point. You have ZERO real-time empirical evidence to support your grandiose claims for Darwinian evolution. All you have are 'just-so stories', I.e. Darwinian 'creation myths" bornagain77

Jerry There's a point at which your attempts to be clever demonstrate just how unclever you are.......... chuckdarwin

supplemental notes: The Christian's claim that humans were created by God is on much stronger empirical footing than Darwinists are willing to admit,

Jan. 2022 Fossil Record refutes human evolution https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/at-fox-news-adam-and-eve-are-compatible-with-evolution/#comment-744141 Fossils and Human Evolution (full series) - Casey Luskin - Oct. 2022 https://evolutionnews.org/tag/fossils-and-human-evolution-series/ Like the fossil record, the evidence from genetics, directly contrary to what Darwinists claim, simply does not support the Darwinian ‘narrative’. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/at-evolution-news-did-life-first-arise-by-purely-natural-means/#comment-765765 Darwinists simply have no evidence that morphology, and/or biological form, is reducible to mutations to DNA. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/evangelical-scientists-getting-it-wrong/#comment-740247 Population Genetics falsifies, instead of confirms, Darwinian claims for human evolution https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/christian-darwinists-must-now-backtrack-re-adam-and-eve/#comment-741335 Human exceptionalism falsifies Darwinian claims for human evolution https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/evangelical-scientists-getting-it-wrong/#comment-740249 Darwinists, (in what makes the ‘problem’ of explaining the origin of the human species pale in comparison), have no clue whatsoever why “I” should even come into existence as a “person” with a unique individual subjective conscious experience, but are instead reduced to arguing that my sense of self, my “I”, is merely a ‘neuronal illusion’ Nov. 2022 - https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/at-evolution-news-there-is-no-settled-theory-of-evolution/#comment-770111

bornagain77

ChuckyD holds that the Genesis account of creation is "a non-explanation." Mind you, this blanket criticism of the supposed 'creation myth' from Genesis as a 'non-explanation' is coming from a person who is at a complete loss to explain the origin of even a single functional protein by unguided material processes,,

Origin: Probability of a Single Protein Forming by Chance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_KEVaCyaA Mathematical Basis for Probability Calculations Used in (the film) Origin Excerpt: Putting the probabilities together means adding the exponents. The probability of getting a properly folded chain of one-handed amino acids, joined by peptide bonds, is one chance in 10^74+45+45, or one in 10^164 (Meyer, p. 212). This means that, on average, you would need to construct 10^164 chains of amino acids 150 units long to expect to find one that is useful. http://www.originthefilm.com/mathematics.php

And given that Darwinists are almost, if not completely, reliant on just-so stories, I find it exceedingly rich that ChuckyD would have the audacity to turn around label Genesis a 'creation myth. Virtually the entirety of Darwinian evolution itself is based on 'myths', i.e. on unsubstantiated 'just-so stories',

Sociobiology: The Art of Story Telling – Stephen Jay Gould – 1978 – New Scientist Excerpt: Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers “Just So stories”. When evolutionists study individual adaptations, when they try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just so stories – and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance. https://books.google.com/books?id=tRj7EyRFVqYC&pg=PA530 “... another common misuse of evolutionary ideas: namely, the idea that some trait must have evolved merely because we can imagine a scenario under which possession of that trait would have been advantageous to fitness... Such forays into evolutionary explanation amount ultimately to storytelling... it is not enough to construct a story about how the trait might have evolved in response to a given selection pressure; rather, one must provide some sort of evidence that it really did so evolve. This is a very tall order.…” — Austin L. Hughes, The Folly of Scientism - The New Atlantis, Fall 2012

Frankly ChuckyD, since Judeo-Christian theism, and Judeo-Christian theism alone, uniquely gave birth to modern science, (whereas all other worldviews failed in that endeavor),

The Christian Origins of Science - Jack Kerwick - Apr 15, 2017 Excerpt: Though it will doubtless come as an enormous shock to such Christophobic atheists as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and their ilk, it is nonetheless true that one especially significant contribution that Christianity made to the world is that of science.,,, Stark is blunt: “Real science arose only once: in Europe”—in Christian Europe. “China, Islam, India, and ancient Greece and Rome each had a highly developed alchemy. But only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry. By the same token, many societies developed elaborate systems of astrology, but only in Europe did astrology develop into astronomy.”,,, In summation, Stark writes: “The rise of science was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God. In order to love and honor God, it is necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork. Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these principles.” He concludes: “These were the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and nowhere else.” https://townhall.com/columnists/jackkerwick/2017/04/15/the-christian-origins-of-science-n2313593

,,, and since the Genesis 'creation myth' uniquely got the creation of the entire universe right, (whereas all other worldviews failed in that most crucial 'prediction' for the origin of the entire universe), if I were you ChuckyD, I think I humble myself and take the supposed 'creation myth' in Genesis a bit more seriously, and not be so quick to 'hand-wave' it all off. Especially since Darwinism itself is almost, if not completely, reliant on unsubstantiated 'myths', i.e. evidence-free 'just-so story' telling.

