Which just returns us to the question of whether such a “simpler” language would be anything much beyond animal communication, eg point and name. No one have provided any evidence that isolated groups of children would go beyond that.
Well, they’d go to become adults and have more important things… Isn’t that how we imagine language came about anyhow? Why would we expect anything different? Certainly the language would grow over time and increase as it was shared with more people and further generations.
The difference being that animal communication seems to have a ceiling, while human communication does not.
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Pretty good restatement of what I’d say in the GAE. If God intended there to be relationships between AE and the people outside the garden, we should expect he would make them (somehow, either taught or created) with linguistic ability to communicate with them.
It’s true that we learn the meaning of words with particular contexts. Grammar and vocabulary, also, quickly becomes a tacit knowledge, disconnected in our brains from the precise way we learned them. For example, I can remember and know the meaning of “loquacious” word even after having totally lost any recollection of how I came to learn the meaning of the word. That means we can imaging God creating a person with the innate and tacit knowledge of word meanings, for example, without also having to create false memories of them learning said words.
Even if a false memory of learning the word was somehow required, we have a non deceptive purpose behind why God might implant those lucid memories: to grant the ability to speak de novo. I don’t think false memories are necessary for this, but if they were it need not be any more “deceptive” than a lucid prophetic dream.
As I explain in the book, and elsewhere, if God intended for AE to engage with the world and people outside the Garden, then these objections just melt away. We are left wonder about it how of de novo creation the same way we wonder about the how of the Virgin Birth. We might think they both happened, but we are not sure how. There isn’t an incoherence in the beliefs, as far as I can see.
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Which animals? How much do we know about animal communication?
For a fair comparison, you would have to look to other social species. As far as I know, the naked mole rats are the best candidate for that among mammals.
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Going back to the original post:
There seems to be two main problems with this assertion.
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There is no reason to think that language requires false memories. We can certainly have knowledge of language divorced from our memories of having acquired such knowledge.
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There is a false analogy to the Omphalos hypothesis, which was a way of dismissing mountains of evidence for an ancient earth. Here, there isn’t evidence one way or another. We aren’t dismissing evidence for an old earth or common descent.
Notably #2 has been addressed many many times. We have produced a theological reason God would have done this too, which does not involve deception. That’s the crux of it. There is no reason to say God is deceiving us in this scenario, so there isn’t really a conflict.
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How seriously does the GAE take Genesis?
The first time Adam uses language is when God speaks to him at various times; obviously he had to know whatever language God was using from the start.
The first time Adam is known to speak is when God shows him all the animals in order to see what he would call them. This is odd, because it tells us that God didn’t know what Adam would say, and thus didn’t know at least some aspects of his language, which Adam seems to be making up on the spot.
The second time Adam speaks he’s talking, apparently, to himself, and he give a little speech. All of this is before Eve speaks, so it’s not possible that Adam and Eve formed their own language by interacting with each other.
It’s hard to make sense of this using any of the scenarios anyone has presented. Even the idea that he was, ex nihilo, taught a local language, doesn’t work because that language doesn’t apparently have words for animals.
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This isn’t so odd. It’s part of the message of Genesis. Adam is a co-creator as he is naming what God made.
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That explanation doesn’t work. If, as you suppose, Adam was taught the language of the population he would later interact with, presumably that language already had names for animals. If so, Adam was creating nothing. At any rate, wouldn’t God already know what Adam would call them, regardless of how he came up with the names?
I think you are forced to consider that much of the Adam and Eve story is untrue if you want to save some parts of it.
https://www.dolphincommunicationproject.org/index.php/2014-10-21-00-13-26/dolphin-language
https://owlcation.com/stem/The-difference-between-animal-and-human-communication
There are also controversial experiments regarding sign language being taught to primates, but those are not what I was thinking of. I meant animals communicating in their ecological niche using their biologically appropriate means (see eg dolphin link).
In all cases, including ours, there is a controversy between the relative important of genetic inheritance versus general learned behavior. For human linguists, that plays out as the conflict between the Universal Grammar supporters (Chomsky, Pinker et al), who favor a language-specific “brain module” parameterized to accommodate different languages, and their opposition, the Cognitive Linguists, who see language as depending on general human learning abilities, not a specific module (among many other differences).
