Recently, we noted a scholarly attack on Quentin Atkinson and colleagues’ study of the origin of language. Atkinson claimed that language must have originated in southwest Africa because the languages spoken there have many sounds that supposedly dropped out of language the further away one got from the original.
His thesis is that language develops according to the same pattern as described by the theory of allopatric speciation in biology (later descendants have a smaller gene pool from which natural selection can select adaptations). Which assumes, in turn that the development of language proceeds according to natural laws that bypass conscious human preferences and adjustment to circumstances. Indeed, a companion study’s findings were said to support the view that the role of the innate human mind is “hugely oversold.”
Michael Cysouw and colleagues have dismissed it all as full of “suboptimal data, biased methodology, and unjustified assumptions.” The most notable unjustified assumption was the basic one, that languages became simplified the further one moved from southwest Africa. Responding to “Evolution of language study the controversy in science,” linguist Noel Rude – whose specialty is Northwest Native American languages – writes,
Khoisan languages of southern Africa really do have far and away the most complex sound systems on earth–lexical tones, clicks, everything. Those ingressive clicks, in fact, are found only in South Africa. To hear some of these sounds you might go to http://www.africanlanguages.org/khoesan.html and see if you can access any of Peter Ladefoged’s sound files hosted at the UCLA Phonetics Lab.
(For audio files of clicks, go here.)
So what does that mean? Quentin Atkinson’s theory was that small groups on the move fanning out from the original “Sprachbund” would tend not to evolve complex sound systems whereas the stay-at-homes would. The most far flung languages–the Polynesian–have the simplest of all sound systems–those of aboriginal Australia also qualify as simple. However, the native languages here in the Pacific Northwest (USA and British Columbia) may have the second most complex sound systems and they also are very far from South Africa. It was an interesting hypothesis but hardly provable on its own.
Comparative studies are a fairly exact science when dealing with dialect splits only a few thousand years old (the split between Greek and Sanskrit, for example) but become quite controversial beyond that. Then there is historical syntax. My old mentor T. Givón once proposed that Proto-World might have had a verb final (final in the clause) syntax and later Murray Gell-Mann and Merritt Ruhlen take up the theory.
The Proto-World theory seems to suggest that languages cannot just be invented, but that isn’t clear. Esperanto was invented using roots from a number of languages, but the same feat could have been done with words created from whole cloth (it just wouldn’t have been as easy for speakers of European languages to learn.)
Tolkien, himself a linguist, did it for his trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, and for some people it caught on. Some words entered everyday English (“hobbit,” “orc”) through his work. When diminutive Flores man was found, the first skeleton was called the “hobbit lady” – and good luck to the person trying to trace that right back to Proto-World (complete with evolutionary psychology’s just-so explanations).
Something, perhaps, can be traced back to Proto-World, but the popularity, the instant recognition of the term “hobbit” owes everything to specific stuff that happened post-2000. Hence the folly of attempts at reconstruction in the absence of history.
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If I understand the controversy, it’s not about vocabulary, which we can consciously create and do so, but about the grammatical structure of a language. Are all grammatical structures of human languages generated by an innate universal grammar, or do they develop independently of whatever innate linguistic structure that we might have.
Well, that’s a young-earth creationist sentiment if ever I heard one. “Never mind how much well-tested science says the Earth is old or that humans evolved from apelike ancestors, we can’t trust any inference from physical evidence about history ever, all we can trust is written documents, but only our written documents, not the written documents of other cultures and religions.”
Nick states;
And exactly how well tested is that historical idea Nick???
The fossil record certainly isn’t as conducive to gradual neo-Darwinian evolution, human or otherwise, as neo-Darwinists have portrayed it to be:
etc.. etc.. etc..
Moreover Nick, multiple lines of recent genetic evidence turns out to be very conducive to Theism and to be very antagonistic towards Atheism,,,
etc.. etc.. etc..
Nick, here is another fairly recent ‘evolution friendly’ article that found the differences in the protein coding genes of the Y chromosome between chimps and Humans to ‘differ radically’:
And Nick, as far as present day evidence is concerned, and besides the fact that the modern synthesis of neo-Darwinism is in fact DEAD!, scientists cannot even demonstrate that the Darwinian mechanism can fix a single unambiguously beneficial mutation in a multicellular creature:
etc.. etc.. etc..
Go figure Nick!!! The evidence you claimed as ‘well tested’ for human evolution simply does not exist save for in your, and other neo-Darwinists, fertile, and wrong, imaginations!!!
Can we please get a reference or references to this alleged “well-tested science” that demonstrates humans evolved from ape-like ancestors?
Preferrably something from developmental biology or genetics that we can link to the transformations required.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/compare.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faq.....rt1-1.html
So similarities in skulls means we share a common ancestor and in no way can those similarities be due to convergent evolution nor a common design?
But anyway I take your “response” to mean that we do NOT have any evidence from developmental biology nor genetics that we can link to the transformations required.
So what it all boils down to is “well-tested science” = “It looks like we share a common ancestor with chimps”.
Saying “evolutiondidit” is one thing Nick, sooner or later, people are going to want to know how. IOW your one big knock against ID is your own position’s downfall- that and you have to assume what it is you are trying to test.
Nick isn’t TalkOrigin the site where Casey Luskin just recently disassembled their oft quoted ‘speciation’ FAQ, and revealed TalkOrigin as nothing more than a vacuous propaganda site?
i.e. Here is a detailed refutation, by Casey Luskin, to TalkOrigins oft quoted, but severely misleading, site on the claimed evidence for observed macro-evolutionary events (speciation);
Here is part 2 of the podcast
Moreover the ‘literature bluffing’ by neo-Darwinists is not limited to claims of observed speciation. In fact In the Dover trial, a theatrical ‘literature bluff’ was used at one point to decvieve people into thinking the Darwinists had any evidence:
In this following podcast, Casey Luskin interviews microbiologist and immunologist Donald Ewert about his previous work as associate editor for the journal Development and Comparitive Immunology, where he realized that the papers published were comparative studies that had nothing to do with evolution at all.
