[DonQuichotte (OP)]

What's The Origin of The Human Language ?

The mainstream materialist   scientific establishment assumes  that human language originated or rather evolved from the chimps' hand and body gestures :
There is no evidence though wahtsoever that proves that coupling between human language and chimps' gestures to be true ,despite the fact that that sophisticated communication between deaf and malhearing people ,via hand and body gestures ,can be qualified to be called a language , relatively speaking :

Is the materialist coupling of human language with gestures just a  desperate unscientific materialist attempt to reduce everything to just physical biological material processes,including the human language thus , its origins emergence and evolution ?   .

Chomsky, for example, thinks that human language is so unique that it cannot have evolved from any prior- to- man  species .

Tell me about it ...

Thanks , appreciate indeed .
Cheers .

[alancalverd]

What is Chomsky's evidence? Human vanity underlies a lot of creationism, and is blown apart as soon as you start to analyse the language of other species.

Language evolves according to need. All species communicate only as much as is required for their continued existence, apart from dogs, dolphins, and other social animals (i.e most familiar mammals) that enjoy playing and teasing each other. Homo sapiens is perhaps unique in using language to promulgate irrational hatred, but you'd have to consult a religious or political professional to find out why. It baffles me, and it's nothing to be proud of. 

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

What is Chomsky's evidence? Human vanity underlies a lot of creationism, and is blown apart as soon as you start to analyse the language of other species.

Language evolves according to need. All species communicate only as much as is required for their continued existence, apart from dogs, dolphins, and other social animals (i.e most familiar mammals) that enjoy playing and teasing each other. Homo sapiens is perhaps unique in using language to promulgate irrational hatred, but you'd have to consult a religious or political professional to find out why. It baffles me, and it's nothing to be proud of.

Both Chomsky's and the materialist assumptions regarding the origins and evolution of human language are just that , the both of them , : belief assumptions = unscientific , but Chomsky's belief assumption on the subject is not  necessarily false , as materialism is .

Chomsky is not convinced by the materialist false assumptions regarding human language at least , as i am not , obviously .

Both Chomsky's and my belief assumption on the subject are unscientific , but not necessarily false ,as materialism is ,  they are just not verifiable falsifiable empirical observable ...

Do not try to avoid the issue at hand , genius :

The burden of proof lies at the side of materialists who pretend to be "scientific"   on the subject of human language at least ,we do not regarding the origin of human language , so :
Just try to tell me how , do you think , that human language allegedly did evolve from chimps' hand and body gestures then , or just via physics and chemistry ...

Ok ?

I did read a whole book on the issue written by a prominent materialist scientist , try to "convince " me then, he could not ,obviously,  try to outsmart him then , "scientifically" , instead of preaching and using rhetorics , judgements of value ....as usual , that are ,per definition, unscientific .

The materialist unscientific exclusively biological physical "evolutionary explanation " of the origin of human language  can, obviously , not account fully for the existence of the unique human language that's also a matter of human cognition,imagination, creativity , intuition, consciousness , sub-consciousness ....let alone that that materialist assumption can account for the emergence evolution or origins of human languuage fully , just via physics and chemistry ...

Science at the other hand , can tell us only about the biological physical side of the human language , obviously , but materialists do go beyond science and beyond the scientific method , via their materialist beliefs on the subject , obviously , once again .

In short :

The materialist and thus and therefore the materialist unscientific belief assumption that the human language + its origin and evolution can be explained only by physics and chemistry is just that = a materialist false unscientific belief assumption thus , logically .

[alancalverd]

A very interesting approach. Apparently anyone who makes a creationist guess or unsubstantiated statement isd allowed to get away with it, in your opinion, but anyone who thinks there might be a rational explanation for a phenomenon is challenged to prove it instantly. If he can't, the entire world of science is wrong.

Get a life, and don't waste mine.   

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

A very interesting approach. Apparently anyone who makes a creationist guess or unsubstantiated statement isd allowed to get away with it, in your opinion, but anyone who thinks there might be a rational explanation for a phenomenon is challenged to prove it instantly. If he can't, the entire world of science is wrong.

Get a life, and don't waste mine.

No, you're the one whose life heart and mind have been limited crippled handicaped and imprisoned indoctrinated by materialism  as a secular belief  , you're the one who's obviously , been wasting my time , to be honest , i must add :

So much for a so-caled scientist ...pfff...

............

As for the rest of your silly allegations , the following then :

No , wrong again, as usual :
All i am saying is that science's realm and jurisdiction are represented exclusively by the material observable empirical measurable testable verifiable falsifiable reproducible ...side of reality , but since the materialist dogmatic belief system in science that goes beyond the scientific method ,materialism  the majority of scientists do confuse with science , since materialism thus "sees " nature as just  being exclusively material = a false materialist conception of nature in science   at that = an unscientific one also , per definition , so, many materialist belief assumptions are sold to the people as science ,including the materialist false assumption in science regarding the alleged origins of  human language , consciousness ...

Is that so difficult to understand ?

It is in fact the materialist dogmatic belief system that's been dominating in science , and that has been sold to the people as science , that gets away with its unscientific materialist belief assumptions , by selling them to the people as science ...
Comprende , amigo .

