Sharks aren’t silent after all

 Image courtesy of Paul Caiger

Joel Kontinen

Can sharks be talkative? They were thought to be quiet, but new research shows they are not.  

”At least one shark species has a bark to go along with its bite. It can make clicking noises, scientists report, a first among an animal group once thought to be totally silent.

During her doctoral research at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Carolin Nieder, now at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, was studying sharks’ hearing. When handling the sharks during experiments, she noticed one species – a houndshark called the rig (Mustelus lenticulatus) – appeared to make metallic clicking sounds.”

Yes. even animals know how to tell stories to their kin.

“I was just kind of ignoring it because sharks are not supposed to make sounds,” says Nieder. “And it just kept happening.”

Source:

Jake Buehler 2025 Sharks aren’t silent after all | New Scientist 25 March

Humpback whale songs have patterns that resemble human language

 

Image courtesy of Tony Wu/Nature Picture Library/Alamy

Joel Kontinen 

“Humpbackwhale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are remarkably similar to those seen in human language. While this doesn’t mean the songs convey complex meanings like our sentences do, it hints that whales may learn their songs in a similar way to how human infants start to understand language.

Only male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) sing, and the behaviour is thought to be important for attracting mates. The songs are constantly evolving, with new elements appearing and spreading through the population until the old song is completely replaced with a new one.

“We think it’s a little bit like a standardised test, where everybody’s got to do the same task but you can make changes and embellishments to show that you’re better at the task than everybody else,” says Jenny Allen at Griffith University in Gold Coast, Australia.

Instead of trying to find meaning in the songs, Allen and her colleagues were looking for innate structural patterns that may be similar to those seen in human language. They analysed eight years of whale songs recorded around New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean.”

But humpback whales are not deriving a proto language that people could use. They are animals with created ways to tell their message.

Source:

James Woodford 2025 Humpback whale songs have patterns that resemble human language | New Scientist 6 February

 

 

Marmosets seem to call each other by name

 

 

Image courtesy of David Omer Lab

Joel Kontinen

How do animals recognise each other?

In a test, Marmosets seemed to call each other by names, the researchers say that this proves that is similar how we call each other.

“They use unique calls for other monkeys in their family groups, similar to how humans call each other by name. They are the first non-human primates known to do so. This discovery shows that communication in marmosets is more complex than previously thought, and it could help teach Darvinists more about how human language evolved.

“Up till quite recently, people thought that human language is a singularity phenomenon that popped out of nothing,” says David Omer at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “We’re starting to see evidence that this is not the case.”

Marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) live in tight-knit, monogamous family groups and spend their lives shrouded in dense rainforest canopies, so they use high-pitched, chirpy melodies that carry through the foliage to convey information to each other, such as their location.”

But only God can make humans speak language that we can understand.

Source:

Sofia Quaglia 2024. Marmosets seem to call each other by name | New Scientist 29 August. 

 

Language Evolution Is Still a Naturalistic Mystery

No comprendo. Image courtesy of Thomas Lersch, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.5).



Joel Kontinen

Introducing a new book on language evolution, New Scientist contributor Alun Anderson writes: “I much prefer a speculative account of how language might have evolved to an invocation of miracles.”

Despite its name - The Truth about Language: What It Is and Where It Came From (University of Chicago Press, 2017) - Michael Corballis does not disclose the truth about language.

Anderson begins his review by acknowledging that our language skills are extraordinary:

“HUMAN language has long appeared miraculous. It has enabled us to accumulate knowledge, build cultures and conquer the planet, making us a creature seemingly apart from the rest of the animal world.”

Anderson says that Corballis, an emeritus professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, mentions two plausible explanations, only to reject them:

“During the 19th century, Alfred Russel Wallace doubted whether natural selection could explain such a unique power. In our century, Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic who has dominated linguistics for 60 years, has supported a hypothesis that language and thought arose suddenly within the past 100,000 years.

In The Truth About Language, Michael Corballis rejects all such ‘miraculist’ explanations. He lays out a plausible route by which spoken language might have evolved, not from the calls of our primate ancestors, but through stages in which a language of gesture and mime dominated.”

