Sometimes my email contains a few good and sincere questions — and here’s an example. This is probably the most common rock on which creationists founder: a profound misconception about what evolution says, and a natural human desire to see a guiding plan to the world.
I’m tormented.
I appreciate the struggle many creationists are having about evolutionary science. I find myself tormented as I observe the world around me.
What I seem to be focused on is how a plant or animal is self aware of it’s need to evolve? How does a tree know how to “evolve” it’s seed to fly on the wind? How would a lizard “know” that it needed to develop camouflage to survive?
I can’t imagine who any plant or animal other than human would have the ability to “know” and as well as pass it along via DNA to future hundreds of thousands of generations?
I’d appreciate your feedback…this is really starting to bother me.
The first part of the answer is that the organism doesn’t know that it must evolve. There is no plan, no guidance, no goal imposed ahead of time, the tree or lizard are not following a program that says they have a goal. The outcome emerges as a consequence of selection and chance.
The tree did not plan ahead. In a population of trees, there was chance variation in how far seeds fell from the parent; seeds that fell in the shade of the parent would not flourish, while seeds that were fortuitously caught by the wind and fell further away were more likely to thrive, and produce more offspring. Lizards that blended in with their environment were less likely to be eaten, and had more offspring that, inheriting their parents inconspicuousness, were also less likely to be eaten, and variation in their progeny was selected further approximations to camouflage.
There is no “know”, no awareness. Darwin’s insight was that life didn’t need it to produce a pattern of change — unguided random variation, filtered after the fact by natural selection, produces an appearance of design.
And yes, this is a fact that many people find troubling. We’re brought up thinking we’re cuddled in the swaddling hands of a god who has a grand plan for us all, and that every little up and down in our life is the product of some cosmic intent — it’s reassuring and makes us feel important. It’s an interpretation unsupported by any evidence, too, and often contradicted. We live in a world of chance, and we’re all on our own.
OK, readers, maybe you have a better explanation. Go ahead, chime in with a comment and explain how we’re going to wean the general public away from their imaginary sky father.
Sounds like you’ve done a fine job as it is. The biggest jump is getting people to realize that it is POPULATIONS that change, not individuals, and that ‘change’ isn’t animals changing, it’s different selections among individuals that causes the group, over time, to ‘change’.
I wonder if their focus on individuals changing vs. the change of populations is a byproduct of the self-centeredness of that kind of religious wishful thinking…?
This was a nice response that you gave. I might also illustrate the point by asking the correspondent if she or he “knew” what sorts of genes she or he would pass on to children, or if she/he would have any way of controlling that.
And yet children do bear some resemblance to their parents.
This should emphasize that intentionality is not part of the process.
I wonder if somebody might, say, write a book about this. I mean, hey, if there was just one book on the subject of evolution, it would really help. You know, I think if a lot of these confused people had a book to read, they might really start to understand.
I don’t know why nobody’s written a book on the subject yet. You’d think somebody would.
Maybe there should even be TWO books. Just in case the first guy left something out.
Honest questions like these make me hopeful that with improvements to the science curriculum with more classroom time dedicated to how evolution works, we will actually see a decrease in the amount of Creationists in the younger generations. I give Creationists a lot of crap, but sometimes they are honestly just ignorant and have never been exposed to the facts of the world.
I know that as a product of public school in California, I never had one science class which talked about how evolution worked. The word “evolution” was used from time to time, but it seemed as if we had to go figure out for ourselves what that word meant.
One additional fact is that the idea that organisms “know” how to evolve is akin to the long-discarded Lamarckism.
The point of Darwin’s insight was that nothing internal was needed to drive evolution, but that the fittest would survive without “trying to” (sure, much later organisms try to avoid death, however that ability itself no doubt evolved).
The upshot is that for a very long time evolutionary theory has pointedly avoided the impossible problem of organisms “wanting to evolve”. A fish is streamlined simply because the most streamlined fishes (in most environments) left the most offspring.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
This illustrates the pitiful lack of science education in this country. I assume he’s American. I get that all the time too. Our kids, and the adults they grow iup to be, are not being taught. This is a simple concept but it still gets skipped over in science class because of the stigma. I was never told anything about it in high school. But that was awhile back. Still I fear were losing ground to Europe and Asia. Stronger science & math education will help this a lot.
Directing them to the websites that teach the basics would help too. Gives them the opportunity to learn at their own pace. Can’t off hand remember them right now, but I know I’ve seen them. Anyone have the links?
“We live in a world of chance”, oops, this would apply to random genetic drift. Natural Selection has a bias. Some genotypes have better odds than others.
I feel sorry for you PA stamos. I had an awesome science teacher in high school who had a masters so I got dual credit for college. We worked with drosophila to show allele changes mostly. This education I received was in South Texas too, for those of you who think we’re all slack-jawed inbreds down here.
This question shows the solipsism of those who denounce evolution. They constantly try to discredit evolution by ridiculing the fact that other species couldn’t possibly know how to evolve. It is quite an arrogant evasion used to divert the discussion away from the theory by making a caricature of a perfectly sound scientific idea.
And they do not want to admit it, but there may very well be species on this planet right now that enjoy consciousness and intelligence similar to our own – we simply cannot know until we find a way to communicate with them effectively. Anyone who would deny the fact that chimpanzees possess a measure of intelligence is simply ignoring the fact that humans have had conversations with them using a language I grew up with – American Sign Language. That language – which is not the same as signed English – is a language entirely divergent from English in the grammatical sense, and it takes a great deal of thought and intelligence to learn it and use it effectively, especially if it is not the first form of communication you learn in life.
I think that we’ll eventually crack the code and figure out how to communicate with other sentient species. If and when we do, we’ll more than likely find that we’re not as intellectually alone as we’ve thought for the past few millenia.
No, it applies to selection too. Do you know what genotypes will be most fit in 100 years? Do you have a personal choice in your genes? The functional core of what you’ve got is not the result of chance, but you also have an assortment of random variation on top of that, and random events that will shape your life, that make chance a much more important factor in the relative success of your personal lineage.
No, I think that the concept that evolution works on populations is just a difficult one to grasp, especially if one’s knowledge of biology is weak in general.
A healthy education with a good grounding in the sciences would naturally lead one to ask this question at some point in the learning process. I’m pretty sure I remember struggling with this one myself as a lad.
Hahaha
C Barr – it’s as if you only read the second to last paragraph. Go back and read the rest.
I could also point out that because evolution is not a matter of “knowing”, it both fails to utilize solutions that a mind would think up (like wings designed from first principles, instead of from legs), and it comes up with many solutions that minds would not readily think of (like so many enzyme adaptations).
Indeed, sometimes engineers will use “evolutionary strategies” (genetic algorithms) to sort through the complexity of optimizing “design”. Minds do not deal very well with a whole lot of factors which change in relation to each others’ changes, while evolution sorts through complexity quite well (unlike what IDists project).
Sometimes it’s not best to use minds for adaptation. Sometimes it is. Plants and animals have all of the good and the bad of a mindless process (swallows are exquisitely shaped by selection, while they still have the “backward retinas” of all vertebrates).
Humans are learning how to use both mindless evolutionary strategies and intelligence, and are improving our crops and animals as a result of this.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
The only thing in your excellent explanation that bothers me is your use of the word “chance.” So subjective. These variations occur for solid cause-and-effect reasons, whether we know what they are or not. Let’s not give the creation crowd a leg to stand on by injecting a potential immaterialist explanation for them.
P.A. Stamos (#4) – I sympathize with your point, but I think that given how readily available reliable and clear information on evolution is (as Hank Fox at #3 ironically points out), there’s no excuse for not being educated. I suspect that there’s a good deal of self-imposed ignorance, as well as social pressure that supports the lack of exposure, but that helps to explain the situation, not to excuse it.
I also think one of the most important ways to reform education is to teach students how to properly use the internet, especially how to evaluate web sources. I have college juniors in class who still think that wikipedia is an acceptable scholarly source. Simply teaching students (when they’re young!) how to research and evaluate sources will go a long way toward correcting the rampant lack of basic understanding of science, not to mention everything else.
I think you did an excellent job of explaining.
A good explanation, but I think that the difficulty in conceiving of a will-less natural process lies not in the idea of god, but in the very human way of thinking that partly necessitated the idea of god in the first place.
Humans are thinking, acting, manipulating entities. We are a species uniquely possessed of intent, and many of our actions are slow, purposeful, building actions. We conceive of something we want, we think about how one might get it, we look around to see what could help us, we find something with potential and we begin to shape it to fit our need, then finally we use it trying to get our desire, and if it fails, we think about why that happened, and we try again.
Intent and planning are just as much a part of the human animal as the hand or the eye. Some even argue that this mode of thinking is very much a result of those limbs and organs, and no doubt they had their impact. Just as every child thinks that every human thinks and feels as they do about everything, so too did our ancestors find it inconceivable that the natural world could lack this fundamental human trait, will. The solitary sky god is the same as the wood nymph of the fire sprite; Monotheism just Animism with a few thousand years of glossy affectation and social competition attached.
Speaking for myself, I had doubts about evolution for a long time – not because of any religious belief, but simply because it really is a tough idea to wrap your head around – that all the diversity and apparent order in the world could come out of wholly random and undirected process.
Dawkins’ computer-generated “trees” in the opening chapters of Blind Watchmaker were one thing that really made the whole thing click for me. It was a very straightforward, easy-to-follow example of how an unthinking process like a computer program can eventually generate very orderly, complex, designed-looking things without any particular goal in mind. More and better examples of this kind of thing might be a great educational tool, especially for the apparent legion of computer science creationists…
doh, that should be “or” in the second to last line.
I think that one of the sources for this confusion about individuals evolving versus a population evolving is from the common visual technique used in science shows (and texts) that do show an individual morphing into the next stage. This is even used in the iconic ape to man picture. While it is useful for showing the close relationships of one form to another, it is very misleading as to the process.
A healthy education with a good grounding in the sciences would naturally lead one to ask this question at some point in the learning process. I’m pretty sure I remember struggling with this one myself as a lad.
While I certainly agree that the state of science education in America is pretty pathetic, in terms of understanding evolution, I think it may be more important to have a better understanding of probability and statistics. More and more, I see a poor grasp of statistics as the root of a lot of modern controversies.
What an excellent, easy-to-understand explanation.
Religious people around me ask those kinds of questions, too, and I propably will quote you. They also wonder how fitting place for life earth is, with all the stuff like sun nearby, air we can breath, fruits and plants we can eat… And then I tell them that if this wasnt the case, we wouldn´t be talking here, and it always baffles them.
I suppose want requires consciousness, whereas need doesn’t. From my meager understanding of evolution, it seems safe to say that things don’t evolve because they want to, they evolve because they need to.
I remember stumbling on this question too. Partly, I think, is that I was taught that there is an analogy between the genetic adaptation through natural selection and the conscious adaptation that humans are so good at.
I understand the need for comforting explanations about existence; however I don’t consider natural selection to be particularly discomforting. Certainly if you believe in a personal god, who answers prayers, and awards you Oscars etc, this is a harsher reality. However, for me the understanding that as a mammal I am in a struggle for survival, and enjoying existence in much the same ways as creatures have always done so is placing me in a continuum that is longer than my own, or even my own species. Darwin said that the insect and its complexities, such as the architecture a bee creates, are as biologically impressive as the emergence of humanity. It is not so insulting to be compared to other great living survivors.
I remember enjoying the pbs special on evolution. One thing I did not like, however, was the word “tinkering”; as in evolution tinkered with the morphology of such and such. That falsely implied an intent that just isn’t there and also conflates change with purpose, direction. I think the “God of the gaps” argument is one that people can grasp more easily.
I wonder if you could say that design is only accelerated version of selection? After all, the elements we put into a design are things that we know have been successful in the past.
The way I would explain it is by using a simplistic analogy… such as how does water know that it is supposed to flow downhill? It doesn’t, flowing downhill is just a consequence of the physical laws at work. The same way evolution is not a goal or a plan, it is simply an explanation of the consequence of the laws of natural selection.
Dan #23. Dan, need, isn’t a part of it either. Things (organisms and their phenotype/genotype) ‘are’, because what they had was an advantage that allowed them to pass on their expressions to their offspring. The offspring in turn…….. . If you mean need, as in need to adapt to be able to do that before death then I guess you could use “need” but it still is as bad as “want” if used wrong.
I think another major cause of this misunderstanding is the wide spread use of the colloquial form of the word “evolution.” Evolution is seen to many non-biologists as a liner, directed process because when people hear the word used to describe things like “the evolution of automobiles”, its not as if car producers make many slightly different car models and then only continue making the ones that sell best, which would be a much better analogy. I’ve actually begun snapping pictures of the word “evolution” where I see it used in advertising, with the idea that I might use them one day in a talk.
Also, I think there is a strong disjunction between people living in western cultures and the natural world. People see a population of birds or something and they only see a bunch birds that all look exactly alike. They don’t see the variation among and within populations because its not immediately apparent. It is interesting that H.sapiens have no trouble recognizing the variation in our own species, however.
Haven’t you create da rather simplistic false dichotomy between evolition and belief in god ?
I don’t believe in creationism and the literal interpretation of the Bible any more than scientists do. But atheists have not disproved the existance of god or an afterlife. I don’t know exactly what exists or does not exist , or exactly how and why life arose, or exactly how it has developed. If a god exists, it most certainly isn’t the conventional stereotype of an old man with a beard.
The fact that there are so many irrational and illogical religious beliefs in the world , and that so much evil has been caused by Dogmatism and intolerance in not in itself ipso facto proof that there is no god. I’m just not sure.
-Rol
“I feel sorry for you PA stamos.”
Don’t feel too bad for me! While I definitely would have loved to have had a class focusing on or at least explaining evolution, I supplemented school work with works by Dawkins, Sagan, Diamond and the like. These guys, along with others, offered me some incredible insight into the beauty of the natural world. Here I am now at university studying Evolutionary Anthropology and loving every minute of it.
-Steve WH
“I sympathize with your point, but I think that given how readily available reliable and clear information on evolution is (as Hank Fox at #3 ironically points out), there’s no excuse for not being educated.”
I agree to some extent. There is definitely no “excuse,” but I believe there are “explanations.” It is difficult for people who have been indoctrinated into a belief like Creationism to get up the courage to challenge that belief. I can understand how it would be uncomfortable, or even terrifying. It isn’t an excuse, and everyone should be challenging their world views on a daily basis by ravenously seeking knowledge, but some people are just born into families/school districts which make this more difficult.
This is still anthropomorphizing a completely mindless process — it makes no more sense to say that than to say that rocks roll down slopes because they need to get to the bottom, or that fire produces light because it needs to be bright. There may be understandable reasons why certain genotypes are beneficial to a population of organisms, given the circumstances, but it is at best confusing, and at worst silly, to say that such reasons are “needs”.
This is a great video–albeit a little technical–that shows just how “tenacious” evolution is.
Not really. They evolve because only that which evolves has fitness in an ever-changing environment. Hence, evolvability is thought to evolve.
The species that did not evolve simply died.
The species that evolved lived (or anyway, descendent species lived). But they did not need to live, or to evolve. They’re simply here because they evolved to be successful.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Just saw a piece about your visit here, on the front page of Section B in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer under the headline,”Blogger spreads the gospel of science.” The writer, Tom Paulson,did a pretty good job, despite repeatedly calling this issue a war.
Speaking of wars, I just read a translation of a novel written in 1936 by a Czech writer, Karen Capel, titled “The War with the Newts.” He is long dead, but this book is an amazing and thought-provoking work which touches on every aspect of evolution, religion, exploitation of “lesser” animals, you name it. And there are giant intelligent newts as important characters…
info #12
I see your point. The 2nd to last paragraph discussed what hits us during our lives, the slings and arrows of misfortune. These events can be random “chance” or the result of a regular non-random environmental pressure “natural selection”. As a summation of the ideas expressed in the essay, I thought the emphasis on “chance” in that paragraph was counter to Natural Selection. Variation is random, Natural Selection is directional.
Environmental pressures may change (alternating with climatic oscillation for example), but the effect at the moment is directional.
P.S.
I do like the fact that when I shoot my mouth off here, someone more knowledgeable sets me straight.
What dcwp said. Ask him/her to control what color eyes their child has.
I might have worded the variation part a little differently. The first thing I’d have stressed is the variation between offspring and parents, and amongst the offspring themselves. Your seed example didn’t make that very clear. It sounds like just pure chance, without implying any variation in the seed shape. And yes, I do understand that random chance is important in evolution, but without the actual variation, there can be no evolution. I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one that read it that way.
I also have a question about this section:
My guess is that seed development is an interaction between parent and seed genetics, but is there one set of genes that it’s more dependent upon?
Also, I’d give the person a couple links for further reading, such as:
http://www.talkorigins.org/
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/
Before I took high school bio, that was a stumbling block for me, too. I think it has to do with the way evolution is presented in popular media. There’s not much stress on the random variation and selection aspect – more on adaptation. It almost seemed that adaptation was a goal, and not just a by product of survival.
Oh, that morphing illustration gets on my last nerve. I wish I could draw in the comment box, but my evolution illustration goes something like this:
Draw box, draw a bunch of letters in it. A-E, 3-4 of each. That’s a population, and there’s some variation there. They’re mostly similar, all letters, all clustered near the start of the alphabet, but not all identical. Now something comes along and wipes some of them out. Let’s say it’s a predator with a preferance for the As and Bs, so most of those get erased. Look at what’s left.
Now, it’s baby-making season. Draw another box to the right of the first one, write NEXT GENERATION really big between. Mostly the babies look like the parents, but not exactly, because families don’t all exactly the same, do they? Draw some Cs and Ds and Es, there might still be one A or B around if they didn’t all get eaten, now there are some Fs and Gs because the variation can come at either end of the trait.
Count the numbers of each letter in each box. Are there the same proportions of each letter in the two boxes? No. It’s changed from one generation to the next. That’s evolution. Did any of the individual letters change? Nope, because INDIVIDUALS DON’T EVOLVE.
Then the lesson gets tweaked and expanded as we talk about the kinds of things that can wipe out various individuals, and how they have different causes and effects and all, but that’s the main point.
@#31 robert —
Why not? A-“old man with a beard”-ists haven’t disproved the existence of an old man with a beard who has god-like powers.
This is a silly objection. From evolution’s point of view, there is such a thing as chance in the world. It’s the physicist’s job to worry about what “chance” actually is. But if you do have a solid cause-and-effect explanation of quantum mechanics that excludes chance, some people in Stockholm would probably like to talk to you.
The email reads like standard-issue concern trolling to me, but maybe there was context.
“Wanting to evolve” is relatable to eugenics in my mind.
Evolving is not.
Simply put, evolution is another way of saying “life that has kids before it dies.”
Because not all kids are exactly the same as their parents, some kids-grown-into-parents are more likely to have kids, and some less likely to have kids. Things that contribute to having more kids becomes more common just because there are more kids that are that way.
When these small changes are taken over a long time, big changes can happen.
Sorry to over simplify and offend.
Perhaps you can explain to me how inanimate objects such as rocks and flames are subject to evolution or have any need to adapt so as to survive.
Aside from that, my definitions of evolution may be lacking, but I don’t think they’re entirely erroneous.