That's too much for your simple -minded materialist head or rather mind , i am afraid ....sorry .

Think carefully about what i have been saying ...and correct  me  if i am wrong , but not via some magical materialist belief assumptions ,or via rhetorics , judgements of value ... please .

Deal ?

Ciao .

[CliffordK]

Most animals including chimps will have vocalizations. 

Watching a dog, for example, one can certainly recognize a warning growl as being different from a playful bark.  Perhaps with practice, one could learn to recognize at least a half a dozen different barks indicating fear, pain, joy, separation anxiety, greetings, warnings, and etc.

It would seem that herds of animals also build up group expectations.  For example, cattle often seem to have an adult tasked to caring for several calves.  How is that communicated?

Why do some cultures like to gesture while speaking?  But, that certainly isn't universal, at least not to the same extent across cultures.

Our language likely evolved from more rudimentary communication forms which would have also included vocalizations as well as gestures and facial expressions.  Over time, there was a slow refinement of these primitive communication efforts.

[alancalverd]

the materialist dogmatic belief system in science

Dogma and belief are the antithesis of science. If you stopped making selfcontradictory assertions about a subject of which you apparently know nothing, and started listening and thinking for yourself instead of quoting unsubstantiated garbage, you might learn something, just as we scientists do.

[RD]

Gesture has the advantage over vocalization that it allows one to communicate without informing everyone present, e.g. ...

 [ Invalid Attachment ]
http://rap.wikia.com/wiki/Gang_Signs

[ You must have to be double jointed to join the "compton crips"  [] ]

[peppercorn]

Gesture has the advantage over vocalization that it allows one to communicate without informing everyone present...

Are the above codes derived from what John McCririck uses? []

[David Cooper]

Let me throw a straw man argument at these fools. I know - I'll assert that science is wrong because some famous guy has supposedly claimed human language evolved from chimp gestures.

No. He may have proposed it as a possible route for human language to evolve, though I doubt the link to Chomsky as the idea must have been floating around long before him. (It would also have come from a common ancestor of ours with chimps and not from chimps, but that's an unimportant point.) The other proposed origin which I'm sure Chomsky prefers is that human language came out of vocalisations which were already there in one of our ancestors, vocalisations which evolved after we split away from the path that led to chimps. There was plently of room for making different sounds such that many distinct words could be produced, and the throat could then have evolved to make the sounds clearer, survival of the fittest selecting for those with a better geometry for creating clear sounds. The difficulties have been exaggerated by those who have an unscientific agenda - even a chimp can make a wide range of vocalisations and it would be easy to make a language out of them if that species had sufficient wit to do so.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Let me throw a straw man argument at these fools. I know - I'll assert that science is wrong because some famous guy has supposedly claimed human language evolved from chimp gestures.

No. He may have proposed it as a possible route for human language to evolve, though I doubt the link to Chomsky as the idea must have been floating around long before him. (It would also have come from a common ancestor of ours with chimps and not from chimps, but that's an unimportant point.) The other proposed origin which I'm sure Chomsky prefers is that human language came out of vocalisations which were already there in one of our ancestors, vocalisations which evolved after we split away from the path that led to chimps. There was plently of room for making different sounds such that many distinct words could be produced, and the throat could then have evolved to make the sounds clearer, survival of the fittest selecting for those with a better geometry for creating clear sounds. The difficulties have been exaggerated by those who have an unscientific agenda - even a chimp can make a wide range of vocalisations and it would be easy to make a language out of them if that species had sufficient wit to do so.

Nobody said that science is wrong , on the contrary , materialism in science is = materialism as just a belief is , per definition, unscientific and false as a conception of nature= the materialist belief assumption that the universe is exclusively material  , no wonder that the extensions of materialism in science and elsewhere are also false and unscientific ,relatively speaking ,  per definition and nature , including the materialist belief assumption that human language originated from other prior -to the existence of modern man or homo-sapiens , species , via exclusively physical and biological processes .

What makes you so sure then of your above allegations then ?
What makes your allegations regarding the origins of human language , or those of materialists for that matter , so 'scientific " and true then ?

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

the materialist dogmatic belief system in science

Dogma and belief are the antithesis of science. If you stopped making selfcontradictory assertions about a subject of which you apparently know nothing, and started listening and thinking for yourself instead of quoting unsubstantiated garbage, you might learn something, just as we scientists do.

Oh , boy , you're , obviously , the one who cannot distill pure science from materialism in science .
You do still not get it yet , he ? What a shame for a so-called scientist .Pfff....

Has science ever proved the materialist "fact " , or rather the materialist belief assumption or conception of nature to be "true " ? Obviously not .

The materialist belief assumption , conception of nature or the materialist meta-paradigm in science that assume that the universe is exclusively ...material .

Do not confuse materialism as a dominating secular religion in all sciences and elsewhere , with ...pure science , once again, as the majority of scientists today do in fact  .

Materialism that has been dominating all sciences and the rest , since the 19th century at least .

Worse , materialism in science that gets sold to the people as ...science .

