Creationism - A Notion In Crisis - Now Its Human Evolution by LOSS of Complexity!

A Japanese macaque producing a coo call.

Credit: WRC/Hideki Sugiura

Simplified voice box enriches human speech | KYOTO UNIVERSITY

Question - How can you tell it's time to ditch a daft idea?

Answer - When its basic claims keep being refuted by science.

This is the problem, Creation Inc. (No donation too large; give till it hurts!) is now facing, as yet another basic axiom is refuted by scientific observation. To make matters worse for them, scientists led by researchers from Kyoto University, Japan, who discovered this latest refutation of Creationism, had no intention of doing so. Their intention was to reveal another factoid in the story of human evolution and, as so often, that factoid just happens to refute a basic Creationist claim.

Chimpanzee vocalization

The factoid in question was the discovery that what makes complex speech possible in humans, unlike in our closes relatives, the other Great Apes, was a modification to the voice box or larynx which involved losing specific vocal folds or cords in the larynx. In other words, a simplified, less complex larynx was the highly beneficial change that allowed early humans to develop speech and so communicate ideas and information and facilitate group cooperation and, ultimately civilisation, writing and science.

It's also a recent addition to the Creationist repertoire of evidence-free assertions designed to appeal to superstitious, scientifically illiterate dupes, that mutations and loss of information are invariable detrimental and so confirm the hapless Michael J. Behe's replacement for the failed Intelligent [sic] Design hoax and so revive the Deception Institute's rapidly failing 'Wedge Strategy' - 'Devolution' [sic] - which he claims is due to the Biblical 'Fall’ but is still science! According to this latest piece of Christian dogma dressed up to look like science, everything was created perfect but, ever since Adam & Eve (No! Honestly!) it's being going downhill, and all illness, suffering, arms races, parasites, etc, are the result. Like an abusive spouse who's just beaten up his partner for not loving him enough, it’s all our fault - we made him do it.

Sadly for Behe, he gets these notions from a book which uses writing - a development of language - to communicate - the thing this Japanese-led team have shown to be due to Behe's allegedly 'devolutionary', (i.e., detrimental), mutations. In his famous blunder exposed in the Kitzmiller trial, Behe admitted that, in his book, Darwin's Black Box he had said:

If a theory claims to be able to explain some phenomenon but does not generate even an attempt at an explanation, then it should be banished. Despite comparing sequences and mathematical modelling, molecular evolution has never addressed the question of how complex structures came to be.

Michael J Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p.185 (1996)

In a major embarrassment for Creationism, he was then forced to admit under oath:

… there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred…

Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. 2005
United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania
Day 12 (October 19), AM Session, Part 1.

By his own test, then, Creationism should be banished, so how much worse can it get when not only are there no peer-reviewed articles supporting you but peer-reviewed article after peer-reviewed article actually refutes you?
That's exactly what we have in this paper - peer-reviewed refutation of Creationism, and especially of Michael J. Behe's latest attempt to resurrect it from the grave the Kitzmiller defeat threw it into, if only Creationists had the courage and integrity to accept it.

Here is how the Kyoto-led team's research is explained by Kyoto University Research News:

An ongoing debate among scientists, on why chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates cannot speak or sing like humans, has focused mainly on evolutionary changes in human brain development. Attention has now expanded to anatomical changes of the voice box that may have played a role in our capacity to produce complex sounds.

A team of researchers from Japan and Europe has now revealed that evolution of the human larynx contributed to the stable voices we use to communicate. Unexpectedly, these changes do not include the addition of structures but rather the loss of specific vocal folds or cords in the larynx.

Paradoxically, the increased complexity of human communication involved a simplification of our vocal anatomy.

Studies by the late Dr Sugio Hayama, on which our work was largely based, showed that evolutionary modifications in the larynx were necessary for the evolution of spoken language. We took his work to the next level, demonstrating that the simpler the vocal fold morphology, the easier it is to control its vibrations.

Other changes, including those in our brains were also needed to gain language, of course, but this anatomical simplification probably accelerated the accuracy with which we sing and speak.

Takeshi Nishimura, lead author
Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior (EHUB)
Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

Most primates have thin, ribbon-like vocal membranes rising out of their vocal folds. The loss of these air sacs seen in chimpanzees and other apes seems to have provided a stable voice quality and controllable voice pitch that we humans use when singing or speaking.