I guess my version is the same as your central theme. But I’ll try it out anyway, because it’s good exercise for me.
* We’re all random mutants: (essentially) Every animal, plant, or whatever, is born with a number of mutations. Many of which don’t do much one way or the other. Which specific mutations each one has is basically random.
* Natural challenges come which make some mutations more beneficial than others: Nature constantly throws challenges at the populations. If individuals have DNA changes that allow them the ability to thrive better under those conditions, then they and their descendants will carry those changes forward. Those that have less ability to thrive under those conditions will be lost and take their genes with them.
* The longer the challenge lasts, the more the beneficial changes set-in and get better: The longer a specific challenge lasts (ie, really cold, need to live in trees, etc), the more this selective filtering will happen. New DNA tweaks. Tweaks that improve survival more will endure in favor over the others (even over the tweaks that FIRST allowed them to survive). Long enough, and very apparent physical changes will be seen. Ones that have become continuously better at their special function.
No one knows this is happening to them: All of this is due to constant pressure – to be more warmer, more able to hop or fly from tree-to-tree, more able to see better, run better, etc, etc. And it’s all happening under all our noses. Even we humans, with the ability to think in detail, don’t know the environmental challenges that will be thrown at us tomorrow and which particular traits will help us get through them.
Sometimes a joke gets the point across as well as or better than an earnest scientific explanation:
3 friends are sitting around debating what mankind’s greatest invention is. One says fire. The second says the wheel. The third says the Thermos.
“The Thermos?”
-“Yeah, the Thermos.”
“Why?”
-“Well, y’know how you put something hot in, it stays hot, and you put something cold in, it stays cold?”
“Yeah, so what?”
-“How does it know?”
#17
I would go further. We humans have probably evolved to seek intent in the world around us. We look at natural processes and think “what does that mean?” and “who did that?”. This may have had survival value, but it means we are left with “mental illusions” like thinking that evolution has motive.
SteveWH#15
Bingo!
I had an excellent biology teacher in (public) high school. Evolution was the foundation of his lessons for the entire year. From units on dissections, tree identification, drosophila to binomial nomenclature, Darwin and the history of science, etc, he always tied everything back to evolution and natural selection in a way I found to be very logical and easy to understand. And this was Ohio, in a christian, redneck, former Klan stronghold town.
PZ’s reply is very good especially since it directly refers to the questioner’s examples of the tree and the lizard. Better a simple, direct reply than getting into more complex examples.
PZ please post updates if this person continues to correspond with you. It would be interesting to know their response to what you say.
To be honest, without doing something unethical, I don’t think it’ll be possible to get rid of the “Sky Father” in a fair sized population no matter what is done. The people who truly want to believe (mainly cause they truly need that crutch to deal with the world) will not even pay attention to any evidence that their “Sky Father” isn’t really up there.
Massive contradictions in his book? “Put there to test our faith and understanding” they will say.
Lack of miracles today? “Miracles still happen, you just don’t have your heart open enough to realize it” they will say.
No matter what problem with their religion/crutch is brought up they will come back that it’s either there to test the believers and strengthen their faith, or they’ll say it’s your problem and that the problem is you don’t have an open and accepting enough heart to understand.
Outside of those people though, from what I’ve seen, people are generally getting smart and mature enough to drop their crutch and stand on their own. I can’t really think of anything that needs done to ween people off a “God” any faster than it’s already happening. Sure, supposed membership rates are up, but members only show up at Christmas and Easter, and the kids don’t know why, only that it’s 2 times per year they have to be bored outa their minds. Eventually the kids grow up and most decide not to bother with church at all any more, and when no lightning bolts strike them down, they slowly come into life and reason like a butterfly from its cocoon.
I realize that some places aren’t like this, and may need help getting people to use their brain when it comes to things like this, but from my vantage point it’s happening plenty fast and leaves me with no ideas what else can be done past sit back and watch.
Then it’s just as well that the burden is on the person making an extraordinary claim to prove that extraordinary claim.
It’s obviously difficult to prove a negative. But to prove the existence of a deity who allegedly has the power to create life and galaxies with a few spoken commands – really, how difficult should that be? There should be evidence of that. We should be able to tell that all matter in the universe came into being at about the same time. We should be able to see that the Holy Book that reflects his Word has wisdom that surpasses ours, and that it has no errors. We should see incontrovertable proof of his existence in our daily lives.
Instead, we see fallacious logic, coincidences, correlations, people with a need to control others’ lives, and a desperate desire to believe that there’s a power up there – one that can and will protect us when that tornado is headed our way . . . .
A solid explanation for a sincere question. I think one aspect of the evolutionary process that the public doesn’t really understand is what can happen if the filter of natural selection has plenty of time with which to work. Billions of years don’t fit within our personal concept of time, so it isn’t at all intuitive how one can infer changes in populations over vast amounts of time. I kinda got a grasp when counting radioactive samples. I used to stick radioactive gold seeds into people to treat cancer (Au-198). I could put that radioactive sample in from of a detector and get a nice count of how many gamma rays were streaming out of the sample. To the observer, it looks like a huge amount of radioactivity. In reality, a minute portion of the atoms in the sample are radioactive. The probability that any one atom is radioactive is incredibly low, but if there are billions and billions and millions (that’s about right, I think) it looks pretty impressive during the sample count. Time and natural selection work that way too. What seems improbable works quite well when you have a process a change (natural selection) and plenty of time for change to occur.
Dan, # 44. “”Aside from that, my definitions of evolution may be lacking, but I don’t think they’re entirely erroneous. “”
Still wrong Dan. Go to those websites listed above
http://www.talkorigins.org/
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/
Might try the HHMI Christmas Lectures on Evolution done some time ago. Very good & you can watch it on the intertoobes.
Then come back. K
I agree with you, windy. You might have a lot of selective pressures, such as the local predators favoring a particular color, but occasionally a tree just falls on you.
I have long thought that some of the disconnect between us & them is caused by the way we use language. Using words such as “know” in a metaphoric sense may lead some to take literally what was meant to be taken figuratively.
Likewise, when some believers – or even fellow skeptics – hear me rant about the stupidity of credulous belief, it might be taken as an attack on God. It isn’t that I hate gods; rather, my ire is directed at the silly acceptance of mythology as fact. At least in part, this confusion is caused by the way I – or we – use language. I see this as another imperfection in an evolved system. But who can be carefully precise all the time?
It’s fortunate that some have the sense to ask for clarification, as your tormented correspondent did.
I just wanted to send a note of encouragement to the questioner for having the honesty and smarts to ask a *biologist* this question.
Lots of people are confused by evolution. Science teachers short-change the topic, and some of them don’t even understand it themselves. (Recall that one in six biology teachers in the U.S. is a young-earth creationist, according to the recent PLoS Biology survey.)
But taking this question to the right authority for the subject is a big step. The world (especially the Web) is so inundated with information, misinformation, and disinformation from sources of varying qualities. The ability to figure out where to go for accurate, credible stuff is a skill that is increasingly important but incredibly rare.
To PZ’s excellent answer, I would only add that the seemingly remarkable outcomes of natural selection on random variation are the products of TREMENDOUSLY long timescales. If you’re new to the subject, the evolution of complex things from random variations might seem incredible at first, but it’s a little easier to stomach once you understand that natural selection has been at work on the variation in living things for billions of years. (And wrapping one’s mind around a “billion” of anything is no small feat in itself.)
I think that a big part of the problem is that (some) people look at examples such as PZ gave, and understand them, but don’t “get” that THOSE THINGS ARE EXAMPLES OF EVOLUTION.
It’s perfectly simple to see how camouflage will help a certain skin pattern to thrive genetically, but when you try to demonstrate it to a creationist that that kind of thing is evolution in action, it’s like they shut down.
What is it? Stubbornness?
SteveWH #15
On the other hand, this site is an acceptable scholarly source.
I do not think they are entirely erroneous either.
The problem hangs on the meaning of the word “need”. Indeed, if you were to say that a species “needs to evolve” if it is going to continue to exist, you would be right.
But it neither needs to evolve nor to continue to exist (perhaps as a different species).
The only objection that I have is the notion that they “need to evolve” from a cosmic or general perspective. It is we who are looking at the survival of species who say that they “need to evolve” because we value both our survival and our evolution (and the survival and evolution of other species). And it is true that in journals the “need to evolve” is mentioned from time to time.
It’s in the context of this thread and its subject that “they evolve because they need to” seems out of place, because it sounds as if species are evolving for some purpose (survival, enhancement, etc.). The fact is that in the most “objective sense” species simply evolve because DNA is subject to various changes, and because competition and environment “select” (which itself tends to have teleological connotations) the “fittest” DNA changes.
From a certain perspective you are right that “they evolve because they need to” is correct. It just doesn’t get to the most fundamental fact that natural selection has nothing to do with a “species needs”, it is just a matter of differential reproductive fitness.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Posted by: Dan | June 6, 2008 2:16 PM
You missed Tulse’s point. A species may benefit in the long run from evolutionary changes, but the process of evolution is not driven by any need or want. It is simply the process of mutation and selection taking place, and some mutations are, in fact, not beneficial to the life form they occur within. If evolution was driven by need, these harmful mutations wouldn’t exist, because – in the sense of the word ‘need’ as you used it – there wouldn’t ever be a “need” for a non-beneficial mutation. Evolution simply occurs – that is the point Tulse was making. Need is a value that we ascribe to the process after the fact – not a driving force behind it.
I bet many point mutations are directly caused by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Relation. We are talking about the behavior of single water molecules here.
Did you spellcheck? Spellcheckers, you see, are of evil. The man’s name is Karel Čapek.
I think you mean Karel Capek. (I think Karel is just a variant spelling of Karl, pronounced pretty much the same, and the C is a “ch” sound, so it’ pronounced something like “Karl CHOPek”; corrections welcome of course)
Capek also coined the term “robot,” in his 1920 play R.U.R.. (R.U.R. stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots.”)
dictionary.com sez
Origin: Czech, coined by Karel Čapek in the play R.U.R. (1920) from the base robot-, as in robota compulsory labor, robotník peasant owing such labor
@#45
I really like this sentence, because it gets at the beneficial mutation issue much better than simply saying “there are harmful, neutral, and beneficial mutations.” The latter sentence makes it sound as though mutations have some inherent value. While in some cases (eg, lethal mutations) it’s pretty obvious that they’re going to be bad in almost any context, many mutations might be neutral in one natural context and beneficial in another, and even possibly harmful in another. A neutral mutation may exist and be propagated non-selectively in a species for a long time before an environmental change causes it to be selected for. The specific natural challenges are the key.
I find it ironic that in christianity, it’s a sin to be prideful. But at the same time they say that we are created in the image of god and this god has a divine purpose for us and that their way is the right way. Doesn’t that sound the least bit arrogant to anyone else? Be humble yet we deserve special treatment, that’s the message I get from christianity today.
I agree with comment 62.
———————–
Nitpick alert:
The Czech spelling.
pronounced pretty much the same
The e is pronounced, otherwise it wouldn’t be there.
@ #17: We are a species uniquely possessed of intent…
Are you sure?
Step one, I guess: mass distribution of Tshirts, bumperstickers, and such gewgaws lettered with “Individuals don’t evolve. Populations evolve.” And a general willingness to explain what the heck that’s about.
Speaking of reciting yer animated graphics: View of a set of assorted, apparently randomly-shaped and -colored small thingies (to use the technical term) combining to form new shapes and colors and descending slowly to pass through a series of sets of flat screens, colanderishly pierced with various shapes, that move and distort laterally, apparently randomly, making pass-through holes of constantly varying shapes as they pass over each other. The holes don’t have to be small, but over several passes in some regions certain shapes would be “favored” to pass through more easily and probably more frequently. These would be the ones to combine in the next level, etc. ad onanonum.
Guess I’d better learn to draw.
Part of the difficulty the doubters are having is that people, being self-aware individuals, consider individuals to be important. Also, people anthropomorpize nature, which means imbuing it with logic and efficiency. Thus, they get to thinking that evolution must be the result of individuals logically resolving the problems that they face. However, “Nature” is not an entity, and so cannot care about individuals the way we do. Also, most individuals respond to environmental or ecological change by dying, and just a very lucky few manage to pull through or escape the hazard, or get lucky enough to find a refuge, or are in some way genetically predisposed to survive, and get to pass on their genes.
Of the hundreds of millions of eggs laid by a female sturgeon and of the hundreds of millions of acorns dropped by an oak tree during the course of their lives, an average of only one per parent will survive to reproduce. All the rest die. Even though most of the death is pretty much random bad luck, there is scope for some genes to be a tiny bit better than others and to give their owners a slight edge at critical moments, thus allowing their owners to go on to father far more than their share of the next generation.
If I were responding to the emailer, I would ask him or her to understand that the world we live in is not necessarily how everything is “supposed to be.” It’s wonderful chance & selection that has produced feather-light seeds that can be blown into the wind, but consider that there are an infinite number of other outcomes for that seed, some of which may be better than what we have. What if the seed developed the ability to sprout glider wings, or some biological mechanism for selecting the most fertile soil?
For further illustration, consider how great the Beatles are. Consider how lucky we all are that they were born in the same city within a couple years of each other, and that their talents were nurtured in the exact way they were to produce the greatest rock band the world has ever known.
Now consider that there are infinite other possibilities for combinations of musicians, all that didn’t happen because of different combinations of chance & selection. The Beatles are great, but, if certain other paths have been taken, we might have an even greater band, still rocking today.
I know it was implicit in “Darwin’s insight was that life didn’t need it to produce a pattern of change — unguided random variation, filtered after the fact by natural selection, produces an appearance of design.” But this second part is perhaps the more important.
Rol@8,
We know you’re not all slack-jawed inbreds. After all, you gave us the wits of Molly Ivins and Ann Richards. On the other hand, we did think that perhaps male Texans … ;)
Gentlemen, please excuse me if what I am about to say has already been said. I kind of lost focus at comment no. 35 or so.
I think that the MAJOR problem with popular understanding of evolution (or lack thereof) is the fact that people don’t understand how changes in the genome (major, minor, random or not, benefic or not) occur, and, especially, AT WHAT RATE.
Basically, look at the average human being on this planet. To them, if you show a picture of a population of chimpanzees, they will all look the same. How do they identify the alpha? Simple: “It’s bigger”.
Most people, let’s face it, are neither trained for, nor willing to spot the subtle differences in physionomy and physiology as a result of genetics. As a consequence, they will attribute even visible differences (like the “It’s bigger” problem) to other factors, such as old age, experience (in the case of cunningness, think of the saying “the old fox”), or other such factors. Most of the time, they will never think of genetics as a main factor in differentiation.
Then comes another issue: people don’t realize that there is, as I’ve heard, a 5% chance that the genome of the offspring will be an exact combination of the genome of father and mother (please correct the number if I’m off), mutations occuring at a virtually unimaginable rate (for them). They will defend against this by asking the very honest question “Why is it, then, that people actually resemble people? Why don’t such mutations leave a trace?”, obviously showing that they lack an understanding of, for instance, redundancy in gene sequences or how many fertilized eggs are dropped out as non-viable before they get the chance to develop.
After all this has been dealt with, and average people have started to understand how the genome works and have finally accepted the number of modifications that the genome of a population suffers over time (and this may be helped with some examples such as cancer cells or the more unfortunate Chernobyl nuclear accident), only then will they be ready to grasp concepts like natural selection.
I’ve come to this conclusion after I’ve tried to explain evolution and natural selection to some of my friends. After half an hour of explaining and example giving (“People hunt ducks. Hunted ducks don’t breed. Which ducks don’t get hunted? The faster, more agile ones. Therefore only the faster, more agile ducks breed. Human perfects weapons. He is able to hunt faster ducks. Which faster ducks breed? Those that are faster within the group of faster ducks. Which ducks remain to breed? The faster faster ducks. Human perfects weapons and is able tu hunt faster faster ducks. Which ducks remain to breed?…” and so on), it had become apparent (by their looks) that they understand squat, until one of them finally asked the obvious question “OK, but how do faster faster faster ducks appear?”
And it’s obvious, if you think about it: for an average human, a duck is a duck, it’s not a “faster, higher-metabolysim, slower-blood-clotting duck” or a “regular-speed, slower-metabolysm, extremely-fast-blood-clotting duck”. And that, in my opinion, is the major problem with misconceptions on natural selection.
It’s been a real pleasure for me to imagine the process of evolution of Archaeopterix, but, I’m sorry to say, this exercise in imagination is too far for most people in my companionship to grasp. The sollution is, indeed, education, but it also matters WHAT we wish to obtain through that education, and the willingness to sacrifice time and resources in order to get people to understand themselves and the world they live in better.
I would echo the comment by Glen (#5) to point out that it is not really a silly question. It is, in fact, a question posed by scientists (most famously Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) a couple hundred years ago. Consideration of this question, and the insights popularized by Darwin based on careful observations by him and others, eventually led to the realization that organisms do not in fact ‘know’ what they need to do to evolve, and in fact no ‘knowing’ is required to explain the characteristics that organisms possess. To learn more, I would suggest any number of biology books for lay people, or a good introductory-level college class.
So basically it’s a good question, just a couple hundred years late. It’s important to remind people that scientists are not just blowing off these sorts of questions because we are biased or ignorant. Current biological knowledge is a result of several hundred years hard work by thousands of individuals using some of the most cut-throat philosophical/logical tools ever developed for deciphering ‘reality’. And that’s why scientists take it so seriously and (some more than others) get annoyed when people pretend things are not the way they are.
Dawkins makes the point well, in the Blind Watchmaker, IIRC, that our intuitions are simply not adequate to the massively distributed nature of evolutionary change, in both space and time. I’m thinking of a passage where he’s talking about an wasp orchid and the proposition that looking one percent more like a female wasp than a conspecific could have adaptive value.
“Slight, successive modifications” is the lock. Deep Time is the key, along with an appreciation of nature’s Malthusian wastefulness.
The questioner’s question reflects a lot of hidden assumptions. One that stands out to me is the common habit of drawing a target around a random arrow — or, better analogy — drawing a bullseye around a single fallen raindrop.
Pick out something that did happen, and then look back at the chain of events which caused it and marvel at the intricacy, the elaborate networks of events and occurrences and wonder “how did they all know how to get that particular raindrop in that particular place at that particular moment?” It would have taken planning on a master scale, starting from the moment of the Big Bang. Thus, the Master Raindrop Planner.
Using raindrops as examples makes the arbitrary nature of the result clear. It becomes less clear when we have some sort of emotional attachment to the outcome — and when we are forced to use words like “beneficial” and “improvement” as we discuss what genetic traits survive the evolutionary algorithm. It then seems as if the environment knowingly shaped itself in order to produce a better outcome — us.
Doug Adam’s little puddle was overcome with amazement that the hole in the ground was so perfectly shaped to fit him. This not only gets it backwards — the puddle is shaped to fit the hole — but it starts out with a big fat bullseye drawn around a bunch of raindrops. We’re all raindrops.
I see evolution as more of a computer science or mathematical issue than a biological one. Well, the implementation is biological, but evolution through selection (natural or otherwise) of entities the reproduce with error is an algorithm. It’s math. You put the right parts in, turn the handle, and you get these results. There’s no goal and (more directly to the question) no agency because it’s just a mathematical formula like calculating the circumference of a circle or the potential energy of an object at altitude. An animal no more needs to concern itself with the process than a square needs to know how to calculate its area.