“My argument,” Dr. Penzias concluded, “is that the best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.” - Dr. Arno Penzias, Nobel Laureate in Physics – co-discoverer Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation – as stated to the New York Times on March 12, 1978 INTERVIEW WITH ARNO PENZIAS AND ROBERT WILSON “Certainly there was something that set it all off,,, I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match Genesis” - Robert Wilson – Nobel laureate – co-discoverer Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation - Fred Heeren, Show Me God (Wheeling, Ill.: Daystar, 2000), "The question of 'the beginning' is as inescapable for cosmologists as it is for theologians...there is no doubt that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing" - George Smoot and Keay Davidson, Wrinkles in Time, 1993, p.189. - George Smoot is a Nobel laureate in 2006 for his work on COBE "Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy." - Robert Jastrow – Founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute – ‘God and the Astronomers’ - Pg.15 - 2000 “The Bible is frequently dismissed as being anti-scientific because it makes no predictions. Oh no, that is incorrect. It makes a brilliant prediction. For centuries it has been saying there was a beginning. And if scientists had taken that a bit more seriously they might have discovered evidence for a beginning a lot earlier than they did.” - John Lennox

Also see:

The Unique Cosmology of Genesis 1 Against Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian Parallels –by Michael G. Hasel, Gerhard F. Hasel - May 1, 2015 Excerpt: the Genesis cosmology and the Genesis creation account come to us without rival. Nowhere in the ancient Near East or Egypt has anything similar been recorded. https://www.grisda.org/the-unique-cosmology-of-genesis-1

bornagain77

That is not an explanation for the emergence of human language, but an unfounded assertion for which no data or theory exists.”

Sounds like ChuckDarwin is criticizing the modern theory of Evolution. ChuckDarwin got off base here. He just undermined any natural theory of Evolution. Chuck is supposed to just mock ID people, not provide a rationale for what they are saying. Aside: there may be some aspects of some languages that are genetic related such as the ability to use clicks or certain pitches to communicate. Then again nearly everyone could learn to do it. jerry

BA77 and Belfast From BA77:

First and foremost, the Christian does not hold that language to be a ’emergent’ property of humans, in the sense that language came about gradually from lower animals, but the Christian, instead, holds that language is an ‘innate’ capacity of humans that is unique and specific to humans. i.e. A unique ‘created capacity’ within humans. A ‘created capacity’ that humans, who are uniquely ‘made in the image of God’, are innately born with.

There we have it: We can only conclude that the "intelligent design" explanation for the emergence of language in humans is completely reliant on the Christian creation myth, i.e., a non-explanation. The best you can do is an "innate" capacity akin to the elusive sensus divinitatis. For the record, similar to Chomsky's meanderings from politics to sociology, his views on the relationship between natural selection and language are all over the map. (See e.g., https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/how-think-neandertal/201501/why-chomsky-is-wrong-about-the-evolution-language). His "one-step" theory about the development of language via a single mutation has been universally ridiculed by biologist, neuroscientists and developmental psychologists. chuckdarwin

ChuckyD at 12 asks, "How does ID explain the emergence of language in humans?" In response to Q's answer, ChuckyD at 15 retorts, "Language “is observed to be intelligently designed?” That is not an explanation for the emergence of human language, but an unfounded assertion for which no data or theory exists." The irony of a Darwinist claiming that something is "an unfounded assertion for which no data or theory exists" is literally dripping off every word that ChuckyD wrote. Especially after Belfast, at 16, then gave us a brief overview of Darwin's rampant 'just-so story' telling trying to account for man's supposedly 'emergent' capacity for language. First and foremost, the Christian does not hold that language to be a 'emergent' property of humans, in the sense that language came about gradually from lower animals, but the Christian, instead, holds that language is an 'innate' capacity of humans that is unique and specific to humans. i.e. A unique 'created capacity' within humans. A 'created capacity' that humans, who are uniquely 'made in the image of God', are innately born with. For instance of this innate 'created capacity' for humans to create language, a unique capacity that Christians believe God gave them,,, after creating Adam and Eve, God brought the animals before Adam "to see what he would name them",

Genesis 2:19 Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.

