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.

Silly Bible - Even Language Refutes Creationism

European and Asian languages traced back to single mother tongue | Science | The Guardian

I've written a couple of time about how the Bible story of the Tower of Babel is, probably next to Noah's Ark, the least plausible story in the Bible. The problem was probably that even the Bible's authors didn't really understand or believe it but felt compelled to include it because it had gained the status of a sacred and holy text.

Later apologists such as Flavius Josephus even claimed that Yahweh dictated it to Moses, though that claim is never made in the Bible and a moments thought should tell you that the scribe doesn't normally write about his own death and burial in a secret place. Josephus was obviously reporting widely-believed myths rather than what he had actual evidence for.

Anyway, just to recap: according to this myth, Yahweh got spooked when it looked like his creation were going to get up to Heaven (which was directly over the Middle East and just above the sky, apparently). He hadn't seen that one coming and even had to go down to Earth to take a look. He then made everyone speak different languages so they couldn't work together any more, and that's how all the world's languages arose.

Don't laugh! These were simple people with no science to speak of and they lived in a world which they thought ran on magic.

Speaking of Evolution

Voices from the past: Ancient secrets in today's words - life - 05 September 2013 - New Scientist

An article in this week's New Scientist illustrates something I've mentioned before. Languages evolve by Darwinian Evolution.

Regular readers will remember how I showed that we can tell the Bible was written by people who were ignorant of many things, including geography, history, biology and language distribution, when they wrote the absurd tale of the Tower of Babel to try to explain language diversity. (See How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People and More Bible Babble.) Of course, their primitive, simplistic, parochial and essentially ignorant explanation was the default 'God did it!", which was code for "I don't know but I'll pretend I do" no less in those days than it is today. Indeed, we see exactly the same primitive level of parochial ignorance and use of simplitic default answers in lieu of actual knowledge in culturally backward and scientifically iliterate societies today, where religious fundamentalism is still found.

It also illustrates how the basic principles of evolution don't just apply to DNA/RNA-based life but to any replicators, provided the three basic components of Darwinian Evolution are present. The article is about languages and how they evolved and diversified from common ancestors.

The three essential components of Darwinian Evolution are:

• Variation.
• Replication.
• Selection.

If those components are present then evolution is bound to occur. If there is separation then diversification is also bound to occur as the system adapts to local conditions.

The New Scientist article by Douglas Heaven is about the work of New Zealanders Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson of Auckland University.

As a trained biologist, Gray notes these [language] differences with the same eagle-eyed curiosity that he has used to study the evolution of bird behaviour. "If you're looking at courtship displays in birds and how their differences are produced by descent with modification, it doesn't seem like a huge leap to think about languages in that way," he says. Living among the Pacific Islands – a hotspot for language diversity – Gray just has to listen to the sounds around him to hear the way that languages can mutate, splinter and proliferate like separate species.

Douglas Heaven; Voices from the past: Ancient secrets in today's words; New Scientist 05 September 2013, issue 2933.

Gray and Atkinson's trick was to feed language data into an evolutionary computer algorithm designed to work out relationships between genomes. It produces a range of possible 'family trees' together with the likelihood that each tree fits the known data.

So far, they have used the technique to try to resolve a dispute concerning the origins of the Indo-European group of languages for which there are two proposed models. One has the origin in Anatolia (the area corresponding to modern Turkey) and spreading out from there with the spread of agriculture starting some 8-9,000 years ago. The other places the origin in what is now Ukraine some 3000 years ago, with the spread being due to marauding horsemen. Gray and Atkinson's method estimated that the origin must have been around 8-10,000 years ago, which fitted almost exactly with the out of Anatolia hypothesis.

Now they have refined their technique and applied it to the Pacific Islands. What they found exactly matches what was already known from archaeological and genetic evidence - that the languages (and by implication, the people) spread out from Taiwan into the East Indies and the Philippines, and then to the Pacific Islands in a series of migration pulses between 3000 and 800 years ago.

So it seems the powerful science of Darwinian Evolution is proving fundamental to understanding another subject, just as I showed with Darwin's Powerful Science.

And once again we see the idiotic nature of a Bible story of the Tower of Babel, which claims totally unrelated and mutually incomprehensible languages were created as is in juxtaposition by a magic man in the sky, just as Darwinian Evolution shows the idiotic nature of the Bible story of the creation of all species by the same magic man. The truth, of course, is that there is a perfectly natural explanation for languages just as there is for species, and magic is nowhere involved in the process.

Almost unbelievably, despite the abundance of contrary evidence, people still earn their living selling people bad science and downright lies designed to reinforce their primitive superstition and the parochial ignorance on which it depends and people still imagine their simplistic, default "God did it!" answer is going to convince educated people that their ignorance trumps all the science and learning to which we all now have access.

References:

Douglas Heaven; Voices from the past: Ancient secrets in today's words, New Scientist 05 September 2013 Magazine issue 2933.