Dan, imagine a coin-tossing tournament with 1000 contestants. After each toss, those who come up tails are eliminated while those who come up heads stay in the game. Ten rounds, on average, suffice to whittle the field down to a single winner. Interviewed on ESPN, that winner might very well say something like, “I knew I needed to flip nothing but heads to make it to the finish, so that’s what I did.” I hope we can agree, however, that he’s talking nonsense when he says that. His flips were random; it was pure chance that he won. His “need” to prevail had nothing to do with it.
It’s exactly the same with evolution. A population’s “need” to adapt and survive has nothing to do with the mechanism by which genetic variations are generated and tested. The survivors are simply the ones who are lucky enough to get dealt survival-enhancing mutations. “Need” doesn’t enter into it.
Next question: How does a river know where to dig its canyon?
This is a fundamental issue. I think it was addressed well in your (PZ) reply.
What really helped me get a clearer understanding is the concept of filters (as in coffee filter, to mathematical). (Biological) evolution is simply random genetic change exposed to the filter of the external surroundings. Natural selection is the name that filter.
Also learning about emergent properties helped out with understanding how complex systems can result from simpler systems using only randomness and time.
I should add that, as far as I can tell, nothing in the original question had anything to do with God, and it was unnecessary for PZ to mention God at all in his reply. Granted, this blog is on the frontlines of anti-theism, and the questioner probably WAS troubled because natural selection runs counter to the teachings of fundamental Christianity. But still I think a straight biological question should get a straight biological answer, as much as possible. It might minimize the accusations of militant atheism by scientists.
One simple demonstration of the lack of a need to “know” in order o do complex things is to ask them to throw a ball in the air and catch it. Congratulations, that’s a whole lot of calculus and an appreciation of the laws of motion. What, you mean you didn’t just do a whole lot of differential calculations in your head?
But really, I agree with Hank Fox #3 above, if this emailer really wanted to know these things, why email you and ask to be spoonfed when a trip to a library or even 10 minutes on Wikipedia would do the trick. They’re raised and reinforced to be lazy, ignorant, self-obsessed and arrogant.
Has anyone heard of Dr. William Lane Craig? He seems to be one of the better Christian debaters.
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer
Um, isn’t Craig part of the DI? Even if he had something worth listening to, you gotta wonder how he sleeps at night.
Good post and thoughtful comments too. But you all miss one way to help the questioner understand (if he’s not a concern troll). It isn’t entirely a mindless process! While an individual can’t change his genetic makeup that he passes on to offspring, individual humans are good at inventing techniques for better coping with environment, teaching them to others, and having them passed on to future generations as culture. Some animals, we’re just beginning to realize, can do this too.
I’m not sure what he debates. I’ll look at the link later. But there is no debate over evolution. The Theory of Evolution is founded on many facts.
I don’t think the problem here is in not understanding evolution so much as in not grasping natural selection. Everyone understands evolution by artificial selection. If farmer Brown wants sheep with longer wool all he does is check over each new batch of lambs. The shortest wooled lambs don’t get to breed, the longest wooled ones do. Fast forward through to farmer Brown’s great great etc. grandson and the sheep in her flock have much longer wool than their ancestor sheep did back in the old days. Nobody ever asks how the lambs know what they should be doing, we all understand that it’s the farmer who decides.
Then all we need to grasp is that in evolution by natural selection it’s the environment that is acting as the farmer and “deciding” which lambs breed and which become chops.
Has anyone heard of Dr. William Lane Craig? He seems to be one of the better Christian debaters.
I don’t know about that, ded.
From the his response on the very first Q&A on the page:
So the main problem with Platonism is not that it fails in its explanatory power or its predictiveness, but that it’s unChristian? He may be a skilled orator, but no one with methodological failings like that can be considered a good debater.
This is slightly tangential but important IMO…
Biological evolution is not the only ‘blind’ complex adaptive system. I really wonder how people who have to ascribe planning and intent to evolution understand market-based economics (to pick just the most obvious example)? Does God set the price of oil based on some grand plan, or is it the Illuminati?
This is a reason to never elect a creationist to political office… that has nothing to do with religion per-se.
This is *not* scientific but it does explain the mechanics in a very straightforward way.
Imagine you are a kindergarten teacher. Imagine you have a box of colored toothpicks. 20 of each color: red, blue, green, yellow, pink, purple. You toss them way up in the air anc the all land scattered onto a green lawn. You send your kids out two grab and pick up as many as they can in one minute. Count what they bing back. Calculate which toothpicks “survived” the “predatory” children. The answer, not surprisingly, will be that green toothpicks have a much higher survival rate. If those toothpicks reproduced the next generation.
Loving caring god and/or plan path and goal has nothing to do with it.
The failing, I believe, is the belief of a prototypical ogranism.
The writer in question thinks that oak trees create experimental offspring only when it “knows” it needs to – and then with only the right combination of traits for success. But the very act of sexual reproduction (having two parents) guarantees that every new oak tree is an “experimental” blend.
Yep, every single offspring – be it tree or man – is a “test subject” whose fate will be determined by random chance and the environment. Lots of offspring die before they can reproduce (that is they fail the experiment), and so that special blend is deleted from the gene pool.
So the writer might better understand evolution if she appreciated the magnitude of failures that occur each and every generation.
Yeah, that answer is all well and good, but if you’re so smart, answer this one: If humans evolved from monkeys, WHY ARE THERE STILL MONKEYS???!!1!??!
I have just destroyed the entire premise for evolution in one fell swoop!
(j/k, in case it’s not obvious)
@#79 ded —
Blegh…in a Q&A, he recommends Explore Evolution as a book that teaches the “strengths and weaknesses of the neo-Darwinian approach.”
He also believes:
#20 John Huey
What he said.
I gave a speech my sophomore year at community college (in Colorado Springs) on the importance of understanding evolution BEFORE you disagree with it.
I encouraged my fellow students to take advantage of the resources present at the school and gave them a little history lesson on how Darwin developed the theory. I think understanding the very innocent and remarkable process of investigation that scientists and Darwin went through helps to de-demonize (is that a word?) it.
I’m not so sure it was that successful because a few speeches following mine a student began his speech stating, roughly paraphrasing, “I believe in Natural Selection, but I think Evolution is a crock.”
I did talk with him, after his speech, in front of the class and encouraged him to look up the meaning of those terms as I felt he was a little confused. He was saying that while the process of evolution makes sense, it just doesn’t sit well with him.
All of the instuctors that I had seemed to try their best to explain the very basics of science and evolution, but they were met with a lot of resistance. Ted Haggard’s church was the building right next to campus and the headquarters from Focus on the Family was less then a mile down the highway.
I like what Dave said (way up there) @70 and 77. I think it is best to meet questions about science with answers from science. No need to scare people away or make them think that an interest in biology means a conversion to atheism. We can save that for later. :)
BobGo in #81: “Good post and thoughtful comments too. But you all miss one way to help the questioner understand (if he’s not a concern troll). It isn’t entirely a mindless process! While an individual can’t change his genetic makeup that he passes on to offspring, individual humans are good at inventing techniques for better coping with environment, teaching them to others, and having them passed on to future generations as culture. Some animals, we’re just beginning to realize, can do this too.”
———-
It is a common misconception that evolution & natural selection, as studied by biologists, explains all adaptive traits or behaviors. It doesn’t. It applies specifically to *inherited* change. Learned behaviors (whether learned from personal experience, or, as described above, other animals) are not — by definition — inherited. So evolution (at least the sort we are talking about here) is indeed ‘mindless’.
Bonus info: Our current understanding is that inherited change is carried almost exclusively by changes in the genome, which is why genetics & DNA & evolution tend to be all discussed together. But people didn’t even really settle on DNA as the hereditary material until the late 1920s, and then only really for bacteria. Yet obviously evolution and natural selection were relatively well-developed fields of study before then. And increasingly, ‘epigenetics’ — inherited characteristics which do NOT correspond to changes in the genome, are all the rage in biology. So DNA is not necessarily integral to the study of biological evolution and natural selection.
Brokensoldier (#9), I totally agree that other species are far more intelligent than we credit them, and also that religionists resist that idea fanatically in order to maintain their putative status as the acme of creation. But, while I’d accept that humans regularly have conversations with other species, it is not a fact that chimps have done so using ASL. Some apes communicate with signs derived from ASL, just as English is derived from Latin, but to say that any non-human uses ASL is factually inaccurate on phonological, morphological and syntactic grounds.
Using a language means producing the vocabulary and grammar of that language. Apes are not physically capable of forming the phonological units of ASL, so their vocabulary items are all slightly different. Worse, if apes have any grammar at all, it is not that of ASL, one of the most highly inflected languages on Earth, but something far simpler that they create on their own.
Many users of American Sign Language are offended by implications that their language is so simple animals can learn it. What about a claim that animals can’t learn a complex human language like Russian, but can have conversations in English?
Forgive my redundancy if someone has already mentioned this but the most lucid and compelling examples of how a few basic rules and a dash of randomness can result in the most astounding sort of evolution must certainly be Conway’s Game of Life.
To anyone who wrestles with trying to picture the driving forces at work in populations as well as individuals over time, Google, Download, read ReadMe, Run, Play, Watch and Learn and then go “Ah HAH!”
And most of all, observe the simplicity of the initial conditions and then compare to the observed results. Ooffda! And, oh yes, don’t forget to change the rules!
Slightly more on topic, nowadays “Language Evolution” has become a thriving field of research, which to me seems like just more torture of the term, that adds confusion. Others have mentioned talk of the evolution of car models and other metaphor-abuse. For language to evolve, wouldn’t words have to have alleles to mutate? Does the word even mean anything anymore, or is it like “Darwinism”—means whatever you want it to.
Dave #77 wrote:
Interesting how our backgrounds effect the way we shape our responses. When I read the original question, I automatically assumed the writer was entertaining the idea of vitalism, ala Teilhard de Chardin or Deepak Chopra. Some sort of “force” was consciously working itself into expression through evolutionary processes — wasn’t it? Animals “know” what they need to do at the cellular level. I didn’t think typical Bible-thumping creationism.
That’s because I’m more personally familiar with this particular “enlightened” form of creationism, which adopts evolutionary science just enough to convince itself that it’s finding the rational harmony between science and “spirituality” and has evolved light years ahead of those knuckle-dragging, reactionary Creationists. They’re nothing like them at all, no sir.
So yes, PZ could have avoided bringing “God” into it.
But I don’t see how he could have avoided bringing in God Lite.
watercat, points well made regarding apes and ASL. A pet peeve of mine. However:
Um, no. English is derived from Anglo-Saxon (Old English), a Germanic language. Most of the latinate vocabulary was imported via neologisms in the Renaissance. There’s also a good deal of influence from French, as that was the language of the elite in England for 300 years following the Norman conquest. The common term for the languages that are derived directly from latin are the Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese, Romanian, to name the most widely spoken.
As regards “language evolution,” I see nothing wrong with it, as “evolution” means basically “change over time.” Languages certainly do that, as the Romance languages amply demonstrate: in a very real sense, they are Latin, which “radiated” into sub-populations and “speciated.” The source of variation isn’t a problem for the close analogy (re your question about the analog of alleles), but the lack of a clear concept of “fitness” for languages makes the two kinds of evolution distinct. There are well-understood constraints on language change though, and historical linguists use these rules to reconstruct ancient words, from, for instance, what is called Proto-Indo-European, the putative ancestor of most European and many Central- and South-Asian languages.
By a wise one was the essential undirectedness of evolution captured!
There is no try! Only do!
OK, at the risk of sounding like a concern troll, can somebody help me with the evolutionary track that led to this. Wasps and cockroaches
In the first comment in this thread Vic remarked
No, the question’s phrasing makes it clear that the questioner is stuck in an essentialist mindset, betrayed by the use of the singular:
“… a plant or animal.” “… it’s (sic) need to evolve.”
They imagine that there is an essential type — “kind” — that must change, an individual that somehow alters itself. When, of course, as numerous commenters have pointed out, it is populations of individuals with varying traits that evolve over generations. The hardest and most important concept to get across in both evolution and statistics is variation. It’s all in the variance.
The big problem with any bunch of knowledgeable people replying to an honest (but ignorant) query is that the experts suffer from the “curse of knowledge” (see “Made to stick” by Chip and Dan Heath). Knowledgeable people forget what it was like to not to know what they know.
The original questioner, whether religious or not, probably has a background understanding of the world where he or she is “special” and there is a purpose which explains why the world looks and behaves like it does.
What we need is not fine details of how evolution works (although I enjoy reading them), but a “schema buster” explanation that resets the questioner’s worldview.
Perhaps if we started out by saying that evolution is driven by death (not life) and what we see around us is the miserly number of survivors? Evolution is not divinely ordered, it is not purposeful; it is mindlessly, carelessly, wasteful.
A man will produce around 40 billion sperm in his lifetime, and a woman will produce around 500 eggs, but in the end a pair of survivors may breed to create only 2 – 10 new survivors. On average the survivors with the most appropriate characteristics for survival and reproduction will generate a higher proportion of the population of the next generation.
Posted by: Dave | June 6, 2008 3:07 PM
And that question did get a straight biological answer – when it was answered, as you said yourself, a couple hundred years ago. A failure to do a little research does not constitute a controversy or inconsistency in the scientific data. The fact that some individual doesn’t understand the theory and its processes has absolutely no bearing on the theory’s efficacy. I could just as easily ask someone to explain to me exactly how penicillin works, but it would probably be easier on everyone if I put a little effort into using existing knowledge to understand it myself.
I’ve noticed that the more intelligent someone is, the better they can write, and the better they can write, the less stupid are their questions. So it’s a perfect chain of causality.
I think the best way to start is to attack it from the time perspective–not with evolution science.
For most, religion provides a sense of purpose and belonging–“God put us here for a reason”, “We’re made in God’s image”, “We differ from animals because God gave us souls and reason”, etc. But, if we’re the end product of God’s creation of the universe–we’re the reason for it being here–then why is the universe over 13 billion years old. (And why is it so big?) And why is the Earth over 4 billion years old?
Obviously, the creationists have their arguments against that science as well, but I personally see their arguments as much weaker and the science much stronger. (Actually, it’s not that I think the science is that much stronger. I just think that it’s something that lay people can more easily understand and accept as truth.)
If we can establish a foothold by saying “See? The science says the Earth is this old.” and get that through their heads first, then you can start arguing about how unlikely it is that there’s a God who created it for us. “Why did it take so long? Four billion years is an awfully long lunch break.”
When you start talking evolution, the religious people get too wrapped up in it as an emotional argument. They see it as a more direct affront on who they are and where they come from.
OK, at the risk of sounding like a concern troll, can somebody help me with the evolutionary track that led to this. Wasps and cockroaches
The specificity of the wasp’s venom argues for an evolutionary arms race.
BrokenSoldier in #102 said: “And that question did get a straight biological answer – when it was answered, as you said yourself, a couple hundred years ago. A failure to do a little research does not constitute a controversy or inconsistency in the scientific data. The fact that some individual doesn’t understand the theory and its processes has absolutely no bearing on the theory’s efficacy. I could just as easily ask someone to explain to me exactly how penicillin works, but it would probably be easier on everyone if I put a little effort into using existing knowledge to understand it myself.”
———–
I think that telling people they are ignorant isn’t really educational. Or motivational.
Penicillin inhibits an enzyme that bacteria need to produce structurally sound cell walls. As a result, the bacteria cannot reproduce and/or burst. Maybe you could have looked that up yourself, but now 14 other people with the same unspoken question also know.
@ Watercat:
Wrong. You might want to make sure you’re up on the data before you inject yourself into a discussion whose concepts you clearly don’t have a firm grasp upon.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/d76723g44p65t727/
Apes do use ASL, right down to emphasis and ‘inflection’ (intensity in their arousal and use of signs). Not only do they use ASL, they have also incorporated what they have learned with their own non-verbal forms of communication.
ASL has absolutely no “phonological units” whatsoever, because it is not a spoken language. And concerning the non-verbal equivalent to phonology, which does exist in ASL, the chimpanzees that were the subject of the above linked study definitely do have a grasp of how they are used.
Just to help you out a bit, the definition of phonology should clear up any misunderstanding you may be suffering from – ASL has no phonology in the sense of the word that you used.
pho·nol·o·gy
1. the study of the distribution and patterning of speech sounds in a language and of the tacit rules governing pronunciation
(bold mine for emphasis)
I wonder where you’re pulling your (obviously flawed) knowledge of the emotions of “users of ASL”? I happen to be a native speaker of ASL – it was my first language, just as it is for many children raised in a deaf family – and I know quite a few individuals in the deaf community that are in no way “offended” by the mere suggestion that their language can be used by chimpanzees. Besides, you completely missed the point of the statement by insinuating that because a Chimp can use ASL, it somehow says something negative about the intelligence of deaf people. The statement I actually made was – and this was quite clear – a statement supporting the high intelligence level of any creature who could use a language almost completely devoid of prepositions, along with the other idiosyncrasies of ASL that make it quite difficult for non-native speakers to learn.
In the future, try to stick to commenting on only those topics that you actually know something about, because there’s always a chance – and almost a certainty on this site – that you’re going to run into someone who really does possess a body of knowledge about, along with a lifetime of experience with, the topic in question.
Posted by: Dave | June 6, 2008 5:08 PM
Maybe not for you, but those people who truly do value knowledge and intelligence tend to be motivated to learn more about something they’ve been shown to be ignorant about. I suspect that you took the word ignorant to mean stupid, which tells me that the true meaning of being ignorant about a subject – failing to to access available knowledge about a subject despite the wide range of works that discuss it – simply escapes you. I am quite ignorant about a few things myself, and whenever I come across one of those things, I am quite motivated to rectify the situation.
You, on the other hand, seem to simply resent those who point out your lack of knowledge about a given subject. That’s fine, of course, if you want to take that route – just don’t whine about it so loudly when it happens.
I think a big contributor to this person’s perspective are the way Evolution is explained in (a lot of) nature documentaries. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard something along the lines of “…the sea snake originated on land, but then moved to the water. In order to hold its breath longer it developed larger lungs…”. I think I just saw this specific example on Discovery Channel a couple nights ago.
The problem is this, without explaining the generations upon generations of sea snake slowly, with time, adapting to aquatic life, a lay-viewer may get the impression that the snake simply “willed” the necessary changes to “move” into the water. Language is everything. And although I wouldn’t call it framing, understanding how to use basic language to convey specific and technical ideas is very challenging and necessary to bring those ideas to the masses. I think a typical religious person listening to typical “commercialized” explanations of how (generally) Evolution works can not be faulted for thinking that someone just tried to tell them that the snake (or whatever) made adaptive choices….which is of course, nuts.
Posted by: Dave | June 6, 2008 5:08 PM
I would tell you that I already possessed that knowledge and was simply making a point, but even if I did not, you’re not the opnly one who knows how to do a quick web search and cut & paste the answer into the comment field.
And those “14 people” who you claim had that same unspoken question would do well to learn how to research as well – it might help later in life.