But for both, language acquisition requires learning and developing in a language community. Observations of the language abilities of single feral children confirm this.
I understood the “children are raised in an environment without other language speakers” in your original post to refer to something like these sorts of feral children examples and tried to confirm that in my first reply
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Under the interpretation he confirmed, Daniel’s OP reminded me of Davidson’s Swamp-person thought experiment. Leaving out some details, he argues that if an entity was created de novo but with all brain structures needed to exhibit language behavior, that entity’s linguistic behavior would nonetheless be meaningless. The reason is that the created entity, at the moment of its creation, would lack causal connections to a language using community and such connections are necessary to attribute meaning to language behavior.
That is a obscure philosophical issue, of no bearing on the science and theology in your A&E hypothesis. But perhaps you may find the relation amusing.
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Bruce, that prairie dog language article was mind-blowing. I had always assumed that such animals had simple calls which alerted the entire colony of danger. I had no idea that their calls were so specific as to the type of danger and even the color of the shirt of a human intruder.
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I recall a documentary on vervet monkeys that described how several species of monkeys that lived in the same area but didn’t compete because they foraged in different parts of the canopy and/or had different diets all understood and responded to the other species’ alarm calls despite them having different speech capabilities and hence different ‘languages’.
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Going to the linked article, I’d tend to agree with:
Daniel Dennett, in Consciousness Explained , has called into question the validity of this sort of thought experiment altogether, maintaining that when a thought experiment is too far removed from the actual state of affairs, our intuitions cease to be meaningful.
That is why this line, as an argument against a de novo AE just seems contrived. Now, I do think it is worth musing about, as it brings us to grand questions such as the ones being touched on by the swampman.
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Then you misunderstood – I probably wasn’t clear enough.
I carefully said “children” rather than “child”. I would not expect language to be invented in the absence of some kind of community.
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Would you expect two people to be a sufficient community?
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I did read that and understood that. What still is not clear to me is whether you expected those children to have no previous exposure to language and no exposure to language while they invented their own. I understood that you were asserting that as well.
Of course, a completely isolated group of children would die. So taken as I read it, your statement is describing an impossibility. There is no possible ethical test, of course. The Romanian orphanage horrors may have been close, but I am sure there was still language use there.
But suppose isolated groups somehow survive. Then evidence from feral children indicates they would not develop the requisite language physical/mental abilities; there is no reason to think they could somehow mutually develop them as a group. This is further confirmed by results from development psychology showing the mandatory role a language community has in development of these abilities as part of acquiring an existing language.
I offered as a possibility that they might point at and name things, in the service of whatever means they developed to survive, but there is reason to doubt even that. For we have given up some genetically-based abilities found in other animals in order to leverage the flexibility of culture. Lacking that culture stimulus, perhaps isolated children would not even point and name.
In no way am I denying that human anatomy and human language capability co-evolved over long time periods. What I highly doubt is that an isolated group of children could repeat that to any degree that would justify calling the result a language…
I agree that thought experiment is of little merit, other than as intuition pump for considering the role of causal history in some of our judgements of how to apply concepts to a given entity.
There are cases where we do rely on causal history. For example, a counterfeit $20 bill is still a counterfeit, even if it is physically indistinguishable from a bill produced by the authorities.
More controversially, some say there are scientific terms which can only be correctly applied by taking causal history into account. For example, some argue that at least part of the concept of being a member of a given species includes sharing the right genetic causal history with others of that species.
Using this approach to species, Adam created de novo would not be the same species as other humans who existed at the same time and who had themselves the right evolutionary history. That is not to say that Adam/Eve and evolved humans could not successfully procreate, only that their scientifically-determined species would differ, if one took the approach to understanding the concept of species involving causal history.
To repeat, these posts are offered only as intellectual puzzles; they in no way are intended to “refute” your thesis. Given what I understand as its consistency with science, I think any concerns with your hypothesis could only be based on theological arguments.
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Hi @swamidass, @John_Harshman, @dga471, @nwrickert, @Roy, @Michael_Callen, @AllenWitmerMiller and @BruceS,
I’ve been digging and delving, and thinking hard about what various commenters have written.