Corballis suggests that humans acquired language by thinking back on what they had done, for instance on the details of a hunting trip, and on what they planned to do in the future.

This might merely be a just-so story, as both Corballis and Anderson admit. But they have nothing better to suggest.

Language evolution continues to be an enigma for Darwinists for several weighty reasons:

• Monkey brains were not made for talking.
• Apes cannot learn grammar.
• Darwinian stories cannot explain why we speak while apes cannot do so.
• Darwinian explanations are merely speculations.
• The Darwinian theory of mind fails to account for language acquisition.

Source:

Anderson, Alun. 2017. How the brain’s ability to time travel may have led to speech. New Scientist (5 April).

Monkey Brains Were Not Built for Talking

A macaque can’t speak. Image courtesy of Shantanu Kuveskar, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).



Joel Kontinen

Parrots and some other birds can utter sounds that resemble words, but monkeys and apes cannot.

This is a big enigma for evolutionists who assume that chimps and other great apes are virtually our cousins, as they think our ancestors parted ways some “7 or 8 million years” ago.

A paper recently published in the journal Science Advances reported on how a macaque named Emiliano uttered a variety of sounds in a laboratory at Princeton University.

The researchers found that while Emiliano could at least in theory produce some vowel sounds, the monkey’s brain is not wired for speech.

This probably also applies to other monkeys and apes. Thus, a speaking orangutan would be an illusion.

Charles Darwin speculated that apes did not have a brain for language. It seems that he was right.

Humans are unique. Apes and monkeys were not made in the image of God, but we are.

Source:

Price, Michael. 2016. Why monkeys can’t talk—and what they would sound like if they could. Science (9 December).

Gorilla "Song" Prompts Darwinian Speculations on Language Evolution

A gorilla “song” prompted speculations on language evolution.




Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists tend to see human traits in animals even when others wouldn’t. In 2012 science publications claimed that a beluga whale could speak (sort of, anyway), although it was no match for parrots.

Recently, stone-throwing chimps prompted at least one researcher to speculate about a chimp shrine.

When an orang-utan recently killed another orang-utan, the media did not hesitate to call it murder. The implication is that the great apes have some sort of moral code, as if the animal knew what was right and what wrong.

Now, when researchers heard a gorilla uttering voices that they described as song or hum, they claimed that it was a “discovery that could help shed light on how language evolved in early humans.”

Darwinian stories are often entertaining, but one might ask whether they have anything to do with science.

Mark Twain once said: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

This applies very well to Darwinian speculations on the human-animal connection.

Source:

Owens, Brian. 2016. Wild gorillas compose happy songs that they hum during meals. New Scientist (24 February).

Language Evolution is a Mystery, Evolutionists Admit

There’s a huge gap between human language and chimp communication. Image courtesy of Delphine Bruyere, Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

There’s no shortage of Darwinian just so stories that attempt to explain the origin and evolution of human language. However, in a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology a team of well-known researchers including Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin acknowledge that they don’t have a clue as to how humans accrued the ability to use words and put them into sentences.

Hauser et al. write:

“Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved. We show that, to date, (1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity; (2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved; (3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes any time soon; (4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any insights into language's origins unverifiable. Based on the current state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses.”

They contrast animal and human communication, saying:

“Talking birds and signing apes rank among the most fantastic claims in the literature on language evolution, but examination of the evidence shows fundamental differences between child language acquisition and nonhuman species' use of language and language-like systems. For instance, dogs can respond to a few hundred words, but only after thousands of hours of training; children acquire words rapidly and spontaneously generalize their usage in a wide ranges of contexts (Kaminski et al., 2004; Pilley and Reid, 2011). Similarly, Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee that produced the only public corpus of data in all animal language studies, produced signs considerably below the expected degree of combinatorial diversity seen in two-year old children (Yang, 2013), and with no understanding of syntactic structure or semantic interpretation.”

They also discuss mutations in the FOXP2 gene that some have associated with language evolution and conclude that this is not a viable explanation.

Concluding their paper, they state: “These are all big IFs about the nature and possibility of future evidence. Until such evidence is brought forward, understanding of language evolution will remain one of the great mysteries of our species.”