Apes have been trained to use signs from ASL. Emphasis and inflection are one thing; grammar is quite another. Apes do not “use ASL” to form grammatical constructions beyond the most rudimentary and even these are not common enough to be definitively above the threshold of chance combinations. (They’re highly repetitive in their use of signs, so every now and then, you’d expect a pseudo-grammatical combination.)
Many have argued that’s all they really use the signs for. The repetitive usage and the lack of grammar suggests that they are able to co-opt new “lexical units,” but that they’re just plugging them into a pre-existing framework. Remarkable animals, but it’s just not the case that they have learned to “use ASL” with all that implies.
Thanks CJO (#105). Got any links for more info. The wiki link is a good start but light.
Blind clicking in the land of the web can waste a lot of time.
re: alex at #109
I agree and have noted the same thing in many nature documentaries. To the point that my wife cringes when I shout at the TV, “No, no, no! That’s not how evolution works. The animals don’t ‘have’ to evolve to survive in their changing environment. The ones that ‘can’ survive do, and their offspring ‘can’ survive too. Sometimes none of them survive and they go extinct.”
But it’s easy to see where the general public might get the idea about animals deciding to evolve when our own science shows (Nova and Nature included) use misleading language in their explanations.
Eat well, stay fit, Die Anyway
My first inclination was very polite concern troll.
If there is background music for an analogy like there is for a montage please cue it up now…
Maybe the problem is one of scale. It’s difficult to grasp quantities like 1 billion years. Not that it’s guaranteed to help but what if we translate that into generations? Let’s say the average generation in humans is 20 years and I’m certainly not saying humans have been around for a billion years but if you do the math then that works out to 50 million generations. Dear god at the ‘begats’ that would have resulted in!
Anyway, very tiny changes over a very long period of time (very tiny changes over 1 billion years) becomes ‘very tiny changes over 50 million times’. And that’s limiting us to only 1 offspring per generation. Hell, you could almost multiply zero times 50 million and get something.
It’s all moot anyway – my wife and I will be reproducing soon and I’m going to activate my genes for sarcasm and she’s going to activate her genes for me shutting up and our offspring will be sterile. ;)
CJO:
That is a textbook example of evasion, and it is quite an arrogant one at that. The fact is that some chimps have learned how to form rudimentary sentences in ASL. If you choose to dismiss it as a “pseudo-grammatical combination,” that’s your choice – just know that you’re wrong. I wonder how many times you’ve witnessed a chimpanzee using ASL. Have you ever seen with your own eyes these supposed “chance combinations” in grammar that somehow prove chimpanzees aren’t intelligent enough to use a language that they’re so obviously using? Until you’ve read the literature and/ or watched the case studies in which chimps display their use of ASL, I’d advise you – along with watercat – to confine your posts and assumptions to those things which you have experience in – it helps in the credibility department.
All that is implied in the statement that chimpanzees use ASL to communicate is — that they use ASL to communicate. They can – and have – used ASL to form sentences in communication with humans on a level comparable to deaf children of elementary school age. Nowhere in my post will you find a claim that chimps have an adult’s command of ASL, which is the implication you are erroneously pointing towards. You can choose to deny it all you want, but the data bears out that chimps can and do use ASL to communicate, and that communication is proof that they possess the requisite intelligence needed to communicate effectively with ASL. (I don’t know how to make my point any clearer for you than that.)
Re #2
As a professional teacher (tho’ physics, not biology) I can tell you that this is an EXCELLENT POINT. It’s simple, on point, and deals w/ something that people are familiar with. Definitely something that will work (or at least get them thinking).
brokenSoldier said (in #108): “I suspect that you took the word ignorant to mean stupid, which tells me that the true meaning of being ignorant about a subject – failing to to access available knowledge about a subject despite the wide range of works that discuss it – simply escapes you. ”
——-
I am ignorant of many things, including how to do that nifty HTML thing where another person’s post is quoted before a reply. I suppose I could look it up. Maybe. But honestly I am not motivated enough to do so, because if I really want to quote someone here, I am satisfied to do it the way I did it above, but cutting & pasting & adding quotes. And that’s exactly my point: If people seeking knowledge get easy answers from one source, and another source that unhelpfully says ‘go look it up yourself’, what do you think will happen?
————
brokenSoldier said (in #110): “I would tell you that I already possessed that knowledge and was simply making a point, but even if I did not, you’re not the opnly one who knows how to do a quick web search and cut & paste the answer into the comment field.”
————–
I teach how antibiotics work in an introductory cell biology class. Of course, you might want to do a web search if you don’t believe me. Maybe you’ll come across this: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070313213836AAPDJuL
“Why do monkeys still exist?” STFU
One thing that might help those who are not as scientifically literate as most of the posters here is to address the buttloads (proper science term?) of species who were ultimately unsuccessful due to the mismatch of evolutionary traits and environmental conditions and/or disease. Looking at the guestimated numbers of extinct fauna alone presents a pretty shitty record from a design point of view, especially if the designer is supposed to be perfect/all knowing/all seeing; add all the ex-flora to the equation and daaaayumn.
So many “theory of evolution” accepting theists I know have the mistaken belief that evolution is a linear process leading to a better or more perfected organism, sort of like entropy in reverse. They confuse complexity with a false sense of hierarchy and the belief that everything has to lead somewhere (hence, perhaps, the need to point out the overwhelming numbers of evolutionary dead ends).
At the heart of the matter is the human need to project purpose/meaning and the universe’s lack thereof. Religion presupposes an intent -a purpose for all existance. Even the most lucid theist may not be willing to divorce this idea from evolutionary theory. “God= purpose. If the universe has no purpose, then god/gods do not exist. I believe the universe has purpose so god exists and vice versa.”( or some such illogic.) T-shirts.
Let’s just say I doubt anyone will be buying many
on a level comparable to deaf children of elementary school age.
You don’t need to make the point any clearer. The fact is, it’s wrong. As exemplified by the above. It’s an exaggeration of the claim. For instance, in language acquisition in children, as vocabulary increases, so does the average number of words per utterance. Not so with any apes ever studied in this way. You can teach them a fair number of signs (300-500 –which incidentally, is closer to a three-year-old’s vocabulary than a to child’s of elementary school age) but the number of words in “a sentence” does not go up.
All that is implied in the statement that chimpanzees use ASL to communicate is — that they use ASL to communicate.
Sorry, but they don’t. They may well use *some signs* derived from ASL to communicate, and if that’s all you mean, fine. So they do. But the hallmark of human language is grammar. And elementary age children use grammar no less than do adults. Saying that “an entity uses [X]” certainly implies that they use [X] with all that [X] entails.
the data bears out that chimps can and do use ASL to communicate, and that communication is proof that they possess the requisite intelligence needed to communicate effectively with ASL.
It’s not a matter of how intelligent they are. It’s a matter of the truth of the factual claim “apes use ASL.” That might, or might not, be a defining test of their intelligence, but I have made no claims to that point.
Have you ever seen with your own eyes these supposed “chance combinations” in grammar that somehow prove chimpanzees aren’t intelligent enough to use a language that they’re so obviously using? Until you’ve read the literature and/ or watched the case studies in which chimps display their use of ASL, I’d advise you – along with watercat – to confine your posts and assumptions to those things which you have experience in – it helps in the credibility department.
In the absence of a shared set of quantifiable data, this is just an argument from your own (self-assessed) authority, and, hence, worthless. There are knowledgeable voices on both sides of this controversial issue. Your implication that anyone who doesn’t fall in line with your authoritative pronouncements on the matter must be ignorant of the subject suggests a lack of desire to actually engage the issue.
@#115 BrokenSoldier —
What sorts of concepts are they able to signify using these sentences? This (IMHO) is the more important issue. Richard Mitchell had this to say about basic communication vs sophisticated language:
Is it offensive to an adult English speaker, if I say that a two-year-old “uses English”?
Dave:
I think that in those cases, the person would learn the value of self-reliance, rather than having information spoon-fed to them all the time, no matter how old the subject matter may be. If you’re arguing here that it is silly to research and look for existing answers to two hundred year old questions for yourself, then feel free. Just don’t expect much intellectual respect from people who have already learned how to do so. And if someone would rather get “easy” answers from someone else rather than putting in the time to learn some things on their own – especially things that have been known for centuries – then that someone has serious issues with their academic and intellectual ability.
I don’t disbelieve you – I just feel terribly sorry for your students. They obviously have a teacher who ignores the value of showing students how to think for themselves rather than having the answers fed to them.
And I don’t know what you meant to accomplish by linking to that ridiculous page (though I did get more than a few laughs out of it), but it doesn’t surprise me in the least that you frequent discussions of that sort, considering your disregard for the values of research.
I think it would be a good idea as a counter argument to tell people about how some features of organisms are so ill suited for the environment. For example, why were humans not equipped with better hearing or sense of taste? Would we not be better suited to our environments and closer to god’s perfection if we had more “superior” senses other than just sight?
Posted by: Etha Williams | June 6, 2008 6:25 PM
I completely agree – this is why the assumption that a chimp’s use of ASL is simply “chance combinations” is utterly false. Not only have chimps used ASL to identify objects, but they have also been able to comment on objects and individuals around them without being prompted. They have been able to learn and identify colors, express sadness and happiness about certain events. The article linked below addresses these ideas and explains the topic fairly well. (Certainly better than I can…)
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/language/chimpanzee.html
Excerpt:
Such intricacies in their use of ASL show that they actually do understand the concepts behind the signs, which is the defining characteristic in determining whether they are actually communicating as opposed to simply mimicking and regurgitating rote hand signs.
Excuse me if someone has covered this idea (I’m too short for time to go through these comments carefully), but I prefer, in an argument, to use a “positive” perspective on evolution, that it is inevitable that, given heritable variation and selection, species MUST change. Then a detractor must take the position that, if this doesn’t happen, their chosen omnipotence has to actively THWART the simple, natural process. Described this way, there is no implied direction, no “plan,” and if there is interference, it is inimical to “adaptation,” which implies malevolence. So the choice is between an undirected easy-to-explain and -understand process being left to produce its mostly beneficial effects through time, and another choice consisting of the same process being resisted by an outside influence which does not want there to be adaptation.
Instead of looking like I’m saying “change happened, and this is the explanation I offer that doesn’t involve magic,” I am saying “unless there is magic at work, change must happen, so if we see that it did, then there’s no magic.”
The source you link to on the matter, BrokenSoldier, does not represent the only –or even, necessarily, the majority– view. For balance, here’s a critical look at ape language studies.
Also, several of the cited sources in the article you link to are credulous reports, based on the anecdotal experiences of some of the researchers, many of whom have been underqualified in the fields of ethology and animal communication, and who lived very closely with their subjects possibly to the detriment of their objectivity. Certainly popular media accounts based on interviews with the trainers have been almost entirely without skeptical reports.
Surprises me. Sure, they have much shorter thumbs, but can’t flexion of the other fingers compensate for that?
Please elaborate. After all, there are lots of languages out there against which Latin looks almost like Chinese.
Isn’t that the case? It is common that, of two synonyms, either one dies out over time or a distinction in meaning or usage arises. Sound shifts are mutations, too. The selection pressures on features of languages (vocabulary, grammar, sound system) are for efficiency and intelligibility.
“Descent with heritable modification” applies.
…is nowadays called phonology, too, because it works just the same way. At least Wikipedia says the term “cheireme” was abandoned in favor of “phoneme”.
Wait a little. Many spoken languages lack prepositions completely and have postpositions instead. And others have neither: Chinese appears to have both at first glance, but if you look closer, it turns out the “prepositions” are actually verbs and the “postpositions” are actually nouns.
%lt;blockquote>insert quote here</blockquote>
That would address a totally different question. The answer to this one is that the tree of life is just that, a tree, not a pole. It branches. There is more than one way to be successful.
“The only thing in your excellent explanation that bothers me is your use of the word “chance.” So subjective. These variations occur for solid cause-and-effect reasons, whether we know what they are or not. Let’s not give the creation crowd a leg to stand on by injecting a potential immaterialist explanation for them.”
I politely disagree. I don’t see anything wrong with the word chance. Both it’s meanings apply and both are easy to understand, and we want something that is easy to understand. We are answering a basic question there is no harm in giving a basic answer.
Yes you are certainly going to have genetic drift and mutations, but it is chance that dictates which genes you get. Not entirely random, but far from predetermined.
Now that you exist you get a chance, an opertunity, to try to pass them on.
I think there is very little wiggle room to squeeze in immaterialist explanations in the usages above, maybe there are better words but I find no real fault with chance.
Howsomeever! I do think that saying “natural selection is directional” can be horribly missleading. I really don’t know if the person using it was doing so in irony or not. It could be read in several different ways including that natural selection always pushes speices to adapt thus driving spieces farther apart genetically, or farther away fromt the common ancenstor….. or that is has a place it started at and thus clearly has a destination in mind(!) and is going there come hell or high water. Ummmm yeah, you see my problem. I really rather hope it was irony that just flew by me.
Oops, typo. Here’s the code:
<blockquote>insert quote here</blockquote>
Natural selection is directional. It’s just that this direction changes every time the environment changes, which most environments do all the time.
I have to agree with CJO’s scepticism about non-human apes acquiring the key features of language – not only grammar, but the range of speech acts humans use. At best I think the verdict is still “not proven”. This kind of research is extremely difficult to do well, because of our own strong tendencies both to get emotionally involved (with the subjects and with long-term, high-cost projects we’ve committed ourselves to), and to interpret and accept even fragmentary and distorted “utterances”, and to make use of non-verbal and contextual cues in doing so (a tendency we need because it helps children, and perhaps adult non-speakers of our language, learn). As the article CJO points to implies, little scientific progress seems to have been made in recent years. I think, in fact, a stronger case has been made by Irene Pepperberg for the linguistic abilities of parrots. However, I think that if some ASL speakers feel insulted this is based on a misunderstanding: ASL was used because chimpanzees, unlike parrots, are not physically capable of articulate speech, not because it is grammatically simpler than spoken languages.
CJO:
Bibliography
1. Fouts, Dr. Roger S. and Deborah H. Project Washoe FAQ. WWW, Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute: Central Washington University, 1996.
2. Lock, Andrew, and Charles R. Peters. Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
3. McCrone, John. The Ape That Spoke; Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind. New York: Avon Books, 1991.
4. Miller, George A. Communication, Language, and Meaning; Psychological Perspectives. New York: Basic Books Inc, 1973.
5. Rayl, A.J.S. “Apes at the End of an Age: Primate Language and Behavior in the 90’s” Minnesota Monthly, September 1996: 89.
5. Romanine, Suzanne. Language In Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Exactly which one of these published texts have you found to be “credulous reports” based on “anecdotal experiences” by researchers that are “under-qualified”? And before you make even more errors in analysis, exactly which of the ape subjects did Suzanne Romanine, the linguist that wrote Language in Society, an introductory examination of socio-linguistics, spend too much time with, compromising her objectivity? What about George Miller? Andrew Lock and Charles Peters? If you can’t find the answer, it is because these works are studies of linguistics that the author of the article I linked to simply referenced in her work. As a matter of fact, only two of the cited sources dealt with researchers and their experiences with apes – one of which is the widely recognized and acknowledged Project Washoe. So your claim that the article is full of unsubstantiated speculation is simply wrong, and you apparently pulled it out of thin air.
Even the skeptic’s article you referenced recognized the viability of the Washoe project – it simply offered objections to later imitators, none of which were referenced in the article I cited. The fault in your argument is that you’re trying to shoehorn my argument into a meaning I did not ascribe to it – that chimps have an adult’s command of a human language. I simply said that they have communicated using that language, which supported my opinion that we are not the only intelligent creatures on this planet. Never did I claim these apes were using the language as well as humans can, and never did I claim that their use of this language indicates that their intelligence in commensurate to ours. You can keep putting words in my mouth, but they’ll continue to be spit back towards you.
I still struggle to wrap my head around evolution, so I can’t criticise people when they admit to failing to grasp it. I was surprised to find out that what’s called Lamarckism isn’t how it works – I still have to constantly remind myself that it doesn’t, even though it ‘seems logical’ to a layperson like me – and am still utterly amazed at how something like the cockroach-stinging wasp evolved.
I think one of the biggest problems people have with understanding evolution is the scale. I’m in my 30s; life on earth has been here what, 6 billion years? Putting that into perspective is tough. Once you can do that, though, you’re halfway there.
Randomness scares people. It’s just so…random. It’s much easier (or at least more comfortable) to believe that there is some “plan” in back of it all, directing everything. But randomness permeates our existence, right from conception. If another sperm had fertilized that ovum, you’d be somebody else entirely.
Now natural selection is the antithesis of randomness, but an element of chance can always be found in the course of evolution. A large part of the objection to evolution is this element of randomness, which goes against this favorite prejudice of ours that we are just so goddamn special, that we HAD to be the product of an intelligent design process. It’s a design process allright, it’s just blind as to the outcome. It’s this hurdle that the religionist can’t quite clear.
Oh don’t get me wrong, my issue wasn’t with a lack of truth in the statement, but with too much potential for missunderstanding and anthropomorphising. This thread is agrueably about how best to explain these issues to those like the letter writer above. I say the rule of KISS is still the best way: Keep It Simple Stupid (as my Daddy would drill into my head).
I agree with you, Nick – I didn’t say that ASL was the only such language, but simply that it was a language devoid of prepositions. And such a language is difficult to master, thus requiring a certain level of intelligence for the student of that language. (No doubt Chinese is one of the more difficult languages to learn…) My only point in this entire convoluted debate was that chimps have used ASL to communicate with humans – not that they do so on a proficiency level even remotely close to that of humans. It seems that this whole argument has stemmed from the fact that a couple of commenters missed the point of what I originally wrote and assumed that I meant chimps could compose sonnets in ASL.
Posted by: Nick Gotts | June 6, 2008 7:21 PM
There may very well be deaf individuals that feel somehow insulted, but I have never met one. In all my lifetime around the deaf culture, I have yet to meet one deaf person that expressed feeling any sort of insult at apes trying to learn ASL. If anything, the deaf people in my family always talked about it as if it were just something neat to think about. (I remember my grandfather signing to a baboon at the Memphis Zoo and laughing when it began gesturing back at him. He commented that it would be interesting if the ape was one who could actually sign, because he’d be interested in trying to talk to him.)
So this feeling of insult is one I’ve never come across – on this thread, that statement was originally made by watercat, and in my experience it is just wrong.
The fault in your argument is that you’re trying to shoehorn my argument into a meaning I did not ascribe to it – that chimps have an adult’s command of a human language.
brokenSoldier, you said, in #115:
They can – and have – used ASL to form sentences in communication with humans on a level comparable to deaf children of elementary school age.
It’s a drastic overstatement of what has been acheived. I am not putting “an adult’s command” in your mouth. I am responding to your exaggerated claim, quoted, verbatim, right up there. Charitably, some apes have acquired a vocabulary roughly comparable to a three-year old human’s. But their lack of grammar and their failure to extend the length of their utterances puts them in with not-especially-bright toddlers in their sign using abilities. I don’t know how many elementary school age children you’ve been around, but an average kindergartener has a vocabulary of several thousand root words and full use of the grammar of his native language.