Re readers’ comments on prairie dog communication, I would urge caution regarding claims made by Con Slobodchikoff that prairie dogs possess a kind of language. See this article Can Prairie Dogs Talk? by Ferris Jabr (New York Times, May 12, 2017):
Slobodchikoff’s research is one of the longest and most comprehensive studies of highly complex animal communication in the wild, without training or inducement of any kind. Yet his peers disagree about the merits of his work, in part because they disagree more generally about methodology. Some scientists worry that Slobodchikoff’s studies, especially the early ones, are too small and depend too much on unreliable techniques. “The statistical approach he uses can be treacherous,” says Julia Fischer of the German Primate Center in Göttingen. “It tends to pick up patterns that might not be there. If you redo his analysis with modern techniques, I’m not sure how strong it would be.” Fischer belongs to one of two unrelated research groups that recently cast doubt on some aspects of the 1980 vervet-monkey studies: Based on a reanalysis of the original data and fresh experimentation, the two groups argue that the vervet calls are not as clear-cut as they have been viewed and that the monkeys ignore playbacks just as often as they respond to them appropriately…
The Yale University linguist Stephen Anderson says the idea that prairie dogs have language is ludicrous. The essence of language, he argues, is not a set of symbols or phrases but rather syntax: the ability to systematically combine symbols into an infinite array of sentences. I asked him what an animal would have to do to meet the minimum requirements for language. He replied that if you showed a parrot a fruit that it had never seen before, a pineapple, for example, and it said, “My, that looks spiky, so I don’t think I want to eat it,” that might be sufficient.
… Slobodchikoff’s ongoing study is lacking in one critical aspect: It is unfinished. “I have great respect for the prairie-dog work, but so far there is no evidence that the most nuanced information is meaningful to this species,” says Zuberbühler, the researcher who studied Campbell’s monkeys. Slobodchikoff’s playback experiments demonstrate that different predator-alarm calls trigger distinct escape responses, but so far he has not been able to link the acoustic variations that ostensibly encode color, shape and so on to any observable behavioral differences. Without such evidence, he cannot rule out the possibility that some of the discrepancies in the alarm calls are an inadvertent byproduct of prairie-dog physiology — an increased sensitivity to a certain color or shape invoking a more forceful rush of air through the vocal tract, for instance — and that the animals do not recognize such differences or use them to their advantage. Perhaps part of what Slobodchikoff deems prairie-dog language is just useless prattle.
By way of comparison, I might mention that most ape sign language is concerned with requests for food. The trained chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky’s longest recorded ‘utterance’, when translated from sign language, was ‘give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you’ (see here). I have to say that the idea that prairie dogs might have a language whose grammatical structure is much richer than that of apes strikes me as downright preposterous.
@dga471 asked:
Does anyone have a good estimate of when high-level language arose in humans or primates?
The following article will, I am sure, be very helpful:
Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care? by Mark Pagel (BMC Biol. 2017; 15: 64. Published online July 24, 2017. doi: 10.1186/s12915-017-0405-3
Human language is distinct from all other known animal forms of communication in being compositional . Human language allows speakers to express thoughts in sentences comprising subjects, verbs and objects—such as ‘I kicked the ball’—and recognizing past, present and future tenses. Compositionality gives human language an endless capacity for generating new sentences as speakers combine and recombine sets of words into their subject, verb and object roles. For instance, with just 25 different words for each role, it is already possible to generate over 15,000 distinct sentences. Human language is also referential , meaning speakers use it to exchange specific information with each other about people or objects and their locations or actions.
Animal ‘language’ is nothing like human language…
No one knows for sure when language evolved, but fossil and genetic data suggest that humanity can probably trace its ancestry back to populations of anatomically modern Homo sapiens (people who would have looked like you and me) who lived around 150,000 to 200,000 years ago in eastern or perhaps southern Africa [4–6]. Because all human groups have language, language itself, or at least the capacity for it, is probably at least 150,000 to 200,000 years old. This conclusion is backed up by evidence of abstract and symbolic behaviour in these early modern humans, taking the form of engravings on red-ochre [7, 8].