Moreover, contrary to what ChuckyD claims about the Christian having no evidence, it is the Darwinist himself that has no evidence for his claim that language 'emerged' gradually from lower animals. For instance, as already referenced in post 6, after 4 decades of extensive study several leading Darwinists, who specialize in this area of study, in a paper entitled "The mystery of language evolution", stated that they have, "essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,,"

Leading Evolutionary Scientists Admit We Have No Evolutionary Explanation of Human Language - December 19, 2014 Excerpt: Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,, (Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin, "The mystery of language evolution," Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 5:401 (May 7, 2014).) Casey Luskin added: “It's difficult to imagine much stronger words from a more prestigious collection of experts.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/12/leading_evoluti092141.html

And as Noam Chomsky more clearly stated in this 2017 article, "The capacity for language is species specific, something shared by humans and unique to them. It is the most striking feature of this curious organism, and a foundation for its remarkable achievement,,," and "One fact appears to be well established. The faculty of language is a true species property, invariant among human groups, and unique to humans in its essential properties. It follows that there has been little or no evolution of the faculty since human groups separated from one another,,," and "Our intricate knowledge of what even the simplest words mean is acquired virtually without experience. At peak periods of language acquisition, children acquire about a word an hour, often on one presentation.26 The rich meaning of even the most elementary words must be substantially innate. The evolutionary origin of such concepts is a complete mystery.,,,"

The Galilean Challenge - Noam Chomsky – April 2017 Excerpt: The capacity for language is species specific, something shared by humans and unique to them. It is the most striking feature of this curious organism, and a foundation for its remarkable achievement,,, There has been considerable progress in understanding the nature of the internal language, but its free creative use remains a mystery. This should come as no surprise. In a recent review of far simpler cases of voluntary action, neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian remark, in the case of something so simple as raising one’s arm, that “the detail of this complicated process, which critically involves coordinate and variable transformations from spatial movement goals to muscle activations, needs to be elaborated further. Phrased more fancifully, we have some idea as to the intricate design of the puppet and the puppet strings, but we lack insight into the mind of the puppeteer.”8 The normal creative use of language is an even more dramatic example.,,, One fact appears to be well established. The faculty of language is a true species property, invariant among human groups, and unique to humans in its essential properties. It follows that there has been little or no evolution of the faculty since human groups separated from one another,,, There is little evidence of anything like human language, or symbolic behavior altogether, before the emergence of modern humans.,,, Our intricate knowledge of what even the simplest words mean is acquired virtually without experience. At peak periods of language acquisition, children acquire about a word an hour, often on one presentation.26 The rich meaning of even the most elementary words must be substantially innate. The evolutionary origin of such concepts is a complete mystery.,,, --- Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at MIT. http://inference-review.com/article/the-galilean-challenge

And in 2019 Chomsky, along with colleague Robert Berwick, reiterated the fact that, "The human language faculty is a species-specific property, with no known group differences and little variation. There are no significant analogues or homologues to the human language faculty in other species." and "There is no evidence that great apes, however sophisticated, have any of the crucial distinguishing features of language and ample evidence that they do not.48 Claims made in favor of their semantic powers, we might observe, are wrong."

The Siege of Paris - Robert Berwick & Noam Chomsky - March 2019 Excerpt: Linguists told themselves many stories about the evolution of language, and so did evolutionary biologists; but stories, as Richard Lewontin rightly notes, are not hypotheses, a term that should be “reserved for assertions that can be tested.”4 The human language faculty is a species-specific property, with no known group differences and little variation. There are no significant analogues or homologues to the human language faculty in other species.5,,, How far back does language go? There is no evidence of significant symbolic activity before the appearance of anatomically modern humans 200 thousand years ago (kya).22,,, There is no evidence that great apes, however sophisticated, have any of the crucial distinguishing features of language and ample evidence that they do not.48 Claims made in favor of their semantic powers, we might observe, are wrong. Recent research reveals that the semantic properties of even the simplest words are radically different from anything in animal symbolic systems.49,,, Why only us?,,, We were not, of course, the first to ask them. We echo in modern terms the Cartesian philosophers Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, seventeenth-century authors of the Port-Royal Grammar, for whom language with its infinite combinatorial capacity wrought from a finite inventory of sounds was uniquely human and the very foundation of thought. It is subtle enough to express all that we can conceive, down to the innermost and “diverse movements of our souls.” https://inference-review.com/article/the-siege-of-paris