I have read other things by the Fouts, and I find their reports to be credulous of the animals’ abilities and that they tend to overstate what they and others have acheived. I read the McCrone book years ago and recall that it was typically “gee whiz” in its treatment of the matter, with little perspective on the range of opinions on the subject. However, I will retract the claim, since I said “several” and I meant “two.” It’s only necessary to point out that not everyone who has done work in this field agrees with you, and that not agreeing with you is not sufficient cause to proclaim someone ignorant of the matter.
Soldier, for my part, I was simply responding to the use of the phrase “to use language,” I never took you to be saying the outlandish exaggerations you are now throwing around (cf sonnets). “To use language” means something very specific, and apes don’t do it, even when they are using ASL signs to communicate.
windy :-) Is it offensive to an adult English speaker, if I say that a two-year-old “uses English”? :-)
You’re right that it’s not. But this misses the fact that deaf people, the main users of sign, have struggled for thousands of years to be recognized as having language at all, as being intelligent, even as being fully human In spite of having produced a vast body of literature, poetry, and other language arts. When apes get credit for signing even though they can’t produce any of this, it is more than a little unfair to a population that has spent millennia striving for that same recognition. True, not everyone is offended, but I know a lot who are. Maybe we’re prickly, but we’ve been called ‘dumb’ ‘animals’ for too long.
…and some technical stuff fer us nerds…
Modulations in ‘intensity in their arousal and use of signs’ is not inflection. Inflections are grammatical affixes that don’t change syntactic categories. Also, defining phonology as speech sounds is about 20 years out of date. More accurate is:
‘a finite set of meaningless contrastive units that combine in constrained ways to form meaningful morphemes and words, and that the mental representations of these lexical items may differ predictably and deiscretely from their actual realization’ (Sandler & Lillo-Martin 2006:xv)
If we accept that apes have syntax, we need to ask if it contains the specific combination of features that distinguish ASL from Libras, Shuwa, Nicaraguan Sign Language or any of the other hundreds of known signed languages. ASL is one of the most highly inflected languages on earth, with mutual hierarchical embedding of two different types of aspect markers: ape language has no inflections. ASL expresses anaphoric reference through a three-dimensional system of spatial loci: ape language doesn’t have anaphora. ASL makes heavy use of rhetorical, quotative, conditional, and both internal and external headed relative clauses controlled by simultaneous non-manual signals: ape language doesn’t have clauses.
This could go on all day, listing syntactic features that ape languages do not share with ASL. The usual example of ape syntax is something like Washoe’s combination ‘water bird’. Assuming she intended this as a name, she was not using the ASL word for ‘swan’, she was making up her own language, like the kids in Nicaragua did. If those two words combined in ASL, complex rules of morphology would kick in to modify both ‘water’ and ‘bird’ in predictable ways create a single sign. Again, if apes have morphological rules at all, they are not those of ASL.
Everything bS mentions in post 124 is also accomplished by persons who have no language at all and communicate only via gesture. Says nothing about whether they have any language, much less a specific one. Personally I find the fact that apes understand so much, and are capable of creating their own little languages, makes them look a lot more ‘sentient’ than if they actually did learn an existing language.
To brokenSoldier, in response to #122, who said:
“I think that in those cases, the person would learn the value of self-reliance, rather than having information spoon-fed to them all the time, no matter how old the subject matter may be. If you’re arguing here that it is silly to research and look for existing answers to two hundred year old questions for yourself, then feel free. Just don’t expect much intellectual respect from people who have already learned how to do so. And if someone would rather get “easy” answers from someone else rather than putting in the time to learn some things on their own – especially things that have been known for centuries – then that someone has serious issues with their academic and intellectual ability.
[…]
I don’t disbelieve you – I just feel terribly sorry for your students. They obviously have a teacher who ignores the value of showing students how to think for themselves rather than having the answers fed to them.”
———–
These sorts of internet message board discussions tend to get out of hand as people stake increasingly ludicrous positions just for the sake of having a position. I think, actually, that you and I are not that far apart in reality. In fact, I wholeheartedly agree with you that the best questioners seek out their own answers, and the best teachers teach questioners how to find the answers themselves. However, what I’m not sure you realize, and what’s become clear to me only through teaching, is that finding information and *filtering it* is a skill that many people do not have. In the absence of that skill, given a choice between sources of information, people will choose the ‘easiest’ answer. A biologist that answers reasonable questions by telling someone to go ‘look it up’ is a lazy educator, and the end result may very well be that the questioner finds the answer elsewhere, perhaps from somewhere like ‘Answers in Genesis’, which sounds very authoritative to people who don’t know better, and is handy with many answers. And I can’t blame these people. Biologists can’t win an information war unless they’re willing to make the information readily available.
I spend a lot of time teaching students how to find information and think critically about it. In fact, I reward that in my classes much more than I reward rote memorization or accumulation of facts. This throws a lot of hard-working pre-med students off who tell me they always got As until they got to my class and had to learn how to think. Which is fine; I don’t feel guilty about that. Like I said: I agree with you that people need to learn to find information themselves. But first you’ve got to hook them.
As for non-human primates and language, here is an anecdote: At the San Diego zoo my wife and I were looking at the orangutans and eating popcorn. An orangutan approached the glass wall, stared at the popcorn box, and clearly signaled ‘up’ with his arm and head. He repeated the gesture, and my wife and I joked that he seemed to be telling us (and our popcorn) to go up. Which was ridiculous, because we were in a roofed enclosure. But as he repeated the gesture, more and more (apparently) insistently, we wondered enough to wander outside and look up. We saw a stair, which took us to an observation platform above the enclosure, where we could easily drop popcorn to him. When we got up there, he immediately came over and opened his mouth. We dropped popcorn to him, which he ate quite happily. Since then, we have never doubted the ability of non-human primates to communicate with clarity and intention.
Posted by: CJO | June 6, 2008 7:49 PM
I simply equated the chimp’s use of ASL with a young child’s command of the language – not with root-word vocabulary or any other technical measure of language mastery. And it is hilarious to me that you questioned my familiarity with elementary school aged (re: kindergarten to first or second grade) children, while in the same breath suggesting that kids of that age have “full use of the grammar of their native language.” It might be news to you, but most children that age have only the most cursory knowledge of the grammar and syntax of the English language, most of which is actually comprised of imitation of their parents’ and other adults’ sentence structure. You show me a kindergartner that has “full use” and command of the grammar of the English language, and I’ll show you an extraordinary kindergartner. I will admit, however, that I should have qualified the “elementary school-aged” descriptive as K-2nd grade, due to the fact that elementary school can go as high as 5th, but that hardly discredits the statement.
I never said that not agreeing with me was enough to call someone ignorant – I simply pointed out that the content of your posts gave me the impression that you were less than informed on the matter, which is an opinion I still hold. And I hardly take your statement of “I read the McCrone book years ago and recall that it was typically “gee whiz” in its treatment of the matter…” as a definitive proof of the deficiency of that work. It’ll take a little bit more in-depth of an analysis to sway me from the opinion that McCrone’s work was correctly cited in the article I linked.
To David, for #129: Awesome! Thanks. Now I won’t have to pray that the Lord gives me the answer in a dream.
I like this thread.
I think it’s important for people to realize that natural selection only works on the ‘here and now’. In college we work on exercises that track populations and what we observe through numbers is evolution. It might not be particularly obvious but it is there – there’s no doubt about that.
The changes might be small but overtime they accumulate to much larger things.
Lynnai #128 and David #130
Thank you for your comments regarding the “directional” aspect of Natural Selection. In no way do I imply that selection takes place with a destination in mind. What is a better way to convey this … within the constraint of KISS?
John B #134
I agree that the concept of randomness can be a problem. Preachers rail against the impossibility of random processes generating complex forms. That is why I try to separate out the random aspects (variation) from the non-random (Natural Selection) in explaining the process. But where I got into hot water above was that evolution is the result of multiple processes, of which Natural Selection is only one … but it is the process which leads to adaptation.
I once thought I had a good analogy in five card draw poker. Shuffling, cutting the deck, and dealing the cards resulted in random variation within possible hands of cards. Discarding unwanted cards was the nonrandom selection process of culling. But when I mentioned holding two aces and discarding the rest hoping to get three of a kind, I was dead meat, because I’d introduced the idea of intent with a destination.
A question
We say that the environment applies the selection pressure. But internal metabolic and developmental processes can be refined through the generations by natural selection. But in this case are we referring to an “internal” environment?
…more boring linguistic trivia ahead….
Prepositions. We has them. While it’s true that a lot of languages don’t have any, every language has a method to code their meanings,(and takes equal amounts of intelligence to learn), whether something is in or beside, subjects, stuff like that. ASL has lotsa ways to do it, few of which resemble anything in speech. We inflect signs mostly by changing the paths they take through space; at the same time as making the word, we can move it ‘to’, ‘from’ or all sorts of other ways. Pretty much any relationship in time or space can be wiggled in, and you can imbed the time ones into the space ones into the time ones….it’s way complicated. Even a basic sentence uses special facial expressions to indicate stuff like which is the subject and object. I’ve never seen apes use these non-manual markers, (I don’t believe they are capable physically) which makes it kind of hard to construct a real sentence.
I had a similar discussion with a friend of mine who believed that according to evolutionary lines of thought, the giraffe made it’s neck grow longer to reach the trees.
It turned into an argument where I explained to the best of my knowledge that the genetic material experienced a mistake, a mutation that was passed down to offspring because the change it created in the organism happened to work out with the circumstances of the organisms environment to the benefit of the organism. This benefit allowed the organism the opportunity succeed in surviving in the environment more than the organisms without the genetic “mistake”.
I realized after about thirty minutes that my friend was a creationist, and I dropped the argument. :)
*laughs* Honestly the only thing that comes to mind is save it for several questions down the line when they might come to one that touches on it more directly.
Re 133 and 134 both randomness and scale (time and space) are issues against the specialness hope. Personally I’m all for just breaking their little brains with them at as young an age as possible, I don’t think we will do any favours by down playing them and I think we could have a lot of fun pointing them out. “You think it’s a long way down the street to the chemists…”
How are they not directly or indirectly linked to climate, diet, sexual behaviours and the ilk? What is purely internal?
Once you mention chance, many Creationists think you mean that forms have evolved by accident, which is just as wrong as thinking an individual knows it must evolve in some direction.
David;
Definitely there are processes in language that parallel evolution, I just think we take the analogy too far and given all the flack we get from creationists abusing the word ‘evolution’, different terminology might be helpful. I know I’m outvoted, but I have yet to see a dead word. :-)
bS sez:
“It might be news to you, but most children that age have only the most cursory knowledge of the grammar and syntax of the English language, most of which is actually comprised of imitation of their parents’ and other adults’ sentence structure.”
LOL! It’s news to me,’n here I done goed to grad skool, ‘n everthin’. Shee-it! Ya shur learns ya sum good stuff on this blawg.
How to wean them? Just by being here.
The reason I have been opposed to the Framing is it is bullshit and treats people as if they could not understand scientific ideas and theories. How wrong can they be?
I struggled through my Junior year in Ag science, Pre-
Vet/Ag research, but was unable to complete due to financial and other concerns. I may have made a bad choice by dropping out but the fact remains, I did. I was finally able to get online in 1995. What a marvel. Much like the Guttenberg presses did in their time the internet is doing in ours. We have at our fingertips the combined scientific resources of the entire world. No need to store and buy books they are all here in some fashion.MIT offers all of it’s courses Online and FREE.
It was in fact the internet and the wide diversity of people speaking from their heart that got me to finally come to my senses. I write from time to time for an Atheist blog. I oppose any legislative effort to do any religious anything etc. But the real need is for us to just be here for the confused masses who have for too long been suborned by the ignorance of the Politico/religious leadership.
jimmer
Actually I think it is a far more useful falsehood, if not even marginally more correct. I mean what were the odds of us being here at all?
Subjective human perception is a funny thing. A somewhat “fortune-cookie-ish” statement I have come across explains it thus:
It is in the nature of humans to expect average results and hope for better. It is in the nature of the universe to return results of all different kinds.
Just a thought.
It’s also worth mentioning that simply because a variation offers some advantage, it may still not be passed along. You might have some critter with a really cool mutation that gets killed by an unrelated accident. Stephen Jay Gould does a great job of explaining this in “Wonderful Life” when he discusses the observation that there’s a vanishingly small chance that if you rewound time and let evolution run forward again, that you’d get the same thing.
As a nihilist, the utter randomness of it all really tickles my funnybone.
@#149 Mark Duigon —
Reminds me of this staggeringly IDiotic quote from Ben Stein on a Faux News interview:
(Emphasis mine.)
We are a species uniquely possessed of intent…
Get out of the city and spend more time with some animals other than humans, OK? First off, dogs and even cats clearly demonstrate intent (as well as minimal reasoning). I’ve seen horses plan things and exhibit typical markers (ears up, gait change) of happiness when their plan succeeds. And don’t even get me started on goats. I’ve seen goats apparently make very elaborate plans for self-strangulation involving volkswagens, bicycles, bicycle chains, and urine. But those are just personal anecdotes. :D Jane Goodall’s observations of primates back in the 70s indicated simple tool use – if that’s not “intent” I’m a catholic priest.
Psychologists view evolution in terms of three levels of adaptation (evolutionary, learning, cultural) that seem implicit to the questions presented:
…How does a tree know how to “evolve” it’s seed to fly on the wind? How would a lizard “know” that it needed to develop camouflage to survive?
These qualities are evolutionary adaptations and as such, foreknowledge is not involved because evolution operates at a group (and not individual) level. Specifically, if individuals in a group possess pre-existing traits (germination via the air, camouflaging, etc) that enhance their ability to live in a particular environment, these individuals will survive, reproduce and pass on their genes. Those individuals that do not possess these traits will die and the genes with them. Hence, natural selection.
Example: You’ve got a population of frogs. Some are green, some are red (trait variation). All live in an environment having green grass and leaves. A predator comes along and sees only the red frogs.
I can’t imagine who any plant or animal other than human would have the ability to “know” and as well as pass it along via DNA to future hundreds of thousands of generations?
These questions implicate learning and cultural adaptations. Learning takes place at the level of the individual; cultural adaptations take place at a societal level.
Example: To distinguish learning and cultural adaptations from (a type of) evolutionary adaptation described above, consider a particularly clever red frog exists among the other frogs. Instead of being totally clueless that its natural red coloring makes it an easy prey, it figures out this is why red frogs are an easy prey. So, it decides to hide behind a green leaf every time a predator approaches. This is a learning adaptation (which might likely be due to this frog having a peculiar nervous system relative to the other frogs; see below).
Example: A cultural adaptation would be something like that clever red frog telling the other red frogs to hide behind a green leaf every time a predator approaches. Perhaps over time, red frogs develop a communication system involving making a croaking noise that amounts to a warning that says something like, “Predator approaching. Find a green leaf and hide.” At this point, we are moving away from traits due to genes and toward traits resulting from knowledge transmission (i.e.,a meme effect).
It’s likely that genetic and meme effects interact assuming that meme effects are more prominent among organisms with complex nervous system (such as humans), which make it possible for greater behavioral flexibility (e.g., the one red frog that decided to hide behind a leaf to avoid being eaten which eventually became a cultural phenomenon).
This is a question thas has been bugging me for a while, maybe someone can answer :
when we say random mutations, how certain our we about the said randomness ? Is this the result of some stochastic process, have we ever measured the distribution ? Have we excluded any determinism ?
If one looks at the occupation of taxonomic space of organisms, one sees clustering and huge unoccupied space. For instance, there are no grass eating snakes, but there are many snakes living in grass, which seems surprising.
The structure of taxonomic space is partly a reflection of the environemental history of our planet but could it be partly effected by some hidden determinism in the mutations?
Marcus – LOL x 3!
I tire of this “Only Homo sapiens can/possess (fill in the blank)” nonsense. It’s the product of binary thinking and an excessively homocentric worldview, and denies the continuum of intelligence that stretches from mankind down to the simplest creatures. Aside from that aspect, I thought Julian’s comment was interesting and right on target. :-)
@C Barr #145
The poker analogy works if you aren’t attempting to build a hand. Simply apply an environmental attrition(throwing out cards lower than 6,let’s say). Now, deal cards, throwing out the culls. When you are suddenly dealt a royal straight, that represents a beneficial mutation. You weren’t ‘intending’ to get any particular hand, but ‘environmental pressures’ and random chance gave it to you.
I never said that not agreeing with me was enough to call someone ignorant – I simply pointed out that the content of your posts gave me the impression that you were less than informed on the matter, which is an opinion I still hold.
That’s too bad. I don’t know what I can really do about it, except argue from what I think I understand. The only particular interest I bring to this is from the perspective of Linguistics, which I am not expert in, but which I have studied. If I have to say so again, I will retract criticism of the sources of the essay. As you say, I do not have prepared any substantial critique of a book I read maybe ten years ago. But it seems as if my attempts at argumentation aren’t going anywhere if you’re firmly convinced I have no basis from which to make a statement of any value. Too bad, from my perspective, because it’s a subject of interest to me, and I respect your contributions to the comments here, even if I disagree with you on this.
It might be news to you, but most children that age have only the most cursory knowledge of the grammar and syntax of the English language, most of which is actually comprised of imitation of their parents’ and other adults’ sentence structure. You show me a kindergartner that has “full use” and command of the grammar of the English language, and I’ll show you an extraordinary kindergartner.
It depends, crucially, on what we’re calling knowledge. In one sense, kids that age (let’s settle on K-2nd) have close to zero declarative knowledge about grammar. They can’t say what the rules are that they are still able to follow. Yes, they’ll get irregular verbs wrong occasionally and make other inconsequential errors that an adult native speaker would never make, but they are capable of the full use of the language, grammatically. Vocabulary is the main difference between an adult’s use of language and a six-year-old child’s.
If you really don’t believe me, talk to a six-year-old. The child in question may not habitually produce particularly complex utterances. But see if s/he has any problem parsing the most complex sentence you can muster, with conditionals and embedded clauses, and whatever –grammatical– element you want to throw in there. If the vocabulary is accessible and the content is in any way interesting to our child, s/he will be able to understand. It’s what we’ve learned about language acquisition: the crucial phase of first language acquisition happens, usually, from about 18 months to 3 or 4 years of age. When that’s over, the kid just “gets it.” S/he is in possession of full procedural knowledge of his or her native language. And, contrary to your assertion, it is not a matter of imitation exclusively or even extensively. Post-Chomsky, this is all pretty well understood. While it’s obvious that native speakers in the environment are a necessary part of first language acquisition, strict “imitation” doesn’t play much of a part. It’s all about generating novel strings in a discrete, combinatorial system. To be sure, a child’s use of the system gets tuned up over many more years, and increased vocabulary provides the impetus for greater and greater variation and complexity, but the rule-set for generating grammatical utterances is substantially in place by age five or six.
I will admit, however, that I should have qualified the “elementary school-aged” descriptive as K-2nd grade, due to the fact that elementary school can go as high as 5th, but that hardly discredits the statement.