Unlike animals, humans seem to be programmed to learn language. For those who take Genesis seriously, this would not be a big surprise, as Adam was able to communicate with God from day one.


Source:

Hauser, Marc, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin. 2014. The mystery of language evolution. Frontiers in Psychology 5 (401).

Taming Ourselves: Fact-Free Darwinian Storytelling

Image courtesy of Delphine Bruyere, Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

In a typically Darwinian way, gaps are filled with stories that are based on assumptions.

And the assumptions are based on a naturalistic /materialistic worldview.

The journal Science illustrated this recently by publishing an article on how we tamed ourselves. This would assume that humans were originally untamed, wild or savage:

“Call a man ‘tame’ or ‘domesticated’ and he's not likely to take it as a compliment. But all of us, male and female, may have to get used to it: At a high-level meeting earlier this month, scientists argued that ‘self-domestication’ was a key process in the evolution of our species.".”

How would they know this?

“They noted that with our reduced jaws, flat faces, and lower male aggression, humans are to chimps as dogs are to wolves, showing many of the physical traits that emerge during animal domestication.”

As apes are wild, our assumed ape-like ancestors would also be untamed. The problem is that there is no objective way of investigating this. They will not allow a Divine Foot in the door, so the only game in town is to resort to naturalistic speculations even though they might be anything but convincing.

And once the ball gets rolling, there’s no stopping. The result is an avalanche of speculations:

“The accompanying changes in behavior, especially among men, might have helped humans evolve more complex language, live atop each other in cities, and work together to create sophisticated cultures. No one set out to domesticate humans, of course. But at the first-ever symposium on self-domestication of humans, held at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, researchers outlined a set of linked behavioral and anatomical changes seen both in animals that humans have tamed and in creatures that have tamed themselves, such as bonobos.”

Language and culture require intelligence, a mind. The Tower of Babel account in the book of Genesis explains human languages much better than the Darwinian version of the origin and development of language.

Source:

Gibbons, Ann. 2014. How we tamed ourselves—and became modern. Science 346 (6208): 405–406 (24 October).

Babies Are Programmed To Understand Language, New Research Shows

The human brain is exceedingly complex. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

It is becoming exceedingly difficult to explain language learning from a strictly naturalistic perspective.

Already in the 1950s, Noam Chomsky suggested that human babies have an inborn “language acquisition device” that enables them to learn spoken language. New research shows that babies have this capacity even before they are born.

A recent Nature News item discussed a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

“Despite having brains that are still largely under construction, babies born up to three months before full term can already distinguish between spoken syllables in much the same way that adults do, an imaging study has shown.”

Now, one could ask, why is this so? It seems that human babies are programmed to understand language. This suggests design – the very intelligent variety.

Like consciousness, language is something that is immaterial, so it does not fit in well with the evolutionary model.

Source:

Nuzzo, Regina. 2013. Babies' brains may be tuned to language before birth: Brain imaging shows that premature babies process speech in similar ways to adults. Nature News (25 February).

New Darwinian Explanation of the Origin of Language: Young Apes Invented It by Gesticulating with Their Arms

The newest Darwinian fable features an ape. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

The origin of language is a big mystery for Darwinists who only accept naturalistic explanations. A recent explanation has to do with the origin of languages.

Katja Liebal, of the Max Planck Institute, and colleagues examined the communication of young great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orang-utans) and published their results in the American Journal of Primatology.

At a very early stage young apes learn to communicate with older apes by gesticulating with their arms. Liebal’s research team found out that only humans and great apes learn to use their arms to communicate at an early age.

From there it’s a small Darwinian step to the origin of language (especially in some popular pro-evolution publications). However, in real life the intellectual leap is considerably longer.

Darwinian explanations might be intriguing but they often have little if anything to do with real science. Even now, some researchers doubt whether this ape research at all relates to the origin of language. We should not forget that all animal species communicate in one way or another. Different species might not understand the ”language” of other species. A cat, for instance, moves its tail for a purpose that differs entirely from that of a dog wagging its rear end.

According to Genesis, Adam could speak from the very beginning, so language never evolved.

Source:

Schultz, Nora. 2011. Baby apes' arm waving hints at origins of language. New Scientist (10 November).