Russell D. Gray & Quentin D. Atkinson; Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin; Nature 426, 435-439 (27 November 2003) | doi:10.1038/nature02029

Gray, R.D, Drummond, A.J, Language, Greenhill, S.J; Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement; Science 23 January 2009: Vol. 323 no. 5913 pp. 479-483; DOI: 10.1126/science.1166858

'via Blog this'

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Talking Bible Babble

Tower of Babel. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

Continuing the theme in my blog yesterday on the Bible's disconnect from reality, here's an amusing tale from Hebrew mythology tucked away in the Bible, telling of an act of their tribal god:

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 11:1-9

So, if this happened in the real world and the god described was an omniscient god, what would we expect to find? The god's clear intent was that people should not be able to understand one another, so we should see language groups rubbing shoulders on their borders with people who speak an entirely unrelated language. We would expect people speaking similar languages to be separated by great distances so that the chance of them coming up against people who could make a reasonable guess at what they were saying was virtually zero. We would expect to find people speaking a language similar to English to live in, say, South-east Asia or South America, and people who speak a language like Swedish to be found in Africa or Siberia. And of course, we would expect to find people speaking a Bantu language as far away from South Africa as possible, say in Canada, Norway or Australia.

Is this what we find?

Of course not. That's what the Bible predicts we should find so we can be fairly sure reality isn't going to be anything like that.

What we find is a reality about as far away from that as it's possible to get. We find precisely the opposite of what the Bible forecasts, of course.

I'll illustrate this with a few language maps I found with a few clicks on Google.

Well, that's the reality which, as we can see is a very different thing to the one we would expect if the myth of the Tower of Babel in the Bible was correct.

What we see in reality is exactly what we would expect to see if language is an evolving cultural thing which we inherit from our cultures and our parent generation along with our other memes. We see diversification occurring due to isolation for various reasons like political borders, isolating valleys and mountain ranges, different religions or religious sects, etc. We also see remnant populations of earlier language groups isolated within larger populations like the Basques of North-eastern Spain and South-western France.

Some years ago on a night shift, I had been reading Beowulf, the earliest known work in Early English, with translation, obviously. One of my assistants, who is Anglo-Norwegian and speaks both languages fluently as well as Danish, Swedish and German, picked it up with a half-dismissive, "what's this you're reading now?", then she said, "Hey! I can read this, almost! Why are you reading old Danish?" Of course she was right. Beowulf is no more English than it is Danish or Dutch. It was written in a language ancestral to, or at least close to one which was ancestral to Dutch and Danish and close to Swedish and Norwegian.

"Beowulf methelode, bearn Ecgtheowes; 'Hwaet, thu worn fela, wine win Unferth, beorne druncen, ymb Breccan spreace, suaegdest from his sithe. Soth ic talige thaet ic merestrengo maran ahte, aerfetho on ythum, thonne aenig other man.

[Beowulf spoke, the son of Ecgtheow: "Well, Unferth my friend, drunk with beer you have talked a great deal about Brecca, told of his adventures. I claim for a fact that I have greater strength in the sea, hardship of the waves, than any other man.]

One of my favourite language groups is the so-called Celtic groups found in the extreme edge of Western Europe. This group is split into two main groups: the Goedelic and Brythonic groups, also called p-Celtic and q-Celtic. They are the Irish and Scots Gaelic, and Welsh languages. They also include Manx (close to Irish Gaelic with some Welsh), Cornish, Breton from France and Galician from Spain (all close to Welsh). They are ancient languages, possibly related to the language spoken in Western Europe before the Roman conquest and maybe even to Cythian, though it's not at all certain that the modern Celts are the same people as the Keltoi, as the Greeks called them or the people the Romans called Gauls.

The terms p-Celtic and q-Celtic come from the ancient words for 'son of' or more precisely, 'of the clan of', map and maq in Welsh and Gaelic respectively. These have become the modern Ap (or Ab) in Welsh and Mac in Scots and Irish Gaelic. How many people today have the name Bevan (Ab Evan), Pritchard (Ap Richard) or Probert (Ap Robert) and how many millions of Macs and Mcs are there? So we can trace these family names back to early origins in earlier languages and to the culturally related device of using a clan name as a surname.

The Celtic word for king is also interesting. Forms of it appear in other related modern languages. It is words like this which show how languages are related. The Gaelic for king is rí. This word takes the form rex in Latin, roi in French and raj in Hindi and Urdu, so showing, along with many other words, how Gaelic, Latin and Hindi are all members of the Indo-European family of languages. From this word, (via medieval French) we get the English words Royal, Regal and Reign. Yes. We still speak a local dialect of Indo-European.

The distribution, differences and similarities of human languages is precisely what we would expect of something which evolved and is still evolving. It is exactly the opposite of what we would see it they had been been spontaneously created by an intelligent god, especially if the intention was to make it so people from neighbouring countries couldn't understand one another. Had the god of the Bible forgotten that people can learn to speak different languages?

Again, the disconnect between the Bible and reality is exposed with a brief look at reality.

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