Over at Evolution News & Views, Casey Luskin reports on a paper in which leading scientists of evolution admit that there is no satisfactory explanation for the origin of human language.
(No? Not baby chimp arm-waving or monkeys throwing poop? Oh well, another thesis awaits the next download of science PRs.
Here’s the abstract:
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. We show that, to date, (1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity; (2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved; (3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes anytime soon; (4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any insights into language’s origins unverifiable. Based on the current state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses. (Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin, “The mystery of language evolution<http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00401/abstract>,” Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 5:401 (May 7, 2014) Open access here.
Note, however: The first author is disgraced Marc “monkeys talk to me” Hauser, who seems to be climbing back into the good graces of the academic world.
All that said, see also: Can we talk? Language as the business end of consciousness (for a brief outline of the problems). More later.
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Not to mention Lewontin! and Noam Chomsky.
In Chomsky’s case, “admit” is Discovery Institute spin, as Chomsky has long argued that language, while of natural origins, could not have arisen by means of natural selection. And Lewontin has been making arguments similar to those presented in this article for decades (e.g. “Questions we will Never Answer” from the 1998 MIT volume An Invitation to Cognitive Science).
On Facebook, an atheist demanded us to,,,
,,,for why, as this paper indicated, man has such a unique ability to do ‘linguistic computations and representations’.
Yet, Alfred Russel Wallace himself, the co-discoverer of Natural Selection, who had far more field work than Darwin did, certainly thought that man’s unique ability to do ‘linguistic computations and representations’, (i.e. communicate and process information), was a sure sign that man had a ‘soul’.
And Wallace has some pretty impressive evidence backing up his claim that mathematics is proof that man has a soul. Kurt Godel summed up the implications of his incompleteness theorem this way:
David Berlinski, in his unique style, gets the ‘soulish’ nature of mathematics across very clearly:
Another tantalizing clue that we are made in God’s image is the fact that the three Rs, reading, writing, and arithmetic, i.e. the ability to process information, is the very first thing to be taught to children when they enter elementary school. And yet it is this information processing, i.e. reading, writing, and arithmetic, that is found to be foundational to life:
As well, information, not material, is found to be foundational to physical reality itself:
Thus, our unique ability to process information is indeed very strong evidence for the Judeo-Christian precept that we were made in God’s image, and is very unexpected under atheistic/materialistic precepts, since life and physical reality itself are both found to be information theoretic in their basis and are not materialistic in their basis.
Verses and music:
Reciprocating, can you help us understand why Chomsky and Lewontin would have Hauser as their first author?
There is no shortage of explanation in materialistic origins research. But alas, there is a shortage of evidence to back the many intuitive claims. The sheer number of stories give the impression that progress is being made when they are getting nowhere.
“Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” – Ecclesiastes 12:12 (ESV)
News:
Hard to escape the impression that they are supporting his rehabilitation.
Hauser and Chomsky have published together before:
Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., and Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298, 1569–1570. doi:
10.1126/science.298.5598.1569
I do not understand what the confusion is about language prigin EVEN from evolutiondom!
Why is people memorizing sounds so complicated ??
Language is just segregated combinations of sounds. Thats it.
any other ordering is just more memorized agreements on ordering the sounds.
i guess the issue is they must have the language come before the intelligence pf man relative to primates etc.
Thats the problem.Creationists have intelligence immediarte and likewise language as a expression of same intelligence.
Thats the ticket.