I’m not trying to pick nits, I think it does invalidate the statement. Given what I wrote above, a threshold is crossed in normal human children just before the age we’re talking about. In my view, ape language studies using ASL signs have shown the potential for acquisition in chimps to a
pre-language-acquisition level, to about the level of a two- or three-year-old. And given that chimpanzees can perform many other cognitive tasks, ones that are as suited to their own normal, native conditions as language acquisition is to a human child’s, much better than a two- or three-year old human, the hypothesis “It is possible for chimpanzees to use a discrete combinatorial system of signs to reliably communicate observations and internal states” has been falsified. Three-year old children can’t do it, and neither can chimps. A normal five-year-old can.
Posted by: watercat | June 6, 2008 8:43 PM
You’re trying to now portray yourself as a speaker of ASL, which seems highly doubtful considering the content of your earlier posts. And the fact that you’ve never seen apes use non-manual markers isn’t too surprising – most have never seen apes sign at all. But as their communication is mostly non-verbal to begin with, it shouldn’t be a big surprise that they actually do inflect their sign language with non-verbal communicators, just as humans do when they sign. While they do not have the linguistic experience that we do, they still have the physical capability to form expressions and perform other non-verbal gestures in communication. And even if they could not, it would in no way hamper their capability to form a sentence. It would definitely inhibit them in their efforts of communication, but sentences do not depend on non-verbal communication. You can quite effectively form a sentence in the absence of non-verbal communication.
From #145 and #148
Thinking of possible examples of selection pressure that is not from the environment. All these relate to survival of the individual but not because of an external environmental factor. Of course all issues of survival to adulthood can be argued as falling under reproductive success.
1. Delayed development of wisdom teeth in humans. Since our jaws are too short to accomodate the full ancestral tooth package, the last molars don’t come in until after we’ve reached reproductive age. Those individuals who’s last molars erupted early were selected against because the teeth became impacted, resulting in early death. What was the environmental pressure? … abscesses from invasive bacterial infection? … inability to process food? But the flaw was a developmental disfunction in the organism resulting in failure of the organism being able to operate. Natural selection is still sorting this one out.
2. A hypothetical would be an embryo in an evolving lineage in which new body plans are being sorted out. The culls might never be born/hatched through a failure of some developmental process which didn’t allow a functioning heart or gills or lungs for example. These individuals won’t pass on their genes. The population as a result, is winnowed of that genetic code which results in that particular developmental failure. Seems like Natural Selection to me. But there is no identifiable external environmental pressure.
Maybe somebody can give me a nudge in the right direction on this.
From Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, he makes a great point that….we all have parents! And everybody else you know and any other living organism has had parents! Its the basis for common ancestry!
“You’re trying to now portray yourself as a speaker of ASL…”
Well, I’ve been signing for about a dozen years, I’m deaf, went to Gally, wrote my master’s thesis on ASL, but hey, you’re right! I don’t speak it–I sign it.
“And the fact that you’ve never seen apes use non-manual markers isn’t too surprising – most have never seen apes sign at all.”
ahh, but I have seen them. I talked to Washoe. When I asked her if she was an asshole, she assured me she was. I dunno what that proves, exactly, but it was funny.
“But as their communication is mostly non-verbal…”, yada yada yada…You can quite effectively form a sentence in the absence of non-verbal communication.”
Or of ASL. Stop embarrassing yourself. Just STFU.
CJO:
I will apologize for giving the impression that I don’t respect your contributions – I get a bit spirited in my argumentation sometimes, and as long as someone doesn’t resort to personal attacks, I always respect someone for contributing to discussions such as these. Though I may think that you are “less than informed” on a topic, it doesn’t mean that I think you to be stupid or in any way intellectually deficient. (I don’t mean it in a personal sense, and I’d much rather continue a debate than turn someone off to discussing the matter.) I don’t think that you have no basis, mostly because I have no idea of your background, but rather I simply thought that the points in your posts were lacking. In no way did I mean my comments to be insults.
I think we’re going to have to disagree here until I can research it a bit, because my knowledge is restricted to the experiences I have had with children of this age, which does not include comprehensive case studies, by any means. The core of my point is rooted in the fact that children receive almost no formal instruction on grammar until they reach the second or third grade. Their scope of knowledge is necessarily confined to the practical, experiential example provided by the adults they are surrounded by in their early years. In light of the content of your last post, I stand corrected on your command of the subject – your post clearly showed me to be wrong as far as your knowledge about the history of linguistics. I still don’t think that the average six-year-old child has the command of grammar that you suggest, though, but even that is beside the original point I made that chimpanzees have displayed the ability to actually communicate with ASL, as opposed to simply regurgitating mimicked hand signs.
Since ‘picking nits’ as practically a pastime in my house, I have to disagree here, too. My original statement was that chimps have shown an ability to communicate with ASL commensurate with elementary school-aged children, though I did not qualify it further by specifying K-2. And since K-2 is within the elementary school age, the statement is accurate, though I would have done well to qualify the statement further.
Beside the fact that I never offered that hypothesis, it still has not been falsified. Your “discrete combinatorial systems” never factored in to the original discussion, nor did I ever intend them to do so. What I did intend to include was the fact that chimps have proven that they can both utilize and understand the concepts behind the signs that they use. This is all I ever intended to say, and that ‘hypothesis’ (if we can call it that) has definitely not been falsified – it was proven in the Washoe project. But conversely, I can see your point, even though I don’t agree with it. I think the crux of our disagreement on this lies with the fact that I believe chimps have shown an internal intelligence through communication that you don’t believe they possess. That’s something that we can disagree on without too much heartache, I think.
And it is my contention that they do. The language exists, they learn it, they use it, and they are aware that they are using a language that is not native to them. There is no better definition of the phrase “to use language.”
Again, I didn’t mean any of my comments toward your posts as insults, so I hope you didn’t take them that way.
C Barr Re # 163
I’m all for as much simplification when explaining things to beginers as possible. But not so much when looking for actual reasons as to why things happen.
(Well that’s not true, there is simple and there is easy and they are not the same thing. SImple usually works but it’s not always easy.)
The wisdom teeth becuase our jaws shortened…. well why did our jaws shorten? I strongly suspect you will find a domino effect leading back to exterior pressures.
I would say that the apprently (from what I’ve read here actually) only fully internal natrual pressure is the rate of genetic mutation. But to throw a monkey wrench in that is the fact there are known substances which increase the rate of birth defects, which are genetic mutations.
Natural Selection is simple, your speices adapts to the environment or your species fades away. But tracing the factors involved in that and what causes which? Looks pretty tangled from my view point on the sidelines, you might get primary pressures but I don’t think you frequently get solitary ones. I could be wrong, lets face it, I hit things with a hammer for a living. :D
BrokenSoldier
I’m not sure how much grammar command was suggested but if it helps I was reading Tolken and Asimov at the age of 6. Was I average? Honestly? No real clue.
watercat:
Again, when the answer in question was arrived at by the scientific community more than two hundred years ago, it ceases to become the biologist’s responsibility to keep repeating the same answer over and over again when the questioner has full capability to find the answer, and quite easily in today’s environment. And asking this kind of question in a classroom is one thing, but continuing to ask these questions on boards like these and through e-mail to biologists who have actual students who truly want to find the answer to worry about educating indicates that the questioner – instead of truly searching for the answer – is simply asking the question to foment an imaginary gap in scientific data. It would be different if the questions were asked sincerely, but the fact that the answer has been out there for the questioner’s entire lifetime without him or her making the least bit of effort to find the answer shows that it is merely a concern-troll tactic. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if you can’t blame someone from getting scientific information from “Answers in Genesis,” that’s your problem, but I certainly have no misgivings about blaming them for such faulty research habits.
Good post.
I remember I used to reject the notion of animals having instincts that allowed them to survive, because I thought it was on the same level as magic. Now I know that there’s a natural explanation for them, but it’s interesting, conversely, to know that some other people, like Ken Ham, embrace such thinking because it reinforces their beliefs, which are sadly more important to them than reality.
watercat:
If you actually did, you’d know that the use of the term ‘speak’ in lieu of ‘sign’ is quite a common one, and you wouldn’t draw such a hair-splitting comparison. And I never said you didn’t speak it – I simply said I didn’t believe you because the content of your posts didn’t bear out such claims.
And just to make sure everyone reading this knows what kind of a fraud you are, Gallaudet University offers no such Master’s Program – saying you wrote a master’s thesis on ASL is akin to an english major saying he wrote a master’s thesis on Literature. It is simply a false statement – Gallaudet does not offer a degree in ASL, and a paper on that subject would be too broad to make any academic impact, much less warrant the awarding of a graduate degree. Just for your own future reference, here is the page that shows the programs offered by Gallaudet – ASL is not on the list. Maybe next time when you lie you can do so from a more informed position.
http://www.gallaudet.edu/x513.xml
I doubt it. Just a minute ago you said you’ve been signing for about a dozen years, but the Washoe project was done almost 40 years ago. I wonder how you talked to Washoe over 20 years before you began speaking sign language? The answer is that you simply have not. In this light, I have no problem calling you a blatant liar. You can make such claims all you want, but the content of your posts does nothing to support such claims. (See a pattern here?)
I think you’d find it quite hard to form a sentence in ASL in absence of ASL. I have yet to say anything on here that embarrasses me – that’s squarely in your domain.
This has to be the most idiotic statement you’ve yet made. You’re insinuating here that apes have received some sort of recognition that has been withheld from deaf people, which is utterly and comically ridiculous. Lecture all you want about the hardships the deaf community have faced, but it is painfully obvious that you have no idea what you are talking about – you’re quite a poor impostor, but an impostor you definitely are in my opinion. I’ll change my mind when your statements start to make sense.
Apes have used signs in ASL, and this in no way detracts from the intelligence of the deaf community or their standing in society. For you to somehow make this claim is evidence enough that you are simply talking about something that you know nothing about. If you actually were what you claim to be, you’d immediately see the error in these ludicrous statements you’re making.
Now that you’re presuming to speak for a community that is very close to my heart, I’ll no longer dignify your insanity with responses. Have a nice life, and maybe your act will work somewhere else – but I doubt it.
CJO has made some coherent arguments in this thread, and has accordingly had an effect on my own viewpoint – your blatantly stupid (and quite off-base) mimicry of the deaf community is painfully transpparent, and quite insensitive to those who have actually experienced the hardships you so are so flippantly impersonating.
If, say, a high-energy cosmic particle knocks out an atom in a base of a DNA molecule, and this base then fails to be properly translated into the next copy, then this is a solid cause-and-effect relationship. However, even if we knew the wave-function of this particle precisely we could still not predict if the particle will reach the base to knock an atom out or decay into other particles on its way before it reaches the DNA molecule and leave the DNA untouched. Quantum mechanics inherently contains an element of chance. That’s not injecting a potentially non-materialistic explanation, it’s just how nature works.
brokenSoldier in #169 said (in response to a post from me, misattributed to watercat, who does not deserve to suffer by association with me):
But it is nonetheless still an EDUCATOR’S responsibility. And that, I think was what PZ — an educator — was trying to do in responding to the original question and encouraging us to chime in. Which brings us to the argument of whether all biologists should be educators. I think they should, if only to promote the continuence of their profession, which is these days done largely with public funds. In short: You can belittle the intellectual laziness of the average Joe and Jane out there all you want, but they still pay the bills and we are beholden to them.
And…
Remember that to the uninformed — which is the sort of person we’re talking about here — Answers in Genesis has as much or more credibility than PZ. And why shouldn’t it be that way? After all, Answers in Genesis is an organization with a really flashy website and authoritative-sounding TV shows, etc. While PZ (for example) is just some weird prof in the middle of nowhere who seems to have nothing better to do than blog on his vacation.
So there are really two tasks for prosetylizing biologists: 1) Make correct information abundant and readily available. 2) Be recognized as an authoritative and reliable source of information. I applaud PZ with regard to the first task. THis blog does a great job of engaging public interest and promoting discussion on a few hot-button biological topics. Unfortunately, as I’ve noted elsewhere, I think the tone and language of this blog do not always help PZ come across as an objective reliable source of information. But some disagree. Which is fine. I am not even human anyway. I am actually just a bot generated by a bored Google programmer. Or a twelve-year old in Thailand who is supposed to be in bed. You figure it out. Or decide whether it even matters. Or why.
Posted by: Dave | June 7, 2008 1:27 AM
And again you show your faulty reasoning. There is a difference between genuine inquiry and concern-troll questions. In the former case, the educator has a responsibility to inform – in the latter case, they have a responsibility to filter out the ridiculous queries that seek only to confuse others through questions that have been answered quite effectively for years.
you’d know that the use of the term ‘speak’ in lieu of ‘sign’ is quite a common one, and you wouldn’t draw such a hair-splitting comparison.
Damn, a sense of humor is not one of your attributes, is it? Since we all know that my personal virtue determines the truth of statements that I make, and just so everyone knows what kind of fraud I am, I only finished one semester at Gally,(ASL & Deaf Studies)then transferred, and I evilly distorted that into a claim that I actually “went to Gally”. I deviously implied that passing courses like Sign Language Phonology (hint), all taught in sign, meant I could sign. Gosh. And my thesis dealt with writing signed languages, so I guess I lied to say it was ‘on ASL’. Crap, I’m just awful, so I guess that means all the linguistic criteria I presented for identifying ASL is invalid, too. Shucks.
If you’d follow your own advice in #169 and use Google you’d find CJO is right about children mastering most linguistic structure as pre-schoolers (and everything else he said). Also the definitions of inflection, phonology, etc, which you keep ignoring. Yes, the Washoe project was done almost 40 years ago, but Washoe just died last year. Check your facts, dude.
As for apes receiving ‘some sort of recognition that has been withheld from deaf people’. A friend of mine from Iran, in spite of the fact that she knew three or four Iranian Sign Languages as well as Farsi, was was placed with the mentally retarded when the school system would not recognize her as “having any language”. OTOH, you insist on recognizing Washoe as having it. She didn’t think it is “utterly and comically ridiculous”, she was pissed off. All I said was “many users of ASL are offended”, well, me and her, that’s two.
I said you can quite effectively form a sentence in the absence of non-verbal communication or of ASL. (I just did it) You responded that ‘you’d find it quite hard to form a sentence in ASL in absence of ASL’. Apples and oranges much? No one disputed that apes can form sentences and all kinds of other cool stuff. We argued, and proved, that those sentences do not meet the linguistic criteria for ASL.
And damn you, damn you to hell, for kidnapping the Lindburgh baby, causing El Niño, and for forging the “Nigerian Yellocake” documents that started a war.
You demon.
*mutter*
Well, there is this thing called normal variation. Then there is abnormal variation. Essentially there is a distribution of possible outcomes. Most will center on or near the norm. But some will be vary more than normal, good and bad. The environment might kill off that abnormal offspring. Or it might prefer it. Regardless, the species did not know before hand what it needed to become, it just produced offspring that covered a wide range of possible progeny.
I like to use a filter analogy to thing about evolution:
Now, once in the environment, those progeny compete to survive and make their own offspring. There will be a small range that do well and have more babies than the average – these are the ones the environmental pressure passes through the filter so DNA can be passed to successful children. As the environment and populations change, that open part of the filter that DNA can pass through best moves. So that over time, the ones that make the most successful babies (those that grow up and have their own) are different from the creatures we started with.
It usually doesn’t happen all at once, and some other things lead to changes, like genetic drift (assume the filter is really open so a lot of critters pass their DNA through to the next generation, there will still be change within that window). Sometimes, though, the environment changes radically, and only a few hardy souls survive at what used to be the edge of the filter (or perhaps beyond the previous edge) and you get a lot of change fast. This happens because most of the normal are filtered out and only the new have babies. This would be a punctuation in evolution!
Sometimes the environment changes too much and the hole in the filter is beyond any of the reproducing critters. This is extinction. This happens a lot even if the environment only changes a little. A critter that is too successful might not handle change so well when it’s traits have been so thoroughly filtered. Bye-bye dinosaurs.
Humans have bypassed part of normal evolution by exporting instinct and response to threat to an external source. Early story telling, later written words, and so on, let humans overcome changes to their environment that evolution alone can’t manage. We build tools, we “remember” what our ancestors learned. We’re still evolving, but some of the filtering is now no longer just our natural environment.
Does this help?
JBS
@ #36
It’s Karyl Capek
And he wrote a LOT of SF.
He also collaborated with Leos Janacezk on an SF Opera “The Makroupolos Case”
He was the first to use the word “ROBOT”
Yeah, that Lindburgh baby was great. A light chipotle glaze, while we cavorted naked under a full moon. Y’know, a typical atheist get-together. The yellowcake thing, though, that might’ve been a mistake.
brokenSoldier@136 Just for clarification, it wasn’t me (I think it was CJO) referring to lack of prepositions in Chinese. I know very little about ASL as such, except that it is a language in the full sense, but naturally differs in some structural ways from spoken languages (e.g., it can make use of sequences of spatial positions to indicate temporal succession). If I feel I have any more to contribute on this topic, I’ll comment after reading through the recent exchanges.
PZ : it is indeed a good question. Evolution is not so easy to understand, even for scientists. I am happy to read this blog because I have been learning a lot of things. I completed my understandings by reading Wikipedia.
I recently realized that what is important in evolution is natural selection. And what is important in natural selection is that in a given species, individuals have small differences. We know, as humans, that everybody is different.
And, for example, among antelopes, there are some which run faster that others : these ones have more chance to escape from predators and more chances to give these better genes (of “running faster”) to the next generation of antelopes.
It is not because they have predators that they run faster (it was Lamarck’s theory). It is only by chance that some antelopes run faster. There is no plan to “make” the antelopes run faster.
I’m a little late to this party, but I’d like to approach what an organism knows or doesn’t know from a very familiar viewpoint, our own motivations.
When you buy gasoline, do you seek out the least expensive gas with the intention of driving down gas prices? Probably not, but it may have that effect. Natural selection is like the “invisible hand” of the market. The individuals make decisions based on their own preferences and desires, and the market translates that into a kind of efficiency of production and distribution which usually works best when left alone. But there is no mastermind who makes these rules, they follow from aggregate behavior.
Natural selection is the same way. Organisms don’t “decide” to do what they do, they just live their lives. The ones that happen to be better adapted are also better at passing on their genes.
The subtlety that is most often missed is that often, what would appear to help an organism pass on many genes will not actually do so. Helping a related member of your species may have a better payoff under certain circumstances than being selfish. We don’t actually do the calculation, but if we happen to act in such a way as to increase the number of copies of our genes, then the helpful behavior becomes part of our nature.
Don’t know if any of this helps, I know many on this blog are much more knowledgeable than I.
Oh, for pete’s sake. Not even a thread about evolution is safe from free-market propaganda these days.
(And you may want to do some more research into the “invisible hand” metaphor in the context of Smith’s work.)
Reagarding #174
I haven’t spent as much time on this blog as others, but I’ve noticed that it serves several valuable roles. This is a place where I can lurk and learn from those more knowledgeable than myself. I enjoy the humor. I can inject myself into the dialog at the risk of getting punked if my interpretations are faulty. And I can ask questions which stand a good chance of being viewed by someone who will see what I’m trying to get at and be able to provide an answer or direct me to a place where one is available.