That Darwinists would be found to have no evidence whatsoever that language emerged gradually should not be all that surprising to find out. Language is the communication of immaterial information between humans. Thus, since Darwinists are wedded to reductive materialism, and seek to explain everything in 'bottom-up' materialistic terms, then Darwinists will be forever stymied in their attempt to explain that which is profoundly immaterial in its foundational essence in materialistic terms. As Stephen Meyer noted, "information is a mass-less quantity. Now, if information is not a material entity, then how can any materialistic explanation account for its origin? How can any material cause explain it’s origin? And this is the real and fundamental problem that the presence of information in biology has posed. It creates a fundamental challenge to the materialistic, evolutionary scenarios because information is a different kind of entity that matter and energy cannot produce."

“One of the things I do in my classes, to get this idea across to students, is I hold up two computer disks. One is loaded with software, and the other one is blank. And I ask them, ‘what is the difference in mass between these two computer disks, as a result of the difference in the information content that they posses’? And of course the answer is, ‘Zero! None! There is no difference as a result of the information. And that’s because information is a mass-less quantity. Now, if information is not a material entity, then how can any materialistic explanation account for its origin? How can any material cause explain it’s origin? And this is the real and fundamental problem that the presence of information in biology has posed. It creates a fundamental challenge to the materialistic, evolutionary scenarios because information is a different kind of entity that matter and energy cannot produce. In the nineteenth century we thought that there were two fundamental entities in science; matter, and energy. At the beginning of the twenty first century, we now recognize that there’s a third fundamental entity; and its ‘information’. It’s not reducible to matter. It’s not reducible to energy. But it’s still a very important thing that is real; we buy it, we sell it, we send it down wires. Now, what do we make of the fact, that information is present at the very root of all biological function? In biology, we have matter, we have energy, but we also have this third, very important entity; information. I think the biology of the information age, poses a fundamental challenge to any materialistic approach to the origin of life.” - Intelligent design: Why can't biological information originate through a materialistic process? - Stephen Meyer - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqiXNxyoof8 --Dr. Stephen C. Meyer earned his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of science from Cambridge University, (Newton's alma mater), for a dissertation on the history of origin-of-life biology and the methodology of the historical sciences.

in other words, Darwinists, with their 'bottom up reductive materialistic framework, simply are not even in the right 'metaphysical ballpark' in order for them to ever understand how and why humans should have a unique capacity for (immaterial) language. Whereas, on the other hand,the Christian Theist holds (immaterial) language, specifically 'speaking' (immaterial) language, to come before physical/material reality itself. Not after. Verse:

Genesis 1:3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Of supplemental note to the foundational relation between sound and light in physics,

Phonon Excerpt: In physics, a phonon,, represents an excited state in the quantum mechanical quantization of the modes of vibrations,, The name phonon,, translates as sound or voice because long-wavelength phonons give rise to sound. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon Concept of Phonon Excerpt: The concept of phonon was introduced by soviet physicist Igor Tamm in 1932. The word phonon was derived from the Greek word phone, which refers to the meaning of sound or voice because long-wavelength phonons result in the production of sound. The name and the word are analogous to the photon. In analogy with the quantum energy, photon, in the electromagnetic field, the name phonon was suggested for the quantum lattice vibrational energy by Frenkel in 1935. Thus, phonons are the quanta of sound just like a photon is a quanta or the packet of energy for electromagnetic waves. https://www.vedantu.com/physics/phonon Engineers make sound (with high enough frequency) to bend light on a computer chip - Nov 26, 2014 Excerpt: "Our breakthrough is to integrate optical circuits in the same layer of material with acoustic devices in order to attain extreme strong interaction between light and sound waves,",, The researchers used the state-of-the-art nanofabrication technology to make arrays of electrodes with a width of only 100 nanometers (0.00001 centimeters) to excite sound waves at an unprecedented high frequency that is higher than 10 GHz, the frequency used for satellite communications. "What's remarkable is that at this high frequency, the wavelength of the sound is even shorter than the wavelength of light. This is achieved for the first time on a chip,",, They are investigating the interaction between single photons (the fundamental quantum unit of light) and single phonons (the fundamental quantum unit of sound). The researcher plan to use sound waves as the information carriers for quantum computing. http://phys.org/news/2014-11-loud-chip.html

Verses:

