Re: Why does language evolution get a pass, with less evidence?
- From: John Harshman <jharshman.diespamdie@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 19:23:46 -0700
Glend wrote:
On May 23, 5:47 pm, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Glend wrote:
[snip]
What I'd like to ask, as I have at other times in different places, isWhat leads you to your premise? I've seen a lot of creationists who
why do creationists of various types generally have no problem with
believing that Russian, Greek, and English all came naturally from a
single language that existed between 6000 and 10000 years ago, and yet
will deny that birds came from dinosaurs without a miraculous poof?
reject the notion that languages have a common ancestor, even the
Indo-European ones. Don't you know that the tongues were confused at Babel?
Oh please, it's not like I didn't use qualifiers and the like. I know
very well that they don't all accept language evolution, but the ones
who pretend to be scientific generally do. I mentioned IDists later
on, because they're the ones about whom I'm mainly concerned.
You're right. That was snippy. I don't know that even with weasel words like "pretend to be scientific" and "generally" you can make such a generalization. Even IDers go all he way from YECs to the theistic evolution that dare not speak its name.
It's language evolution that usually lacks direct contemporaneousWhy do you say that? What's the difference?
evidence for macroscopic changes, not biological evolution (to be
fair, in many lineages, fossil evidence for evolution is not
apparent. But where taphonomy allows, particularly in the vertebrate
lines, there is much fossil evidence for evolution). Only Greek,
Latin, Sanskrit, Chinese, and some Semitic languages (perhaps there
are others, this list is what occurred to me in a few seconds), of the
ancient languages with living descendents, seem to have really good
evidence for their evolution from a kind of written "fossil record" of
language, and this isn't the kind of change that had to occur in the
evolution from Indo-European.
Seems like I wrote what the difference was. Your pathetic inability
to read is not my problem.
Hey, you get snippier as we go along. No, you didn't write what the difference was. The only difference you mentioned was that we have "fossils" for some but not for others. But this isn't a difference in the nature of the linguistic change involved.
In fact we do have one
advantage in reconstructing language history, in that we not only have
some fairly complete "fossil" languages, we also know that they were in
fact ancestral to particular modern languages.
Again you show how bad your reading is. I already mentioned those,
and said that they might be considered "microevolutionary" (no one
knows for sure, since "microevolution" has no real meaning, so I have
as much reason to suggest "microevolution" as they do).
You mean, I presume, that it has no real meaning to creationists. It has a definite meaning to biologists. It could be argued, and with reason, that possession of these complete ancient languages is an aid to reconstructing much deeper relationships that is not available to biologists.
Deal with what was written, not with your imaginings with which you
replace considered argumentation.
The fact that I was pointing out, which you should catch if you have
any concern for honeste discussion, is that many creationists accept
that Indo-European gave rise to many languages, and there's no
evidence that Indo-European existed, except for the descendent
languages. You utterly ignore that (at least up to this point), and
replace it with your strawmen.
What strawman, exactly? You are making some kind of equation between the creationist micro-macro distinction in biology and various levels of linguistic relationship, but I don't see the objective basis for that equation, or for setting PIE at the macro level but Romance languages at the micro level.
The problem with creationists is that they set an arbitrary amount of evolution that they will accept, and set another level that they won't accept, despite the fact the the evidence for one is identical to the evidence for the other. It's not that they won't accept certain types of evidence; it's that they won't accept certain conclusions, though they rely on evidence identical in nature to that supporting the conclusions they do accept. Lots of creationists accept that "kinds" are larger than species, and that the nested hierarchy within those "kinds" is discoverable by the same means that scientists use. They just have a limit beyond which they stop accepting the evidence.
One might consider the documentedCan you present evidence of creationists believing in the existence of
changes in languages to be merely "microevolution", with as much (as
little) rigor as creationists and IDists divvy up "natural evolution"
from the magical kind, or from special creation.