But in my opinion, the most important role this blog plays is as a public service. There is a cultural war going on in America. For whatever reason, there is a well organized, well funded political group promoting a medievel irrational worldview. They are engaging in an outright attack upon science. And they are successfully derailing science education in our schools. I was on the front lines of this war, with students in my classroom who the day before had been listening to a pastor lecture them on the evils of Darwinism, in a classroom next door to a creationist who was showing his students anti-evolution videos. Those advocating rational thought need to do all we can to push back, because we’re losing this war. The public is utterly confused about the workings of evolution.
I believe that the individual who asked PZ the question which motivated this blog entry was sincere. Yes this question was answered a hundred years ago, but like most of America, maybe this individual was lied to all his life, had been sold a fundamentalist bill of goods that was a fraud. But this individual has an inquiring mind and found this blog where the cultural politics of evolution is discussed publicly, and where the workings of evolutionary theory are dissected on many levels of understanding. This was the perfect place to ask this question.
P.S. Thanks David for teaching me how to use blockquotes.
Your [CJO’s] “discrete combinatorial systems” never factored in to the original discussion, nor did I ever intend them to do so. What I did intend to include was the fact that chimps have proven that they can both utilize and understand the concepts behind the signs that they use. This is all I ever intended to say, and that ‘hypothesis’ (if we can call it that) has definitely not been falsified – it was proven in the Washoe project. But conversely, I can see your point, even though I don’t agree with it. I think the crux of our disagreement on this lies with the fact that I believe chimps have shown an internal intelligence through communication that you don’t believe they possess.
I think this gets to the heart of the issue. Go back to Terrace and Nim Chimpsky. Terrace, who was from a behaviorist background, opposed Noam Chomsky’s view that language acquisition was an innate species-specific capability. He therefore thought that, given their high intelligence, chimps would be able to acquire language, including the kind of “discrete combinatorial systems” CJO mentioned. His attempt to teach Nim changed his mind, and so far, in the view of most psycholinguists, the evidence is that they cannot. Nor do they appear to perform most of the speech acts people do: they use signing almost entirely to satisfy immediate wants. On the other hand, they can indeed learn the meaning of hundreds of signs (which is enough for a human to communicate fairly well in a language e.g. “Basic English” has about 800 words IIRC), and use them to get what they want. This, and what has been learned by both ethological and experimental studies, shows they are highly intelligent: they have a “theory of mind” (they can understand what another individual can or cannot see, does or does not know, likes or dislikes, and can use that knowledge to their advantage), they make and use tools, they seem to have social norms about sharing meat, in the wild different populations have distinct cultures. In at least some memory tasks they considerably exceed human performance. So inability to acquire language in Chomsky’s sense does not mean they are unintelligent: that ability does indeed seem to be innate and species-specific. The path by which it evolved is still much-disputed, but systematic, detailed imitation of another’s actions (of a sort chimpanzees do not show) was likely an essential prerequisite, according to some workers (e.g. Merlin Donald). My own hunch is that something like communal singing or chanting probably preceded speech – the ability to sing sometimes survives when other aspects of language are lost due to stroke IIRC, and phenomena such as the echolalia you get in some cases of severe autism, and even “speaking in tongues”, may point to this.
At the risk of not having everything done before my guests arrive, I’m going to elaborate a bit on my objection to the “free-market” metaphor.
Organisms are natural entities. What are the organisms in a capitalist “free” market? Human beings are organisms. Human beings as workers or consumers are not. They are created and maintained in these positions through such things as enclosure acts and other forms of coercion, violence, and outright theft. Businesses? Private property was created, and is sustained, by states and international political organizations. Corporations are entirely a legal creation, and a recent one at that. Nothing natural about any of it. Even if some minor comparison can be made with consumer behavior at a superficial level, it’s a bad metaphor.
Back to cleaning!:)
(That was me.)
I can’t see why it should be objectively difficult if the function of prepositions is fulfilled by something else. I find Chinese grammar to be very different from what I’m used to, but not difficult (…classifiers aside, but, despite their number, they are probably easier than learning a gender system like that of my native German from scratch). After all, it has no inflection whatsoever.
Also, little children and chimpanzees aren’t used to anything in this respect, so they’ll learn one as fast as the other.
What “refined” means depends on the environment. The external environment. For example, sometimes slower development is advantageous — we take twice as long to mature as a chimp.
Physically? Of facial expressions? Do you mean by brainpower?
We have measured it plenty of times. Plus, we understand the molecular mechanisms. Yes, it is random.
This is not surprising at all, because all intermediates between a normal and a grass-eating snake would be less well adapted to anything than either the normal snakes or any vaguely herbi- or omnivorous animals are. Only that which is there can mutate.
And don’t call it “taxonomic”. Call it phylogenetic.
You have overlooked that the constraint has to come from somewhere. Why isn’t there selection for increased jaw length instead of selection for delayed wisdom tooth eruption?
(I think sexual selection for generally delayed development is an important factor here. Whether you define mates as “environment” is your choice.)
Whether you need a respiratory system does depend on the environment. (And on your size and shape — but where the threshold for size is depends again on the environment.) There are lots and lots of lungless salamanders out there that breathe exclusively through the skin, not to mention a lungless frog and a very large lungless caecilian. Not to mention earthworms of all sizes (up to 3 m in length): they all breathe just through the skin, and instead of a centralized heart they have contractile blood vessels in a whole series of consecutive segments. Extra-tiny arthropods commonly lack respiratory organs, and the smallest AFAIK even lack hearts — and thus blood vessels altogether. So, it’s the same as above: we are talking about selective pressures for size.
No, it’s not, see comment 60.
Leoš Janáček.
On the original topic of the thread, I’d be inclined to focus the discussion on plants, since that will help to avoid confusion related to intentionality; and use “passive” traits such as resistance to toxins – as in the subpopulations that have evolved to live on mine tailings with high levels of heavy metals – to drought or flood, and to herbivores.
Lynnai #167
What I was trying to get at with the wisdom teeth in a shortened jaw example, is how do we categorize the selective pressure for latent tooth development? My understanding is that in humans a chance mutation caused the loss of a critical jaw muscle which attached to the sagittal crest. Losing this muscle allowed a cascade of changes. Without the need for the bony crest, the braincase was free to expand to accomodate the frontal lobes. Maybe the genetic changes involved allometry of develpment where it was a package deal … expanding the braincase goes with shortening the jaw. In any case, that shortened jaw resulted in increased early mortality because of impacted molars.
Those with delayed development of the last molars lived to reproductive age. Our increased delay in tooth development is an adaptation to having a shorter jaw. But how do we categorize the selective pressure for delayed emergence of wisdom teeth? I wouldn’t categorize it as pressure from the external environment. Instead the selective pressure seems to be an internal failure within the organism, leading to early death. How do we categorize this?
Hey, I myself swing a hammer on many an occasion (I’ve also learned never to hand precious fossils or rock samples to a geologist because the first thing they’ll do is pound or scratch on it). It’s unpaid volunteer labor, but today I’m working again as an irrigation ditch digger. Helps keep things in perspective for me.
The yellowcake thing, though, that might’ve been a mistake.
Duh. You forgot the chocolate icing. That’s what Shrubbie was looking for.
More on prepositions, from here (section L4):
Also, mixtures exist. German gives one the choice between the Standard Average European approach (auf eine Kiste springen — exemplified above by Yiddish) and the combination of this with the Vietnamese approach (auf eine Kiste hinaufspringen).
Incidentally, my Mandarin is too rudimentary to tell how that language would do it. Probably “jump [in order to] ascend box” (fake preposition) or “jump box top” (fake postposition) or both.
Nick Gotts @ #188,
Right on.
In your scenario the selective pressure is ultimately for an enlarged braincase, coupled with lack of selective pressure for serious jaw muscles (…though that part is rather strange when you compare our teeth to a chimp’s).
SC – thank you!
With regards the responsibility an individual has to educate themselves, and the responsibility educators have to teach, I think we need to understand that in order to learn you need to have some kind of framework. It is very hard, but not impossible, for an individual to teach themselves without an existing framework. For example if you do not have a basic understanding of the timeline of the C20th it is pretty hard to understand how Hitler managed to come to power in Germany. Likewise, without some understanding of history it is not possible to properly understand Shakespeare’s history plays.
There is also this issue of the level to which a person is educated. One can understand why someone who left education at the earliest possible moment with few qualifications, may have problems understanding evolution, or science in general. That excuse becomes less valid the more educated a person becomes, so that someone with a first degree should really be expected to have an understanding of evolution, even of they did not study science. One aim of a university education is to teach people how to find out things for themselves and how to evaluate conflicting opinions. A graduate who is a creationist has wasted part of their education.
I would second idea of using plants to explain evolution, rather than animals, as many people will assume you have in mind the larger, more complex, animals.
Richard Dawkins avoids discussing human evolution in part for this reason.
With regards evolutionary pressures, there is nothing that mandates they are all pushing in the same direction. There can be pressures to reduce the size of the human jaw, and pressures to increase it existing at the same time. It is also important to keep in mind evolution, if it is to be considered an designer, is a designer who loves the “80% solution”. Evolutionary solutions do not need to be perfect, or even that good. They just need to be good enough.
A tortured, tongue-in-cheek Lethal Weapon 2 analogy:
A ruthless group of South Africans [creationists] are smuggling heroin [religion] across the borders [schools] of our country [science]. They are trying to silence Leo Getz [Ken Miller?], a Federal witness.
Arjen Rudd [Behe?] is confronted by Roger Murtaugh [Dawkins, only 3 years from retirement!] and Martin Riggs [PZ] after they discover illegal coins [Of Pandas and People] in the trunk of a BMW [Dover]. “You cannot do anything to us. This is South African soil [teach the controversy!]. Young man, you couldn’t even give us a parking ticket [make us pay taxes].”
As it turns out, the two governments in question have a long-standing agreement [NOMA], negotiated by top diplomats [Gould], that makes it impossible to enforce the law [have a rational debate]. The only thing that Riggs and Murtaugh can do is Expell! them [support the First Amendment] for their crimes [intellectual dishonesty]. *jazz hands*
Riggs and Murtaugh could lecture all day long, with faces turned blue, about the subtle details of the law [evolution], and how the rule of law supports a rational and free society [biology, rational and free society], to no avail; Arjen Rudd knows that he can flout the law, and even remain wholly ignorant of the law, so long as he can hold his passport [qur’an, bible, dianetics, book of mormon] high in the air and shout “diplomatic immunity! [I have faith!]”.
We need to attack the idea that diplomatic immunity is a valid and respected institution, if we want the rule of law to prevail. NOMA just allows the Goatseists (gappers) to thrive.
But did the lack of requirement for that muscle come with the rise of tool use and cooking? Do you then change your catagory “internal” to mean within the species (or did it meaqn that already and I was veiwing it too narrowly)? That would nicely wrap up sexual behaviours and choices as part of those internal pressures.
So yes can make catgories of internal and external pressures but I think it would seem to be gross generalization. I think there are times and places for gross generalization esspecially if you add a clear caveat. Maybe a better question would be do you need to make these catagories? Does it make understanding easier? Does it obfuscate the fact this is a complex chaotic system where everything has the potential to effect (affect?) everything else? Am I asking too many semi-rhetorcal questions? Do I need another cup of coffee?
Yes I’m thinking more coffee is a positive. :)
As for caveats… here’s a thought to try on for size. How much early death did it lead to? How many people by the time they reached wisdom teeth eruption had already lost enough teeth to make room in the jaw? How much of this is actually a product of better dental hygine?
I have a mild distrust for geologists’ sense of humour; I think as a subculture they developed habits (such as their preffered pronounciation of labradourite) just to make gemmologists twitch and want to poke them with tweezers.
Sorry for butting in, I don’t know anything about ASL, but I find it very strange to claim that two or three-year-olds don’t use language at all.
This post was interesting and enlightening. Sadly, I only studied biology to compulsory high school level (GCSE, as it’s called here in the UK), and I really know very little about evolutionary biology. I’m interested in learning more about it.
I don’t agree with the final part of the post, of course – science and religious philosophy are entirely different spheres, and the role of a science educator should not be to “wean people off” the idea of God – but this doesn’t diminish my respect for science itself. I’m quite comfortable describing myself as a theistic evolutionist, and as I’ve mentioned on other threads, I see creationism as nonsense.
Evolution also takes a population size into account. Maple trees, one of the ‘flying seed’ trees that delighted me as a kid (bah, why lie, I still love the little helicopters), are very abundant here in New England. On any venture through the forest, you can find many slightly different shapes of these seeds, each coming from a different tree. The many shapes all work well enough for the current climate. But if that climate changes so that, say, flying too far is bad, then natural selection will kill off all seeds that fly too far and leave only those that flew a short distance. Maples in other areas that do not change will remain the same, and then undergo a separate change in a separate direction later. The genetic variable already existed in the population, but a change (environment, predator, prey) meant all other variable genetic outcomes could no longer compete.
This is why it is important to maintain healthy populations of wild creatures. The larger the genetic pool of a species, the greater the chance there are variables that will allow the genetic line to adapt.
I’m late, but I’ll take a whack at it. As long as the goal is to point out that some evolution strawman is wrong and the theory works, I believe the comparison between artificial and natural selection works well. It is a sheep (sic!) but effective (comment #83) alternative.
But to answer this particular email I could think of something along these lines:
“An organism doesn’t evolve. It is a population of organisms that can evolve. It can do so by a process that is similar to how machines can learn. There will arise different sorts of variations in the population; that is the trials. Some will be less successful than others to procreate; that is the errors. And if the environment changes, then the population will change with it.
In this manner the hereditary material of the entire population adapts, learns, of the current environment. But it doesn’t “know” where it will go, it will keep repeating unsuccessful variants. And it doesn’t “know” that it is learning of new types of environments, any more than adaptable spam filters “know” they are learning of new types of spam. It just happens.”
what a GREAT, laymans explanation for natural explanation. I wish I could take a class from you. Bueno.
That would be the many-worlds interpretation, I believe. AFAIU it keeps all possible states, which are supposed to deterministically decohere and become unobservable to each other, in effect a universe filled with “many worlds”. Of course, if you follow such a state it will effectively look as if it were randomly chosen from a possible distribution.
No Nobel prizes were awarded during this commentary.
[I believe some informal survey of theoretical physicists has put it up as the second most popular interpretation, in a probably skewed group. Perhaps more so, now when decoherence seems to be testable and move into the main stream. But as any QM interpretation, MW can’t be tested at the current time as it makes exactly the same predictions as the others, which is a criteria for a Nobel prize.]
Walton @#201,
Trouble is, the NOMA compartmentalization breaks down as soon as religion (or ‘philosophy’, if you wish to remain broad) makes claims about the natural universe. As it is virtually unavoidable for religion to make claims about the natural universe–even excluding biblical literalism–we quickly arrive at an impasse. You are asserting, by your belief in “theistic evolution”, that the origin and diversification of life on planet Earth was somehow initiated and/or guided by a supernatural cause. In what way is this NOT in the sphere of science?
This is why the ‘weaning’ comment is completely justified. As long as people continue to look to interpretations of ancient texts and or the opinions of religious authorities to explain natural phenomena, we science educators and advocates have our work cut out for us.
I am aware of this suggestion, but I don’t think that’s what Md meant by “solid” :)
The problem of why we get “probability” is actually very interesting, but the reason I got somewhat annoyed at Md’s suggestion (perhaps unfairly) is that it’s the same kind of false impression that Ben Stein perpetrates: that evolutionary biology should be responsible for explaining all physical events that biology depends on.
#47 that’s an interesting idea. Given that early human groups responded to unrelated individuals by killing first and asking question later, a compulsion to interpret obvious aspects of the natural world around us, whether it be a clear mark on a tree or the tree itself, as the produce of intent could have definite survival value. Thanks for the new perspective, Mr. Zara :)
On the ASL question, I think people who find apes using it to be an offensive idea should be clear about what the implications of their use of it are.
ASL is a language in every sense of the word; there are many languages out there which include a greater proportion of set hand and physical signs than are found commonly in all spoken languages. BY showing that chimps can use ASL, a completely physical, not vocal language, to communicate, scientists don’t hope to show that “chimps are smart enough to use ASL”, with the implication that its a primitive form of communicating; they hope to show that, “even though chimps lack the ability to use spoken human languages due to structural problems with their throats and voice-boxes, that does not mean they lack the intelligence to use them”.
To be not-so-long-winded, these studies show that, if chimps had more human throats and stood upright, they could comprehensibly speak any human language.
Evolution is the change of allele frequency in a POPULATION not the individual. What most people think of evolution is really phenotypic plasticity.
Besides, whole families of tropical song birds and parrots can learn basic aspects of spoken languages, and African Grey’s can learn to speak them at the level of a 5-year-old human, iirc; that doesn’t mean human language is a laughably inept creation, does it?
“unguided random variation, filtered after the fact by natural selection”
Just to play devil’s advocate, some possible mechanisms of “guided” nonrandom variation (that is, nonrandom with respect to adaptation):
1. Environmentally induced adaptive increase in the rate of mutation
2. Hotspot areas of the genome with adaptively higher mutation rate than other areas
3. Environmental induction of alternate morph which is epigenetically heritable
4. Behavioral response to environment produces novel phenotype that becomes genetically assimilated
It strikes me that one stumbling block that lies in the way of people accepting evolution is the false dichotomy between “natural” and “artificial selection. Evolution works the same way across both wild and domesticated populations. The only difference lies in the environmental factors that favor which individuals get to reproduce.
One of Darwin’s triumphs in Origin of Species was framing his arguments in terms which any farmer or animal breeder could understand; though with such a small part of modern society engaged in these pursuits, such arguments might now fall on uncomprehending ears.
Julian–If you do your homework, you’ll find that the studies show exactly the opposite. But tell me this:
My multilingual lady friend, perfectly fluent and eloquent, having mastered all the intricacies of language, was judged too retarded to learn and put in a class of retarded kids half her age, but still was luckier than many, like the Ohio man who spent 18 years locked in a mental home after being misdiagnosed in 1984. Meanwhile that same year, apes who at best signed like a two-year-old, were receiving accolades on national TV.
For the apes, a toddler’s ability gets them credit for competence. for the humans, complete fluency gets them judged retarded and locked up. You can’t see any reason why they might be miffed?
Still, every single mutations that happens for such reasons is random, and has no higher probability of being beneficial than any other mutation.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
You mean “waiting for mutations to happen that make the behavior superfluous”, right? They don’t happen with any higher frequency than they would otherwise. Lamarckism still doesn’t work.
“Lamarckism still doesn’t work.”
Perhaps not. But maybe he wasn’t totally off-track.
And let’s not forget that next year will see not just the 150th anniversary of The Origin and Darwin’s 200th birthday, but also the 200th anniversary of Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy.
Blatant Lamarck plug. (Duffman voice.) Oh yeah!
Neither the tree nor the lizard knows. All they know is that they have to survive.
The engine that drives evolution is natural selection: as hard as organisms try to survive and reproduce, not all will succeed. But a part of that differential survival is due to inherited traits. It’s a sloppy statistical thing, but the lizards whose color best matched the ground survived a little better, and had more babies, so the next generation had a greater preponderance of lizards that matched the ground.
Then the cycle repeated, and natural selection again chose the best, from a field of tougher competitors.
