Dr. Craig: I mentioned that despite thousands of hours by these primatologists to teach chimps language of some sort, they can’t learn it. And yet you can take the most uncivilized aboriginal, put him in a cultured situation and, as you said, he’ll learn the language. He’ll even learn Polish, as difficult grammatically as that might be. In fact, my colleague Josh Swamidass has pointed out to me the remarkable fact that you can take primitive man and put him in a modern environment and modern culture and he’ll get along just fine. He’ll learn how to learn the language. He’ll learn how to adapt. A great example of that would be the Indian, Squanto, who met the pilgrims when they came to Massachusetts. Squanto was, in effect, a Stone Age person. The Indians never got beyond Stone Age tools. They didn’t even have a wheel. And yet Squanto was able to learn the language. He was able to go to England and work as a servant and butler, and then eventually finally did go back to his native people. But despite his primitive origins, he had these innate capacities that we talked about for language and for culture. It’s quite extraordinary when you think about it, and very, very different than animals.
Clarifying this a bit. Squanto was much farther along than a stone age technology, because he had agriculture! He wasn’t really “primitive.” A better way to put it is that though he was “apparently primitive” he wasn’t at all. He was just like us. In fact, he wasn’t even a hunter gatherer, and they are just like us too!
This is pretty fraught language, but WLC’s point (and mine) is that we might have though Native Americans were are primitive, but they are really not. They were just like us, and far beyond the great apes. We are, in the end, all the same degree of “human.”
Note: it was clarified below that native Americans might have been Stone Age, but I still emphasize that doesn’t mean they weren’t technologically advanced in important ways.
My understanding is that agriculture was developed in the stone age, and is one of the dividers between paleolithic (old stone age) and neolithic (new stone age). So it would be unfair to refer to Squanto’s technology as paleolithic, but ok to refer to it as neolithic.
It’s also not really true to suggest that Native Americans hadn’t invented the wheel. They certainly had, as evidenced by wheeled children’s toys, but didn’t use wheels on things like carts (for transport), probably because they didn’t have advanced metalworking skills to make axles without significant friction.
Squanto also had a complex and rich language, a reasonably stable society and cuture, a government, a religion, and an economy that traded goods over much of North America.
He and his people tried to peacefully engage with the Pilgrims. In return, the “civilized” Europeans enslaved him and took him from his home and family for use as a servent and a curiosity for their amusement.
WLC’s condescending racism is ignorant and disgusting.
Those numbers should be 99.5% and 98.7%, respectively. Personally, I think human exceptionalism is pernicious. Are we just apes? Well, we’re apes. Don’t know what function “just” serves in that sentence. Are we just animals? Well, we’re animals. Are we special? Sure, every species is special in some way. Since we have eliminated all our closest relatives, we are perhaps more special than species that haven’t. But I don’t think our inflated sense of self worth needs too much encouragement.
Really, it reads as if he’s comparing “uncivilized aboriginals” to chimps. Maybe he should clarify it.
A lot of people are mystified by language learning–among ummm people, and even–my word–Polish! lol–but I might have expected him to be a bit more informed.
The 95% thing is based on counting every base in an indel as a separate difference. That’s not a valid metric for any reason. I don’t think the 98% similarity in coding regions can be justified by any metric at all. Where did you get it?
Is it harder than any other language? Every child learns his native language with equal facility. Whether a foreign language is easy or hard depends on its similarity to one’s native language. Craig, as an English speaker, should not find Polish to be harder than Italian or Hindi, and much easier than Chinese or Tlingit. He mentions all the cases, but Polish has no more cases than many Indo-European languages (no more than Latin if you count the rare vocative and locative), and many fewer than Finnish. I remain mystified.
Comparing them isn’t the problem. He compares them to animals and us, showing that they are just like us, unlike a chimp. We compare people to animals all the time.
The bigger issue is calling him Stone Age and primitive. Though his point, in context, is that he is not Stone Age or primitive, that isn’t clear and it is going to offend.