Based on the Neanderthals’ limited technology and the differential expression of their FOXP2 genes, the author also argues that these humans probably didn’t possess a symbolic language.
In a paper titled, [Pleistocene Exchange Networks as Evidence for the Evolution of Language](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/216751880_Pleistocene_Exchange_Networks_as_Evidence_for_the_Evolution_of_Language ( Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13(1):67–81 · April 2003), Ben Marwick suggests that human language evolved in three stages:
Stage One is a long and stable period where individuals are able to express a small number of the total meanings possible in the simulation using a small grammar. Grammars during this first stage are not sets of rules but vocabulary lists with meanings expressed as arbitrary unanalyzed strings of symbols. Kirby (2000, 317) describes Stage One as a communication system that is nothing more than an inventory of calls expressing unanalyzed meanings’ with ‘an impoverished, idiosyncratic vocabulary of one-word utterances’. The lack of syntax and the stability of the communication system in Stage One is analogous to the proto-language of non-modern hominids that emerged around 1.0 million years ago and lasted until about 130,000 years ago.
Stage Two is a period of unstable and unpredictable changes. The size of the grammar and the number of meanings expressed increases dramatically, but fluctuates wildly. An important change from Stage One is that the number of meanings be-comes greater than the number of rules in the grammar… I believe that this stage is a reasonable approximation of Neanderthal linguistic abilities, with their behavioural capacity somewhere between earlier non-modern hominids and modern humans, but raw-material transfers firmly in the range of earlier non-modern hominids.
Following an abrupt transition, the third stage of the simulation appears with a sudden increase in the number of meanings that can be produced, to the maximum value allowed by the simulation and a drop in the size of the grammars (Kirby 2000, 314). There is now a regular correspondence between meanings and expressions and the individual’s grammars are compositional and have syntactic categories for nouns and verbs. This stage constitutes a simple system with long-term stability and great expressive power. The third stage is an ideal analogue for the emergence of modern language, with syntax and massive expressive power controlled by a Universal Grammar consisting of a few general rules.
Marwick believes that this third, modern stage in the evolution of language occurred in Africa 130,000 years ago, but cautions that his estimates are subject to revision in the light of new data concerning trading networks among early humans:
If the timing and patterning of the crucial thresholds of 13 km, 100 km and 300 km are shown to be unreliable and fail to be confirmed in future research (which should consider data from China, central Asia and southeast Asia) then the narrative proposed here can be rearranged or rejected altogether.
Another paper, titled, Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa by Quentin Atkinson (Science 332, 346 (2011); DOI: 10.1126/science.1199295) comes to a similar conclusion, based on an analysis of the phonemes used in today’s languages and an attempt to link them via a parsimonious family tree:
:
Although distance from Africa explains much less of the variation in phonemic diversity (19%) than in neutral genetic markers (80 to 85%) (5, 7), the effect is comparable to that obtained from analysis of human mitochondrial DNA (18%) (8) or phenotypic data (14 to 28%) (6). To the extent that language can be taken as an example of cultural evolution more generally, these findings support the proposal that a cultural founder effect operated during our colonization of the globe, potentially limiting the size and cultural complexity of societies at the vanguard of the human expansion (10, 11). An origin of modern languages predating the African exodus 50,000 to 70,000 years ago puts complex language alongside the earliest archaeological evidence of symbolic culture in Africa 80,000 to 160,000 years ago (27, 28). Truly modern language, akin to languages spoken today, may thus have been the key cultural innovation that allowed the emergence of these and other hallmarks of behavioral modernity and ultimately led to our colonization of the globe (29).
However, we now know that these dates are likely to be a little conservative, as the various branches of Homo sapiens last shared a common ancestor 300,000 years ago, which was when Southern Africans diverged from the lineage leading to Central Africans, West and East Africans, and non-Africans. See this family tree here. Also, the oldest know Homo sapiens fossils date back to around 315,000 years ago. What’s more, it is now believed that Homo sapiens didn’t emerge in just one location, but in various locations all across Africa - see here and also here:
The team [that determined the age of the oldest known Homo sapiens skull, in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco - VJT] doesn’t propose that the Jebel Irhoud people were directly ancestral to all the rest of us. Rather, they suggest that these ancient humans were part of a large, interbreeding population that spread across Africa when the Sahara was green about 300,000 to 330,000 years ago; they later evolved as a group toward modern humans. “ H. sapiens evolution happened on a continental scale,” Gunz says.