We have great snapshots from rather large-scale evolutionary changes
(which nearly all creationists and IDCreationsts consider poof
territory), by contrast, which are just what would be expected from
"natural evolution." Archaeopteryx remains probably the best one to
use as an example, a "poorly designed" bird which is "poorly designed"
because of retained dinosaur traits. Bird genomes show basically the
same pattern of evolution that the fossils do, of course, but the
archaeopteryx fossil is the "written record" of "natural evolution"
that is lacking in the evolution of a large family of languages from
Indo-European.
Indeed, we have no record of Indo-European, except in the languages
that evolved from it. Even without archaeopteryx, otoh, we would
still have dinosaurs as candidate ancestors of birds. Yet the IDists
have no problem with the natural evolution of a large variety of
languages evolving from Indo-European, since they use the same
inferences in language that they and we use in determining phylogeny
(until they simply decide not to do so, that is), and are content to
believe in an otherwise unevidenced language due solely to the
phylogeny of language. And of course they're not going to invoke
miraculous language evolution, because miracles simply would not be
expected to produce the same phylogenies as "natural evolution" does.
Proto-Indo-European?
Why don't you deal with the qualifiers I used, and my explicit mention
of IDists.
IDists are too varied for your generalizations to mean anything. Now in fact there are creationists who deny that the methods we use to determine biological relationships are invalid. There are creationists who agree that they're valid up to a point, but not beyond that point. And there are creationists (or perhaps we should just call them IDers) who agree that they're entirely valid and that all life is indeed related by common descent. I don't know the opinions on linguistic evolution of any of these people. Your criticism applies only to the first group, *if* the first group does indeed accept common descent of languages.
Yet with life documenting both dinosaur ancestors, and transitionalOld Church Slavic makes a pretty good intermediate, though obviously not
forms like archaeopteryx, all highly consistent with the predictions
of non-teleological evolution, they will not accept "natural
evolution" of birds from dinosaurs.
And of course nobody has ever shown how Russian could arise
"naturally" in step-by-step fashion from Indo-European. Maybe the
changes were irreducibly complex?
midway.
I see you don't understand analogies. My statement mirrored what Behe
says. Behe does not deny intermediates, you know, though he denies
the implications of the details of the transitionals.
What exactly does Behe say that you are mirroring here? What implications does Behe deny?
They don't know, they don't care,I'm sure this is true. But do they accept language evolution? What
because they're simply willing to infer that one thing descended from
another thing where language is concerned. They'll even accept an
ancestor for which no evidence exists except for the descendents when
the issue is language. But when you have both ancestor (close
relative of the ancestor in most or all cases, in fact) and descendent
in life, and one or two transitional forms consistent with non-
teleological evolution in the bargain, they deny "natural evolution"
in that case.
Their acceptance of language evolution and not biological evolution is
perhaps the most glaring instance of how completely anti-science they
really are. They demand what cannot (for good reasons, like
taphonomical ones) be supplied for one, and accept far less evidence
for language evolution than exists for biological evolution. Indeed,
it is because the evidence of biological evolution is so much more
complete than that for language evolution that knowledge discovered in
the evolution of life is being applied to language evolution. For
instance, we have absolute dates in biological evolution, and no
absolute dates for language evolution, save a few languages with
ancient written records.
There is no question that they accept language evolution simply
because they have no objection to the usual scientific methods in that
case, and they fault biological evolution merely because they are
unwilling or unable to accept reasonable conclusions in science in the
matter of life.
proportion of creationists? How much evolution?
I was taught of language evolution as a creationist.
Could you provide some details?
Do I care what proportion of creationists? My main point is aimed at
the "scientific ones", hence the mention of "IDists" at one place in
my post. I'm generally not concerned about your average creationist
who simply disbelieves evolution because the Bible said something
else.
You must know that "Scientific Creationism" and "Creation Science" are indeed pretenses to science by people who simply disbelieve evolution because the bible said something else. As are many IDers, though they're very coy about admitting it. Perhaps you should get specific about particular individuals here. What are their views on common descent and language evolution, and how are they contradictory?
.
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