“Arf, arf” or “Let There be Speech,” Which Was It?

      “Arf, arf” or “Let There be Speech,” Which Was It?

                Published in Marietta Daily Journal Sept. 11, 2016

            Evolutionary theory, a million miles wide and a quarter inch deep, still covers the earth like the dew.  How could it not?  It is the dogma of science education and the default position of modern biology.  It is the belief system heralded by such evangelists as the militant atheist Richard Dawkins, and the popular, TV “Science Guy,” Bill Nye.

            If your children or grandchildren are in a public school, they are being sufficiently schooled in evolutionary theory.  What else is there to consider when students are presented only one view of things?  The National Science Teachers Association makes sure that evolution is extolled and that anything approaching intelligent design is fast debunked.

            Departing from Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, NASA pioneer Wernher von Braun, and other imminent people of science, today’s evolution evangelists still cling to the conclusions of Charles Darwin.  Darwin actually gleaned his theories from his ailing contemporary, Alfred Russell Wallace.  Together, these two men advanced the notion of “survival of the fittest,” arguing that the earth is populated with an impressive display of creatures, all of which developed from a smaller, less “fit’ ancestor.

            But Wallace and Darwin had a problem.  They didn’t know what to do with language and speech.  Was speech also gotten progressively?  Did the sounds we produce with our tongues, lips, teeth, and hard palate also evolve over time?

            Glance at all of the words on this page or screen.  Ponder words long enough and you might begin to marvel.  Words are actually symbols that stand for something much larger than themselves.  They signify thought and mental processes.

              Language being the wonder it is, how do you suppose humans first learned to use it?  Language (speech) is the combination of sounds that have meaning in a particular cultural community, but how did we first learn to combine those sounds meaningfully?

            Theories abound.  The Heave-ho theory argues that language emerged from grunts and utterances, as when early man picked up a felled log, grunted, and heaved it into place for fortification.  Fanciful?  Many things about evolution are.

            The Bow-wow theory asserts that our speech evolved from animal sounds.  Wallace, Darwin, and even some major linguists “reasoned” that animal sounds led to our own.  This conclusion is questionable as well.  A dog’s “Arf, arf!” and a bird’s “Tweet, tweet” are a long way from “Amanda, light of my life, Fate should have made you a gentleman’s wife,” and I suspect Wayland Jennings would agree. 

            Another theory of language origins is the Divine Gift theory.  Universities don’t like this one.  It contains a “religious” word that could offend their students.

            The question is, is language the result of chance?  Did dog or baboon barking and bird whistling eventually develop into the sparkling words that brought fame to Cicero and Churchill?

            Darwin basically ignored the issue in his most famous work, “On the Origins of the Species” (1859), but in a lesser known work, “The Descent of Man” (1871), he asserted that animal sounds did eventually slide into human language.  Then why do dogs still bark and birds still sing is what I want to know.  If there is a missing link between ape and man, there also appears to be one between Lassie and Rin Tin Tin on one hand and Cicero and Churchill on the other.

            Could Wallace and Darwin not acknowledge that language is one thing that makes humans human, that speech is a human activity, that animals can communicate but cannot talk?  No, they could not, all because of their philosophical presumptions. Evolution is also philosophy.  It cannot pass muster for Aristotle’s scientific method: observe, record, and theorize.  Neither Wallace nor Darwin was there at the dawn of time to observe and make notes on language acquisition or anything else.  That, obviously, did not keep them from theorizing.

            Oh, the philosophical webs of guess work that we weave when we refuse to accept that life contains marvels and wonders such as human language.  Wonders that our minds will never fathom and our theories will never rightly describe.  I’m grateful science has brought us out of ancient shadows into electricity, clean water, medicine, and instant communication, but it has also brought us disenchantment, almost emptying us of the majestic and the supernatural (as in the Divine Gift theory).

            Yes, man is a special species, as his language indicates.

            Science still has not taught us to love our neighbor or to even go meet him.  Our success or failure in “saving the planet” hinges on language and our ability and willingness to use it wisely and well and for good purpose.

            Arf, arf!

Roger Hines

9/7/16