Can't you understand just that, after all those kilometers of pages on that human consciousness thread  ?

I am starting to doubt your very intellectual capacities , and judgement qualities ,really .

All beliefs for that matter , either the religious or the secular ones, including materialism thus , should be kept outside of science , and outside of science's jurisdiction as well .

P.S.: Human dominating beliefs  in science and elsewhere ,are in fact unavoidable , the materialist naturalist reductionist neo-Darwinian false conception of nature , will be just replaced by a naturalist non-reductionist one , as Thomas Nagel's " Why  the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false " stated , convincingly ....materialism in all sciences and elsewhere will be just replaced by yet another false conception of nature, as Nagel said in that book of his , or as he put it :

"The human will to believe is inexhaustible " .

[alancalverd]

"The human will to believe is inexhaustible " .

Crap. I stopped believing when I was 11. There is indeed an inexhaustible supply of believers, but that isn't the same thing at all. 

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

"The human will to believe is inexhaustible " .

Crap. I stopped believing when I was 11. There is indeed an inexhaustible supply of believers, but that isn't the same thing at all.

Don't be stupid , come on :

Everyone on this planet does believe in something , someone , ....in the broader sense also , you are no exception to that rule .
Everyone has a certain conception of nature = a belief assumption at that, a cultural one .... .

Do you think that you are some sort of a Robinson Crusoe that has been born on his own on some isolated island, and by living all alone there  ?

Even so, so to speak, every human has innate intrinsic inherent beliefs ...that get nornally shaped by culture , society , environment , nurture ...psych biology ...economy ...

[CliffordK]

Gesture has the advantage over vocalization that it allows one to communicate without informing everyone present, e.g. ...

It is goose migration time, and one has to wonder why the birds are so vocal.  Perhaps, other than humans, they are relatively safe from predators when in the air.

Birds, of course, are also the group of animals that can best mimic human speech, even better than the chimps.

The problem with gestures, of course, is that one must have line-of-sight, and the receiving party has to be paying attention.

What is the sign for "it's time to wake up"?

Is the idea that language grew out of sign language based on the fact that we've taught sign language to several chimps?  The chimp larynx may limit their vocabulary, and our ability to understand it.  Thus, sign may give access to a larger and more diverse "human" vocabulary. 

[cheryl j]

Don, I can't but helping noticing that every thread you begin, or are involved in, regardless of who participates in it, ends up embroiled in the same argument - materialism. It doesn't matter if the topic starts out with evolution, or consciousness, or the origin of human language, it always goes the same way. You aren't genuinely interested in discussing any of these topics. You don't care about what language is, what it does, or how it changed over time, or how it is different or similar in human groups or animals.  Every topic is just bait for your religious, anti-Western civilization diatribe.

[grizelda]

Leave it to Don Of the Gaps to use words to deny the existence of language.

[RD]

It is goose migration time, and one has to wonder why the birds are so vocal.

The one in front of the V-formation is telling the slackers in their slipstream that they are knackered and it's time for someone else to take the lead position [] ...

The V formation greatly boosts the efficiency and range of flying birds, particularly over long migratory routes. All the birds except the first fly in the upwash from the wingtip vortices of the bird ahead. The upwash assists each bird in supporting its own weight in flight, in the same way a glider can climb or maintain height indefinitely in rising air. In a V formation of 25 members, each bird can achieve a reduction of induced drag by up to 65% and as a result increase their range by 71%. The birds flying at the tips and at the front are rotated in a timely cyclical fashion to spread flight fatigue equally among the flock members.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_formation#Aerodynamics


[ don't geese fly at night ? , if so making a noise would let each other know where everyone was in the darkness ]

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Don, I can't but helping noticing that every thread you begin, or are involved in, regardless of who participates in it, ends up embroiled in the same argument - materialism. It doesn't matter if the topic starts out with evolution, or consciousness, or the origin of human language, it always goes the same way. You aren't genuinely interested in discussing any of these topics. You don't care about what language is, what it does, or how it changed over time, or how it is different or similar in human groups or animals.  Every topic is just bait for your religious, anti-Western civilization diatribe.

Wrong again, darling :
I am highly interested in  pure science ,in life , consciousness, human language and in the rest of those purely scientific issues , + in their emergence evolution and origins  you have no idea : i just would like to see science getting liberated from that false materialism in science it has been confined to since the 19 th century at least , as Sheldrake, T.Nagel and others have been doing , that's all
Well, that's my predicament , i cannot but try to make you , folks, realise that science is not materialism in science , obviously .
I just try to separate science from materialism = scientific facts results and approaches , from the materialist belief assumptions in science .

I do think that human language , for example , cannot be just a matter of physics and chemistry ,as materialism assumes it to be at least .
Science can tell us only about the physical biological material side of the human language , so.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Leave it to Don Of the Gaps to use words to deny the existence of language.

That's exactly the other way around : this is all about materialism of the gaps = the materialist dogmatic belief system and materialist meta-paradigm dominating in science , that must not be confused with science , that's all .
So, i have been denying nothing (How can  i  deny the existence of language , be serious ) , i was just rejecting materialism in science , that's all .