John 12: 28-30 Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again. The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered: others said, An angel spake to him. Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes.

bornagain77

@Querius @11 “ I expect Darwinists to advance a fantasy about the gradual genetic evolution of language from grunts and squeaks to profound concepts as a result of survival of the fittest and assert this is yet another “proof” of Darwinism.” You are closer than you know. Origin of language WAS a subject discussed by Darwin; and it is necessarily bathed in his evolutionary theory. Necessarily, because if grasshopper’s knees and tiger’s teeth are the result of millions of tiny improvements, then so must language; it cannot be said that language lies elsewhere and apart from mutation and natural selection; because if language doesn’t fit within the paradigm, then, rhetorically, what else does not? It is in chapter 2 of ‘The Descent of Man’ entitled, ‘Comparison of the mental powers of man and the lower animals.’ Here, Darwin set out his stab as to how it applied to language. He laid out his speech theory in stages; the first stage being imitation of natural sounds “I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals..., “ - early man picked up ideas especially listening to birdsong. The second stage was when humans evolved the bird’s capacity for singing. Primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, “probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing ...especially exerted during courtship of the sexes..”(Darwin’s words, not mine - speech evolved to pull the girls.) The third stage was humanity, likely ladies first, working out what information was included in the singing; and this was improved all the time by humanity getting smarter still in that they began to connect sounds with more abstract ideas. This was part of Darwin’s outright rejection of the mind/body dualism theories. His theory on language is one based on analogies, and indistinguishable from smoke from his pipe. Belfast

Querius You are not simply begging my question, you are deliberately avoiding it with your strange digressions. Language “is observed to be intelligently designed?” That is not an explanation for the emergence of human language, but an unfounded assertion for which no data or theory exists. chuckdarwin

Querius: Language is OBSERVED to be intelligently designed (ID). For example, consider Esperanto.

I don’t think anybody is disputing this. It is the source of the capacity for language that is in dispute.

My own native language is ancient, from which a modern language was derived. It did not evolve by mutation and natural selection based on survival of the fittest.

Languages certainly do evolve. Words and phrases mutate and become fixed in the population by a selection process. For example, the word “girl” was originally gender neutral and was applied to children of both genders. But don’t tell those here who get bent out of shape over the current disagreements over the preferred use of personal pronouns. They might faint. Sir Giles

Chuckdarwin @12, Language is OBSERVED to be intelligently designed (ID). For example, consider Esperanto. I know that linguists can and do create synthetic languages. As a college homework assignment, one of my kids did exactly that with words, grammatical rules, syntax, and semantics in logical relationships different than those of English. He thought it was easy. In my association with people of the Navajo nation, I learned that their language (Diné Bizaad) is based on verbs rather than nouns (I got stuck on their pronunciation of a TL/CL consonant).

Verbs - Navajo sentences are built around verb stems. - The verb stems are based on about five hundred verb roots. Each root has a basic meaning that can be extended through the use of affixes (mostly prefixes). - Verbs are composed of a verb stem and a set of prefixes. There is a hierarchy in which the prefixes are ordered. Stringing up prefixes can result in very long verbs. It is theoretically possible to have ten prefixes preceding a verb root. - Verbs have pronominal prefixes that mark both subjects and objects. - Verbs are marked for tense, aspect and mood. - There is a large number of aspectual, modal, and tense distinctions marked by verb stem alternations and prefixes. - Navajo has classificatory system for verb stems that classifies objects by their physical characteristics, in addition to describing the movement or state of the object. For instance, the English verb "give" is expressed by eleven different verbs in Navajo, depending on the physical properties of the object. https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/navajo/

My own native language is ancient, from which a modern language was derived. It did not evolve by mutation and natural selection based on survival of the fittest. -Q Querius

Querius and/or BA77 Edify us and answer the same question put to Caspian: How does ID explain the emergence of language in humans? chuckdarwin

Bornagain77 @9,

Q, do you, as an ID advocate, honestly expect Darwinists to ever come up with a coherent explanation for why people have the capacity to communicate abstract, and immaterial, information to one another?