Senior author Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Vienna explains that the thin vocal membranes found in the larynx in the team's large selection of monkeys and apes are specific to nonhuman primates. Based on computer modeling showing how vocal membranes allow nonhuman primates to create their characteristic vocalizations, the team posits that the melodious quality of the human voice directly results from losing these membranes during evolution.

Inside the larynx of vocalizing chimpanzees and monkeys, we see active vibrations of their vocal membranes causing loud and unstable scream-like calls.

W. Tecumseh Fitch, senior author
Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.

By avoiding this instability, humans possibly achieved stable source sounds, accelerating the evolution of human language.

Isao T. Tokuda, co-author
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Ritsumeikan University, Kusatsu, Shiga, Japan.

According to Isao Tokuda of Ritsumeikan University, whose study of nonlinear dynamics in animal vocalizations led to his investigation of voice production in chimpanzees, the presence of vibrating tissues to the vocal folds may increase the vibrational degrees of freedom, causing frequent vocal instability.

Using the comparative method to reconstruct our evolutionary past has shown that, if humans alone lack the vocal membranes that virtually all nonhuman primates have had as a trait, we may have lost it in our recent evolution despite sharing a common ancestor.

Jacob C. Dunn, co-author
Behavioural Ecology Research Group
School of Life Science
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK.

…a comparison of extant species is often used to infer the evolution of traits, such as animal behavior, that do not leave a fossil record. Our past video recordings of how the squirrel monkey voice box works during vocalization now seem to support a hypothesis on the evolution of the human ability to speak.

Ole Næsbye Larsen, co-author
Department of Biology
University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Austrian voice scientist and former KyotoU scholar Christian T Herbst sees the apparent tradeoff between the reduced voice-box complexity and our increased ability to create and transmit enriched verbal information as a "movement of the ability to produce complex vocal information from the throat to the brain."

More detail is given in the abstract to the paper in Science:

Abstract

Human speech production obeys the same acoustic principles as vocal production in other animals but has distinctive features: A stable vocal source is filtered by rapidly changing formant frequencies. To understand speech evolution, we examined a wide range of primates, combining observations of phonation with mathematical modeling. We found that source stability relies upon simplifications in laryngeal anatomy, specifically the loss of air sacs and vocal membranes. We conclude that the evolutionary loss of vocal membranes allows human speech to mostly avoid the spontaneous nonlinear phenomena and acoustic chaos common in other primate vocalizations. This loss allows our larynx to produce stable, harmonic-rich phonation, ideally highlighting formant changes that convey most phonetic information. Paradoxically, the increased complexity of human spoken language thus followed simplification of our laryngeal anatomy.

Nishimura, Takeshi; Tokuda, Isao T.; Miyachi, Shigehiro; Dunn, Jacob C.; Herbst, Christian T.; Ishimura, Kazuyoshi; Kaneko, Akihisa; Kinoshita, Yuki; Koda, Hiroki; Saers, Jaap P. P.; Imai, Hirohiko; Matsuda, Tetsuya; Larsen, Ole Næsbye; Jürgens, Uwe; Hirabayashi, Hideki; Kojima, Shozo; Fitch, W. Tecumseh
Evolutionary loss of complexity in human vocal anatomy as an adaptation for speech
Science 2022; 377(6607); 760-763; DOI: 10.1126/science.abm1574

Copyright © 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Reproduced by kind permission under licence #5370340299034

So, one of the major differences between humans and the other Great Apes, and one that is frequently cited by creationists as 'proof' that humans are a special creation and not the descendants of a common ancestor with the other apes, is the ability to speak. Yet, as this paper shows, the ability to speak is because humans, very recently in their evolutionary history, and after we diverged from the other apes, lost certain structures on out larynx.

Paradoxically, this loss of complexity, facilitated an increase in complexity at the neurological control of speech. Apparently, controlling a complex larynx would have made a necessarily even more complex neurological control harder to evolve, so this loss of structural complexity was a fortuitous and ultimately beneficial evolutionary change.

And once again, without effort, science has casually refuted a central Creationist doctrine and refuted Michael J Behe's attempt to replace his failing 'Intelligent Design' notion, with an even more flawed and nonsensical notion of 'Devolution', simply by showing the real world flatly contradicts Creationist doctrines.

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