The deception, (literature bluff), from neo-Darwinists at Dover, did not stop with immunology. It extended to every claimed example of the origin of functional genetic information;
Language is just organized sounds to allow human thoughts to be expressed.
animals probably could speak but they are not intelligent enough.
Parrots can mimic us and so why not speak?
Apes i think also have the tools etc
The very primitive peoples of the world do not have inferior languages but rather they came from the general languages and simply atrophied.
So they just use sounds in a more primitive way.
They are extreme hics but not originally.
People don’t actually have words but only segregated sound combinations .
Then these combinations having an end are called words.
We are made in the image and are ourselves mini gods in our thinking.
Then we are put into a machine of the natural world called a body.
So we can only makes sounds and simply make combinations of them and memorize then and agree on them.
Then babel came and disagreement.
Luskin’s refutation of TalkOrigins’ speciation article(s) was one of the more thorough intellectual beatdowns I’ve seen in quite a while. If these debates were judged like boxing matches, it’d be a first round knockout victory of Luskin.
Highly recommended reading. Thanks for linking it, BA77.
Nick as Joe made clear, regardless of the fossil record, which I hold evolutionists have severely misrepresented, your assertion that Humans evolved from Chimps must be bore out on a mechanistic level. i.e. You must clearly demonstrate, scientifically, that blind material processes can achieve what you adamantly claim. But the plain fact is that you have ZERO evidence that neo-Darwinian processes can generate even trivial levels of functional information, much less the massive amounts of highly integrated functional information that are needed to explain what you wish, a-priori, to be true;
Now Nick, if you were truly fair, and really concerned with finding the truth in this matter, should I not readily expect you to admit to such a glaring poverty of foundational evidence for your preferred Darwinian scenario?,,, expect integrity instead of finding you fighting tooth and nail to conceal such damning evidence against your preferred case??? It simply does not follow for you to refuse to address your primary problem! i.e. functional information!, In fact Nick, if you were to honestly search the matter out, instead of playing deceptive games, you would find the information problem is acutely profound for neo-Darwinism! You see Nick it is found, quite contrary to neo-Darwinian thought, that ‘material particles’ reduce to transcendent information in quantum teleportation experiments, thus neo-Darwinism, since it is based on materialism, i.e. based on the presupposition that the transcendent information found in life simply ’emerges’ from a material basis, cannot be the true explanation for where that transcendent information came from in life in the first place. i.e. it is not possible, not even in principle, for the ’cause’ of transcendent information to ’emerge’ from a ‘material’ basis; Clearly, a ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, cause must be supplied which is not within the materialistic neo-Darwinian framework to supply;
This is not a trivial matter in the least, Nick, as far as the science itself is concerned. ,,, But you chose not to address this foundational evidence, which you have seen before, forthrightly, but instead have chosen to rely on the fossil record to try to make your case. But just how trustworthy is the fossil record that you have put such a ill founded hope in??? It turns out that the fossil record is not trustworthy at all! In this following video the neo-Darwinist in the video was so convinced that his preconception for neo-Darwinism was right that he actually took a power saw to a femur bone in Lucy (actually a cast of the bone) to make the bone look how he presupposed it ‘should’ look.
Nick this following study revealed how Dr. Leakey’s preconceived Darwinian bias influenced him to produce a fraudulent fossil that mislead many scholars for years:
The following sites are sadly comical for revealing just how badly personal prejudice colors Darwinian interpretation of fossils in the field of paleoanthropology:
Thus Nick, you can insist to the contrary if you want, but the plain fact is that you have nothing but mush backing up your claims! Myself, I would be deeply ashamed if I had such blind adherence to such a bankrupt hypothesis as you seem to have!
Robert @ 8: I’m willing to bet that you are not a linguist. I’m not either, but I’ve read enough to know that there’s at least one school of thought among linguists that would say that human languages are the output of an innate human structure involving various rules about how to form a language. I’m not sure how much of this idea is accepted among linguists. I’m pretty sure that no linguist thinks that there are any “primitive” languages.
Bilbo I.
i’m not a linguist.
I don’t think they do think there are primitive languages or at least its not acceptable to say so because of the racial stuff.
There is indeed no inferior but there is atrophy from primitive segregated people just as in nOrth america the backwards folks twist English into almost another language like in Tom Sawyer or something.
There is no need ti invoke innate structures.
They just miss the point that people are very intelligent , including children, with very complex thoughts from the start.
There could not be a time where we only grunted.
Quickly did sound combinations become agreed upon.
I say this was in Eden and the in babel there was a sudden unnatural disagreement.
Evolutionary thought corrupts understanding what language is.
In fact its just what writing is.
Sounds = agreed meaning=language and written symbols = for agreed sounds.
Thats all it is.
Robert – it would surely be better if you studied linguistics (and/or neurology) before stating confidently what language is or isn’t.
It’s the 50th anniverary of John Glenn’s space flight, but I well remember a couple of years before that a filing clerk at my father’s office saying, with authority, “You can take it from me they’ll never get a man into space.”
As my father said to him, “Why on earth should anyone take it from you?”
What if the clerk said before the beatles break up there will be a man on the moon!!
Ideas should be weighed on their evidence and reasoning and not on authority.
Whats wrong with my explanation of language?
I think i’m right but i’m open to criticism and want to be right.