In a word, no. I expect Darwinists to advance a fantasy about the gradual genetic evolution of language from grunts and squeaks to profound concepts as a result of survival of the fittest and assert this is yet another "proof" of Darwinism. As usual, it will be based on nothing more than conjecture. As far as I know, ID recognizes the profound differences in brain organization rather than brain size as being primary. Darwinists have retreated into brain per body mass ratios, but the issue of disproportionate corvid intelligence still remains unresolved. The fact that language has generally degraded over time rather than becoming more complex and nuanced is telling. For example, compare versatility and specificity in Greek (or Latin) with modern languages. In English, we might say, "I love my spouse" or "I love ice cream" using the same word. However in Greek, we have the following words for love: 1. Eros: physical, passionate love 2. Philia: affectionate, deep friendship 3. Erotoropia: playful, flirtatious love 4. Mania: obsessive love 5. Storge: familial love 6. Philautia: compassionate self-esteem 7. Pragma: practical, companionate love 8. Agápe: unconditional, sacrificial love Which of these languages, English or Greek, appears more "evolved"? -Q Querius

Caspian/5 "What you ascribe to evolution is a capability that is...[i]nexplicable in terms of natural processes." Given the above comment, how then does ID explain the emergence of language in humans? chuckdarwin

Querius, "I wonder whether the researchers attempted to correlate language and genetics by sex." Q, do you, as an ID advocate, honestly expect Darwinists to ever come up with a coherent explanation for why people have the capacity to communicate abstract, and immaterial, information to one another? It simply makes no logical sense. i.e. How is it even remotely possible to get from the physical/material realm to the abstract/immaterial/mental realm of language? As Dr. Egnor noted, "We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses. Our difference is a metaphysical chasm.,,, Systems of taxonomy that emphasize physical and genetic similarities and ignore the fact that human beings are partly immaterial beings who are capable of abstract thought and contemplation of moral law and eternity are pitifully inadequate to describe man."

The Fundamental Difference Between Humans and Nonhuman Animals - Michael Egnor - November 5, 2015 Excerpt: Human beings have mental powers that include the material mental powers of animals but in addition entail a profoundly different kind of thinking. Human beings think abstractly, and nonhuman animals do not. Human beings have the power to contemplate universals, which are concepts that have no material instantiation. Human beings think about mathematics, literature, art, language, justice, mercy, and an endless library of abstract concepts. Human beings are rational animals. Human rationality is not merely a highly evolved kind of animal perception. Human rationality is qualitatively different -- ontologically different -- from animal perception. Human rationality is different because it is immaterial. Contemplation of universals cannot have material instantiation, because universals themselves are not material and cannot be instantiated in matter.,,, It is a radical difference -- an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference. We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses. Our difference is a metaphysical chasm.,,, Systems of taxonomy that emphasize physical and genetic similarities and ignore the fact that human beings are partly immaterial beings who are capable of abstract thought and contemplation of moral law and eternity are pitifully inadequate to describe man. The assertion that man is an ape is self-refuting. We could not express such a concept, misguided as it is, if we were apes and not men. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/11/the_fundamental_2100661.html

And as Adam Sedgwick scolded Charles Darwin, "There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly "

"There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly",,, - Adam Sedgwick to Charles Darwin - November 1859 https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2548.xml

Verse:

Mark 8:37 Is anything worth more than your soul?

bornagain77

Considering that the historical migration of Y haplogroups is significantly different than historical migration of mitochondrial DNA, it would seem that this fact alone would explain the low degree of correlation between genetics and language. In other words, I wonder whether the researchers attempted to correlate language and genetics by sex. -Q Querius

What is more interesting still about the fact that humans have a unique ability to understand and create information, and have come to ‘master the planet’ through the ‘top-down’ infusion of immaterial information into material substrates, is the fact that, due to advances in science, both the universe and life itself, are now found to be ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis.

"The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, but information–and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena." Vlatko Vedral - Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and CQT (Centre for Quantum Technologies) at the National University of Singapore, and a Fellow of Wolfson College -

It is hard to imagine a more convincing scientific proof that we are ‘made in the image of God’, than finding that both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and have come to ‘master the planet’, not via brute force as is presupposed in Darwinian thought, but precisely because of our ability to infuse immaterial information into material substrates

Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. John 1:1-4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and that life was the Light of men.

Of course, a much more convincing proof that we are made in the image of God could be if God Himself became a man, walked on water, healed the sick, raised the dead, and then defeated death itself on a cross in order to prove that he was God. And that just so happens to be precisely the proof that is claimed within Christianity.

Minimal Facts vs. Maximal Data Approaches to the Resurrection: A Conversation with Dr. Lydia McGrew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUt3r3dXBr4 Shroud of Turin: From discovery of Photographic Negative, to 3D Information, to Quantum Hologram - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-TL4QOCiis

Verse

Philippians 2:5-8 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!

bornagain77