People groups arent that different

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Rawpixel.com. 

Joel Kontinen 

When God created the difference in people at the Tower of Babel, he merely changed their languages.

But here’s New Scientist says:

“People may subconsciously overestimate the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups, even if they belong to those groups, which could create illusions of diversity within populations.”

It goes on to say;

“Individuals from the minority group are by definition less frequent,” says Rasha Kardosh at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. “Therefore, we are more likely to notice them and so are more likely to remember their presence, and so we end up overestimating their presence.”

Yes, we often notice the difference in peoples, But still, all were made in God’s image-

Source;

Murugesu, Jason Arunn. 2022.  People tend to believe populations are more diverse than they are New Scientist 16 April. 

Storytelling Cannot Solve Darwin's Problem, i.e. The Sudden Origin of Language

Our linguistic skills cannot be explained by Darwinian mechanisms.




Joel Kontinen

Since the time of Darwin, the (naturalistic) origin of language has troubled evolutionists. A recent article in PLoS Biology attempts to tackle this problem.

The authors acknowledge that it is indeed an enigma:

“The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language ‘phenotype.’ According to the ‘Strong Minimalist Thesis,’ the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000–100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework.”

Johan Bolhuis and his colleagues go on to say:

“Within a remarkably short space of time, art was invented, cities were born, and people had reached the moon. By this reckoning, the language faculty is an extremely recent acquisition in our lineage, and it was acquired not in the context of slow, gradual modification of preexisting systems under natural selection but in a single, rapid, emergent event that built upon those prior systems but was not predicted by them.... For reasons like these, the relatively sudden origin of language poses difficulties that may be called ‘Darwin's problem.’ ”

Except for the part on reaching the moon, this looks a bit like a description from the early chapters of Genesis that depict humans as being intelligent and innovative from the very beginning.

It was Charles Darwin himself who initially put to words the horrid doubt that the authors refer to. Writing to William Graham on 3rd July 1881, he stated:

“But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

While they attempt to address this problem they actually manage make things worse for Darwinism:

“Evolution by natural selection is not a causal factor of either cognitive or neural mechanisms. Natural selection can be seen as one causal factor for the historical process of evolutionary change, but that is merely stating the essence of the theory of evolution.”

It seems that evolution is an inadequate explanation for the emergence of language:

"In addition, evolutionary analysis of language is often plagued by popular, naïve, or antiquated conceptions of how evolution proceeds."

Language is an immaterial phenomenon. It cannot be explained by storytelling.

It takes intelligence (and a mind) to invent something as sophisticated as language.

For Darwinists, this is an insurmountable problem. But it is by no means the only one.

Sources:

Bolhuis, Johan J. 2014. Ian Tattersall, Noam Chomsky, Robert C. Berwick. 2014. How Could Language Have Evolved? PLoS Biology 12(8): e1001934. (26 August).

Darwin correspondence project.

Elephants can distinguish between three human languages

Elephants are surprisingly clever. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

Elephants roaming the savannahs in the Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya may be able to distinguish between three languages. This is the take-home message of a recent British study. BBC reports on tests conducted by a research team from the University of Sussex, UK, who drove around the park on the outskirts of Mount Kilimanjaro in a Land Rover, observing elephant behaviour.

The British researchers discovered that old female elephants were able ”to learn the identity of at least 100 other individual elephants by voice”.

The researchers also played recordings in three different languages (Maa, Kamba and English) on a loudspeaker atop their Land Rover. They noticed clear differences in how the elephants reacted to these languages. When the elephants heard someone speaking Maa, the language of the Maasai, they became nervous probably because the Maasai occasionally kill elephants in order to protect their herds. Then, when they heard the Kampa language, they were less nervous. On hearing English, the elephants stayed calm.

The elephants obviously know that English-speaking tourists only take photos. They seem to realise that the era of Ernest Hemingway and other rifle-toting white hunters is past and gone.

BBC also mentioned experiments conducted in Japan that suggest that elephants are good at mathematics.

According to Darwinists, chimpanzees should be much more intelligent than other land animals or birds. However, several recent experiments suggest that both elephants and crows beat chimps in tasks needing innovation.

These and other observations do not support assumptions based on Darwinian evolution.

At least some elephants are clever painters as well. See a video clip of an Asian elephant painting the portrait of – yes, a fellow elephant:




Source:

Luck-Baker. Andrew. 2010. Inside the Elephant mind. BBC News (17 February) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8518831.stm