We now also know that around 320,000 years ago, there was a technological breakthrough in Africa. This breakthrough is discussed in a 2018 University of Utah press release titled, Scientists discover evidence of early human innovation, pushing back evolutionary timeline:
An international collaboration, including the Natural History Museum of Utah at the University of Utah, have discovered that early humans in eastern Africa had–by about 320,000 years ago–begun trading with distant groups, using color pigments and manufacturing more sophisticated tools than those of the Early Stone Age. These newly discovered activities approximately date to the oldest known fossil record of Homo sapiens and occur tens of thousands of years earlier than previous evidence from eastern Africa. These behaviors, which are characteristic of humans who lived during the Middle Stone Age, replaced technologies and ways of life that had been in place for hundreds of thousands of years.
The new evidence is backed up by no less than three studies.
So if one were to pinpoint a date for the origin of modern human language, 320,000 years ago seems like a plausible bet - certainly no earlier. Neanderthals seem to have had something that was somewhat more primitive - at least, until inter-breeding with Homo sapiens occurred.
Now that we’ve gotten the dates out of the way, I’d like to address the arguments as to how Adam and Eve learned to speak.
@dga471 writes:
There are also cases of people who forget a large chunk of their personal memories, such as Benjamin Kyle. Kyle only had a few scattered memories of his childhood. Yet he did not instantly revert to the intelligence level of a child. He could still speak and act like an adult.
Applying this to the case of a de novo created Adam and Eve, it seems that their language and other abilities could have been similarly implanted miraculously and instantaneously by God. God would not need to have implanted false memories to them - only a set of neurological abilities to reflexively be able to express what they wanted in whatever language they spoke. They would be like Derek Amato or Benjamin Kyle, but in respect to the ability to speak and move and do other human things.
I don’t think this suggestion will work. The problem with the suggestion is that it involves a top-down creation of the structures in the brain coding for human language, and top-down creation is philosophically incoherent, due to the problem of under-determination. I argued this point some years ago (when I was involved with the Intelligent Design movement) in a post written in response to philosopher Ed Feser on the creation of Adam:
In a comment on … [a] post, entitled, Nature versus Art (April 30, 2011), Professor Feser also asserted that God could, if He wished, make a man from the dust of the ground, simply by saying, “Dust, become a man.” As he wrote back to me, when I asked him about the sequence of steps involved in such a transformation:
Forming a man from the dust of the ground involves causing the prime matter which had the substantial form of dust to take on instead the substantial form of a man. I’m not sure what “sequence of steps” you have in mind. There’s no sequence involved (nor any super-engineering – God is above such trivia). It’s just God “saying,” as it were: “Dust, become a man.” And boom, you’ve got your man.…
I maintain that Feser is completely wrong in his account of how God could make a man from dust. I hold that no-one, not even God , can make a man from dust without specifying, at the atomic level, what should go where (and, I might add, doing quite a lot of nuclear transmutation as well). The reason has nothing to do with any limitations on God’s power; rather, it has to do with the very nature of things. In a nutshell: the top-level of an entity does not, and cannot , determine all of the details at the bottom. If God tried to make men from the top down, without specifying their constituent atomic particles, then they wouldn’t be men at all. They’d be no more real than the things in the movie, “The Matrix.” Real entities – be they people, animals, plants or minerals – have to be fully specified at the bottom level as well as the top. Otherwise, they’re not entities at all…
Let us suppose, now, that God commanded a piece of dust to become a man, as Professor Feser supposes he did. On behalf of the dust, I would like to reply: “What kind of man would you like me to become, Lord? A tall one or a short one? Brown eyes or blue? A Will Smith lookalike or a Tom Cruise replica? Blood type A, B, AB or O? Oh, and what about the micro-level properties of the man you want me to be? Exactly how many cells should this individual have? What sequence of bases should he have in his DNA? I’m afraid I can do nothing, Lord, unless you tell me exactly what you want.” I won’t belabor the point here: the difficulty should be obvious. The problem with merely telling the dust to become a man is that it under-specifies the effect – or in philosophical jargon, under-determines it. And since dust is unable to make a choice between alternatives – even a random one – then nothing at all will get done, if God commands dust to simply become a man. To get a real man, every single detail in the man’s anatomy has to be specified, right down to the atomic level…
So contrary to what Feser wrote, I would maintain that God does have to do super-engineering, if He designs an organism.
