Teleology & evolution: Vocal cord development (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, December 17, 2016, 13:42 (2693 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Except, we have fully accepted evidence that anatomic vocal tract bony changes started with or before H. habilis, a couple million years ago. Habilis appeared with the changes. Do you think Australopithecus thought, I need to find a way to communicate better than hand gestures? I still think God makes species, species don't make new ones by themselves.

dhw: Our ancestors had voices. Monkeys have voices. Monkeys communicate with their voices and their hands. My guess is that early humans did the same. And as their enhanced consciousness brought the need for enhanced communication, they used their voices to produce new sounds, and just as physical exercise can influence the muscles, the effort to produce new sounds brought changes to the vocal tracts. As I said, the new discovery doesn't actually change our basic premise. But I still think it favours mine over yours, if it's true that the physical capability was already present in monkeys. No need, then, for your God to fiddle around.

DAVID: You stated above: "the effort to produce new sounds brought changes to the vocal tracts". Really? Produced new hominin species just by vocalizing? The vocal tract changes in each new pre-sapiens form also came with all sorts of other phenotypic alterations at the same time. I'll stick with God as the producer of new species with all their newly changed parts.

That is an absurd exaggeration of my proposal. Nowhere have I suggested that vocalization caused speciation! Nobody knows how speciation happens, and nobody knows the cause of enhanced human consciousness. Two points arise from this discussion of vocal tracts. Firstly, you insist that your God dabbled or preprogrammed all the different vocal tracts and all the different phenotypic alterations that resulted in different species of hominin, although his purpose was to produce sapiens. Why do you think he did so, instead of going straight to sapiens if sapiens was his purpose?

Secondly, as regards the vocal tracts themselves, unless I’ve misunderstood you, your suggestion is that thanks to your God changing the physiology, humans discovered they could make new sounds, and the fact that they could make new sounds enabled them to enhance their consciousness. I suggest that enhanced consciousness (cause unknown) required new sounds, which led to developments in the vocal tracts. You believe the ability to make new sounds led to thought, whereas I propose that thought led to the ability to make new sounds. Speech before thought, or thought before speech? I know which one I consider more logical.

Xxxxx

Thank you for the extremely interesting article on big brain evolution, which really does expand our discussion and raises important questions relating to all the above. I will get back to you on this.