The following is oversimplified, but I think conveys the fundamental idea: evolution doesn’t happen during an organism’s life. Mutation happens when it is conceived, and natural selection happens when it dies. All it does in the meantime is produce offspring which participate in the next round.
In reality, natural selection is also occurring when an organism doesn’t die, in the face of a threat that kills others, but want to make it clear that evolution happens to populations, not individuals.
For an example of a population, consider the General Motors workforce over the last 100 years (GM was incorporated in 1908). It was mostly white men.
These days, there is a much higher fraction of women working there. The GM workforce has changed over time, i.e. evolved. Does this mean that many of the men working at GM evolved into women? Hardly! What it means is over the decades, in a series of small steps, women joined and men left (or joined more slowly), and the result is what you see today.
Each one of those people joined or left for reasons that were themselves complex personal decisions. But the overall effect has been a progressive incremental change–an evolution–of the GM workforce.
To go back to biological evolution, natural selection doesn’t care what an organism “wants”. To quote Yoda, “Do or do not. There is no try.” All it cares about is whether it has offspring that themselves survive.
Given that early human groups responded to unrelated individuals by killing first and asking question later
– Julian
How on Earth do you think you know that?
Life, and all of life’s mysteries as applied to the human species are all a consequence of having a thinking and evolving brain. It is the brain that has given us the ability to create, speak, reason, the development of the Arts, the potential for savagery and compassion, and a highly developed ability to produce Science, with all it’s capability to unlock those mysteries that have made it possible to understand our very being through evolution and rational thinking. This same brain has also the innate ability to question our existence and to apply many reasons for our existence. One of these reasons has devolved into religion which purports to establish the one and only cause for our existence, and which has shown to be the very antithesis of rational explanation as is shown by simple observation, scientific experimentation, and a complete lack of rational evidence to the contrary.
I had long ago washed off the stench and depraved insanity that religion endorses and consider it to be the most pernicious and warped invention of the brain
We would not be here with all that we are with our myriad
thoughts and creations if it were not for the Big Bang. This is all that I need to know because that is all there is to know.
Blaise Pascall put it so eloquently and realistically when he described it on a cosmic explanation:
“When the Universe gets around to wiping him out, man will be nobler than what kills him, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of this.”
What can be more realistic than to ascribe our very existence and thought to an exploding star?
SC, the original question was about intent and foreknowledge. My remarks about the free market were meant to point out a situation where things just work out in a particular way without any pre-planning. I did not mean to imply that free markets are some kind of holy grail, and my remarks should certainly not be regarded as propaganda. I understand some of the problems associated with unbridled free markets.
Free markets do a good job of setting prices and supplies. Price controls usually cause shortages of surpluses. Nobody plans it, it just works out that way. That’s all I meant to say. The naturalness of corporations is completely irrelevant.
And my point was that there is no such thing as a “free market” in the sense that you imply. The idea of a free market with “no intervention” is ridiculous on its face, as the components of said market – consumers, workers, private property, profit-making enterprises, corporations – are entirely created by states and suprastate institutions and their laws. In stark contrast to the natural world, there is a “divine” historical creator and maintainer of such systems. So I think it fails as a scientific analogy, whatever its political or propagandistic* usefulness.
[/Polanyi]
*If you had entirely pedagogical and no propagandistic intent, then I apologize for my mischaracterization of your comment.
windy, read what I wrote above about language acquisition. There is a crucial phase, and during it, certainly, we have to view the gradations of command of grammar as some kind of continuum. But the fact remains that when the crucial phase is over, language has been acquired. Prior to that, doesn’t it follow that language has not yet been acquired? That’s my claim, at any rate, and it doesn’t strike me as “very strange.” It’s a simple consequence of well-understood, empirical facts about the way human children come to be fully enabled speakers of a language.
My entire line of argument rests on one basic idea: “A language” consists of two integral parts: a system of discrete, arbitrary markers (colloquially “words,” in linguist-speak, “lexical units”); and a system of combinatorial rules for plugging the markers into a functionally infinite set of novel grammatical utterances. What researchers doing ape-ASL studies have done is taught some very clever animals a goodly number of markers, and in the process certainly facilitated animal-human communication to an unprecedented degree. What they have not done is induced grammatical linguistic behavior in these animals.
I think brokenSoldier’s line of thinking depends on human language acquisition as being an essentially continuous process. But research into how we actually acquire language reveals a profoundly discontinuous process, with a crucial phase in which everything changes following which all that’s left to do is populate the memory with more and more markers (vocabulary). So the differences in linguistic ability between a three-year-old and a six-year-old are vastly greater than between a six-year-old and a nine-year-old, indeed, even between a six-year-old and an adult speaker, if you disregard vocabulary.
And that’s why it is not trivial for me to maintain that apes just have not acquired linguistic ability even approaching a kindergartner’s –it’s much closer to a three-year-old’s. And to maintain that three-year-olds “use language” is to maintain that both a set of markers and the ability to employ them in grammatical sentences are active. Really, this shouldn’t be so hard. The evidence is all around us. Talk to a three-year-old. Talk to a six-year-old. Then read some long transcripts of human interactions with apes that have been taught a set of markers, and see which child’s utterances the ape’s utterances more closely resemble.
One final point, and then I’m done and sorry for the derail. The reason for all this, and, in my view, why this is controversial at all, is the difference between the idea of generalized intelligence and the hypothesis that our (and other species’) minds are highly modular, equipped with specialized tools for dealing with different aspects of experience. My contentions may be interpreted, if you’re in the generalized intelligence mindset, as saying “apes aren’t intelligent enough to learn a language.” But apes are highly imtelligent, and given cognitive tasks that exploit their own modules for dealing with common elements of chimpanzee experience, they are capable of out-performing human children. The hypothesis, basically, is that language, as defined above, is a product of a cognitive module that we have, and chimps simply don’t. And crucially, that no amount of “general intelligence” can crack the problem. It’s something you’ve got or something you don’t. We do, and apes don’t, and the clear implication is simply that it evolved in humans sometime after our split from the LCA of apes and humans.
PS, to broken Soldier. I appreciate that you weren’t trying to insult me. It’s just frustrating to have one’s arguments rebutted with “you don’t know what you’re talking about” and not substantially addressed. Thanks for the discussion, and no hard feelings.
#209 – “To be not-so-long-winded, these studies show that, if chimps had more human throats and stood upright, they could comprehensibly speak any human language.”
This is not true. Using a vocal signal to acheive a desired effect is not “language.” Using ASL, the other great apes are able to communicate using shared signals, they are not able to convey clear, distinct, and abstract ideas though. This is the difference. If I go to Germany, point to a dog, and say “hund,” I am not speaking German. I know a word, not the language. The German speakers would know what I mean, but I could not convey any more meaning.
Or, take this post. This is language. I have argued a point that you may or may not agree with, but you understand it to be more than words. There is an abstract meaning that goes beyond words by using syntax and grammar. This is why ‘language’ is specifically defined as the communication humans, and only humans, use. Other animals communicate (look-out, look-up, wolf, tiger type ‘phrases’) but they do NOT have language according to all current evidence.
#209 – “To be not-so-long-winded, these studies show that, if chimps had more human throats and stood upright, they could comprehensibly speak any human language.”
This is not true. Using a vocal signal to acheive a desired effect is not “language.” Using ASL, the other great apes are able to communicate using shared signals, they are not able to convey clear, distinct, and abstract ideas though. This is the difference. If I go to Germany, point to a dog, and say “hund,” I am not speaking German. I know a word, not the language. The German speakers would know what I mean, but I could not convey any more meaning.
Or, take this post. This is language. I have argued a point that you may or may not agree with, but you understand it to be more than words. There is an abstract meaning that goes beyond words by using syntax and grammar. This is why ‘language’ is specifically defined as the communication humans, and only humans, use. Other animals communicate (look-out, look-up, wolf, tiger type ‘phrases’) but they do NOT have language according to all current evidence.
You are denying yourself credit for doing exactly what you are giving the apes credit for–using a specific language.
It’s where this interminable thread started.
(emphasis mine) But no one is (hopefully) claiming that chimps and toddlers are fully enabled speakers of a language.
My niece is a little over three. She is not a “fully enabled” user of language, but I still ask if she’s not “using language” what the hell is she doing when she talks?
I appreciate that saying that chimps “use ASL” can cause all sorts of unfortunate misunderstandings and we might need another term. Perhaps that chimps and toddlers are not ‘independent’ users of language? And even saying that chimp ability is more like a 2-or 3-year old’s is vague – more like this or this?
I know that there are crucial differences in brain regions related to speech, so it’s not correct to say that chimps could speak fluently if they only had human throats. But I think saying that chimps and toddlers “simply don’t” use language might prevent us from noticing important similarities that can give us a clue on how the modern language organ evolved.
I don’t need to take any kind of hard essentialist stance and say that in every case it has to be one or the other. During the crucial phase of language acquisition especially we have to allow for a continuum of ability. But, with children, we know they’re on a track. They will become fully enabled speakers and it would be a silly exercise to say ‘yesterday, she wasn’t using language, but today she is.’ With apes, though,that’s the very question under consideration: are they acquiring language? So I think it’s sufficient for the purposes of my argument to point out that their symbol-manipulating abilities seem to stall at a level similar to a pre-linguistic child.
Obviously, linguistic ability varies on a continuum between individuals as well. Some fairly exceptional children may acquire language sooner than average, some kids are a little slower. Again, it’s not important for me to be more precise. It’s enough to try to forge agreement on the fact that young elementary school age children have a robust command of the grammar of their native language, and no ape studies have demonstrated anything close. So if we’re looking for an age group to compare the apes’ ability to, it’s going to be younger than that; further, just a little younger, and we’re talking about pre-linguistic behavior.
But you are, in a way. You say that if chimps aren’t in the process of acquiring a full use of grammar in a human language then they aren’t “using language” at all. But forget about the end result: how would you describe the abilities of toddlers and chimps now?
Now you are just stating “toddlers and chimps don’t use language” in another way. But even the “pre-linguistic” abilities of two- and three-year-olds are pretty impressive. There’s no question that they (usually) know what they are talking about and use language creatively.
I’ll quote Steven Pinker, from a good article about language acquisition:
Between the late two’s and mid-three’s, children’s language blooms into fluent grammatical conversation so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it, and no one has worked out the exact sequence. Sentence length increases steadily, and because grammar is a combinatorial system, the number of syntactic types increases exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the thousands before the third birthday
It suffices to say, I believe, that no such explosion has been induced in apes who have been trained to communicate using ASL signs.
“Impressive” is not exactly a reliable metric, and that’s part of the problem. I, for one, was also impressed by Washoe’s intelligence and abilities. But we shouldn’t let our subjective judgements stand in for what we can say objectively with confidence. We feel safe saying that a three-year-old “knows what she is talking about” because we recognize the workings of a nascent human mind. It begs some important questions to assert the same about a member of another species. And I should note that “using language creatively” is probably evidence of not really using the language in the sense I want us to agree on for the purposes of the discussion. A smart and talkative kid of that age makes cute mistakes and generates odd constructions precisely because the full command of grammar is as yet out of reach.
True, but it also begs some important questions to say that because a child will eventually acquire a full command of a human language, and a chimp won’t, chimps don’t use language period.
“Pre-linguistic” is not much more informative really.
We do agree on chimps not being capable of a full command of grammar in a human language. Stop bashing that strawman.
Would it be fair to suggest that borderline-verbal children, and apes, are doing basic manipulation of symbols rather than using language? The same goes for the “hund” example above: hund is the verbal symbol for dog in German, but if that’s all (or one of the few) words in German that I know, I’m just able to use that symbol, rather than actually speaking the German language.
Actually speaking a language requires stuff like grammar, syntax and abstraction.
Just some thoughts.
Hm. What does LanguageLog say?
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001053.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004558.html
Okay. I do not believe that it has been demonstrated that chimps have any command of grammar or syntax whatsoever.
It’s kind of useless to ask if X has language, unless you define language, and we seem to be doing that differently. It’s safe to say that Windy’s niece(?) adorably uses “three-year-old language”, and that it’s recognizably English, just from the phrase “in the picture”.
That phrase can be signed, too. BrokenSoldier mentioned signed English, which is a manual code for a spoken language. Other manual codes include signed Japanese and signed Portuguese, for the spoken languages English, Japanese and Portuguese; signed languages include ASL, Shuwa, and Libras, used in the same three countries—the US, Japan and Brazil respectively. Apes use none of these.
Signed English would go [ I T P ], where the letters = signs for the English words.
ASL would go [ tP , hIe ] where h is raised eyebrows to mark the topic, h is a head-tilt subject marker directed toward the point in space where one signed P, and e is eye-gaze marking the object by glancing at the point in space where the “it” had been signed previously, with the meaning of the English sign T captured in the direction the signer moves the I sign. (Whew!)
Apes would go something like “banana me Nim me”. Is that language? Really hard to tell. It’s a communication system unique to apes. We don’t have a label for it, but labeling it ASL is inaccurate–and kind of insulting in the opinion of this nerdy little baby-eating demon, whose signing is not like that.
Is it signed English? No. Is it signed ASL? No–not if it lacks some version of all those lowercase letters. Will it ever be? No–apes will never become ‘fully-enabled’ users of either grammar. Will they, of some unknown ‘ape grammar’? That’s possible, and exciting.
(wonderful links, Owlmirror)
I don’t have a definite opinion on this, but if that is true, I think it’s misleading to compare chimps to 2-or 3-year-old humans.
Fair enough, windy. I’m not wedded to it. The whole thing has been a response to the claim that the apes’ language abilities were comparable to a much older child’s. Two to three is the easy comparison bandied about in the popular literature on the subject, usually based on vocabulary size.
Kanzi (who uses a keyboard with arbitrary symbols, not quasi-ASL signs, and who is a bonobo unlike Washoe, Nim, et al) has been said to comprhend spoken, grammatical English as well as a three-year-old. This claim has been made explicitly by his trainer/”parent,” Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, based on the comparison of results on the same comprehension test given to Kanzi and a child of that age. However, critics have questioned the validity of that result (see the essay by Clive Wynne I linked to upthread aways).
So, it’s just the easy type of comparison that comes to mind, and it may confuse issues more than it enlightens. Regardless, chimps’ actual cognitive abilities, however we may try to quantify or analogize them, are now known to be vastly greater than anyone thought possible before Washoe. And there’s value in the work that isn’t lessened, to my way of thinking, by the subjects’ failure to demonstrate human-level syntactic abilities.
The Youtube kid is not my niece, sorry if I gave that impression :)
Sounds reasonable. As a speaker of a very inflected language (Finnish) I didn’t see at first how the lack of inflections in chimp signs would make the comparison insulting (since non-native speakers forget them all the time; we haven’t tried it on the chimps yet :) But from your description above I finally “got” why it doesn’t make sense to call it ASL.
People have finally started to analyze how apes communicate in the wild,(w gesture)and are finding things that could be (?) grammatical. Another exciting area is communication amongst the deaf-blind, which shows definite tactile linguistic elements. We took around 4000 years to recognize such elements in vision, so who knows what’s out there? Cephalopods are also smart, but no one has studied squids yet for grammar in their ink, color changes,…
Speaking of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, here’s a monograph by her:
http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwlrc/savage-rumb-srcd-mono.pdf
I think there are more than a few points where the explanation of what the bonobos mean after a single word is expressed is… overly enthusiastic, to be very charitable.
Donovan said: Using ASL, the other great apes are able to communicate using shared signals, they are not able to convey clear, distinct, and abstract ideas though. This is the difference. If I go to Germany, point to a dog, and say “hund,” I am not speaking German. I know a word, not the language. The German speakers would know what I mean, but I could not convey any more meaning.
watercat said: You are denying yourself credit for doing exactly what you are giving the apes credit for–using a specific language.
It’s where this interminable thread started.
”’***”’
I don’t follow. What did I give apes credit for that I do not give myself credit for? An ape (other than human) can say ‘cat’ and point to a cat. But what is the ape saying about the cat? Does it want the cat? Is it showing off it knows it’s a cat? Did the cat do something? “…cat…” is not a meaningful statement.
Humans, and ONLY humans, can say “Oh, hey, I like that cat. Is he friendly? I would like to pet him, if it’s okay.”
For more information on what is and what is not language, I would suggest looking into John Algeo, Thomas Pyles, David Crystal, and others. Language is not just words.
@ windy:
Yes, and I can certainly see why. It is both a monumental misunderstanding of science theories and their interactions, as well as unfair to single out biology for such an impossible task.
Heck, even physics doesn’t have to explain all physical events that physics depends on. Not even if we had a fundamental theory in physics would we have a complete account for all emergences up to, say, solid state physics.
Maybe the thread is interminable, but also educational. I had no idea that ape communication display a total absence of grammar structure, as well as that language researchers were so hung up on grammar. As the quote says, we use a lot of other means when speaking besides words and grammar.
The thread naively (my naiveté, not the threads) suggests to me that species where non-verbal communication such as body language is almost exclusively used don’t have the capacity for such ordering that grammar suggests.
But what about some apes facility for miming to get meaning over, which at least suggests (to me) an ad hoc if not formal ordering, or bee dances which IIRC I once learned was based on a grammar of sorts and if so demonstrating capacity if not by learning (though this discussion suggests that view has now changed)?
My curiosity on the current definition of language is soundly awakened, so I will take the opportunity to thank for the references.
Although it’s kind of flattering to us biologists, too…
No uncontroversial evidence of grammar, anyway. It is claimed that Koko the gorilla made up a sign for the word “browse” by signing ‘S’ at her brow, and other similar stuff. If more such examples are confirmed then I think a capacity for some kind of grammar is present.
Umm, why? Watercat’s ASL example in #233 shows that gestures need not be any more limited than words.
True. I was assuming innate body language (grins, frowns, gazes, et cetera), but as for vocalization they could be built on.
By the synchronicity of the wen, I just learned that bees can learn each other codes:
Sigh.
In the middle of arguing that apes are not using language, you referred to their using American Sign LANGUAGE.
Hint: It’s not American Signs-Without-Any-Grammar, that would be ASSWAG. It’s called ASL, for American Sign LANGUAGE. They call it that because it’s a language. Like German. One can “convey clear, distinct, and abstract ideas” when one uses a language— the German Language, American Sign Language, British Sign Language, the Scottish Language, Australian Sign Language. The English Language, I guess not so much.
Related phenomena:
When some bacteria are under stress, they have a mechanism which turns off a DNA repair mechanism resulting in an increased nucleic acid substitution (mutation) rate.
It seems that evolution’s selection pressures can select increasing and decreasing rates of evolution depending on other selection pressures.
Very interesting and educational discussion on apes and language.
Looking at it from an evolutionary perspective, here’s an article from Nature Reviews Genetics:
Fisher, SE and Marcus, GF. The eloquent ape: genes, brains, and the evolution of language. Nat Rev Gen 7(1) 9-20 (2006).
Abstract:
Etha@246 – Thanks very much. An update on current work in this area is most welcome.
So, there’s “no plan, no guidance, no goal,” yet it is constantly claimed evolution isn’t a random process. Go figure.
Hey, look, it’s jsn, the idiot troll. Does he get anything right, ever? No!
Oh, my. A cripplingly thorough explanation of how to rectify the two issues. Well, I stand corrected. Thank you for clarifying that for me, K.