The same problem applies to the supposition that God created structures in the brain coding for human language. The problem is that by willing that neurological structure X code for meaning Y, God has under-specified X. More detail is needed, as the top-down meaning requirement fails to stipulate X’s structure at the molecular level. Some bottom-up specification is required, and this comes from the individual’s causal history: namely, the circumstances under which he/she learned the meaning of the phrase in question, creating the distinct associations and neurological traces in the individual’s brain.
The examples of Derek Amato or Benjamin Kyle are beside the point here. Although these individuals had long forgotten the circumstances under which they learned the meanings of the words they spoke, the point is that there was originally a unique set of circumstances under which they learned each of the meanings they were still able to proficiently express in later life, despite their tragic loss of autobiographical memory. In Wittgensteinian terms: having climbed the ladder, they can now kick it away: their past history no longer matters. But my point is that there had to have been a history in the first place.
As we’ve seen above, the Adam and Eve scenario is looking pretty unlikely for Homo sapiens, a species which appears to have evolved all across Africa. But supposing for argument’s sake that there was an original couple who acquired modern human language in a single generation, how would they have done so? I would submit that the only plausible way is for them to have been raised from infancy by God (or an angel) appearing to them in human form and teaching them the meanings of words, much as a human parent might. Such a scenario requires no special creation of brain structures coding for meanings in Adam and Eve’s brains: all they needed was a brain that was neurologically capable of processing the grammar required for a language that is able to express an infinite variety of meanings.
Finally, it should be borne in mind that the phenomenon of genetic drift works very slowly. It is likely that the genes coding for a modern human language-ready brain would have taken tens or even hundreds of thousands of years to spread across Africa.
My two cents.
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Drift works slowly, but selection works fast.
200 kya or even 70 kya, if a single community had a step change in their language ability, their genes might have spread across Africa (and the world) very quickly, perhaps in just thousands of years.
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I don’t understand how the circumstances change the situation meaningfully. Both you and I agree on the meaning of the word “three”, even though we may have learned it in different circumstances. With more complex words such as “melodious” or there could be cultural and personal nuances that make our understandings slightly different, but there is also a large amount of agreement such that you and I both understand each other when we use that word.
With Adam, God has to create neurological structures that make him understand the word “melodious”, and God must choose what personal and cultural nuances attach to that word, to avoid the problem of under-determination as you mentioned. Perhaps God would choose nuances that are similar to the cultures of people around the Garden. (As Josh suggests in the GAE model, this could be purposefully done, if God wanted Adam to eventually intermingle with them.) But it is hard to argue how this amounts to God being deceptive. Deceptive to whom? Adam was fully aware from the beginning that God created him, and that even if he instantly learned a lot of Ancient Near East cultural practices after de novo creation, he also knew that he was made differently. Adam would be like Neo, who instantly learns jujitsu in the Matrix after uploading the software into his brain.
Now perhaps you could argue that Adam’s appearance is deceptive to people outside the Garden. But unlike fossils or stars, Adam is an active, conscious agent who knows where he comes from. He would be able to reveal his identity to the people he encountered. And even if he didn’t, that would be Adam being deceptive, not God. Finally, in a culture where it is common to hear of tales of gods taking the form of humans, sometimes secretly, I don’t think Adam being of non-human origin would be offensively deceptive to anyone he met. He would be like a distant traveler with a mysterious backstory.
More importantly, I think what this conversation has made me realize is that DGOs need to be thought out much more. What kind of deceptiveness is forbidden for God, and why? DGOs, if taken too far, would imply that miracles are impossible. @vjtorley, do you think Jesus turning water into wine suffers from the problem of underdetermination?
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