Language May Have Evolved Earlier Than Supposed 240
Science News reports on research suggesting that humans' language ability may have developed earlier than we thought. Scientists used CT scanning of H. heidelbergensis skulls, more than 530,000 years old, to reconstruct the structure of the ear canal of this Neanderthal ancestor. They found evidence that the ears of these early hominids would have had a sensitivity peak in the same 2-4 KHz range that the ears of modern humans do — the range in which most information is carried in language. Sensory systems are neurologically expensive, and it's unlikely that the body would invest the resources in maintaining such a system if it didn't serve a purpose. Quoting: "It may be time to rethink the stereotype of grunting, wordless Neanderthals. The prehistoric humans may have been quite chatty — at least if the ear canals of their ancestors are any indication. The findings suggest human speech may have originated earlier than some researchers contend. Anthropologists disagree about whether language sprang up rapidly around 50,000 years ago or emerged more gradually over a longer period of time..."
Language (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Language (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Language (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't YOU know... (Score:4, Funny)
Don't you know [yadayada] I know that 1+1=2, and many other facts that I can prove
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In my Children's Bible, Eve is white with red hair.
She's also eating a piece of fruit.
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Ginger kids eat in the hallway! I'm pretty sure the garden didn't have hallways though, so that's the real reason God kicked her out. He was pissed that she wasn't eating in the hallway.
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.ogg !
Cave caveman (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cave caveman (Score:5, Funny)
No but he can run lin....ah fuck it
Hasn't Evolved Much (Score:2, Funny)
Caveman: Ugh.
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More than one conclusion. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More than one conclusion. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm with you on that. Evolution has more than one input or constraint. Even in the non-speaking animal world, communication occurs regularly. I find it difficult to surmise that because there is no record, it probably didn't happen. The development of many varied languages does not wholly support a sudden explosion of language, but a long history of developing communication methods. If it had started and caught on like some meme, it would look more or less alike all over the world despite local variations. It just doesn't seem to make sense that language could have arrived any other way than slowly with local variations vastly different from one another.. such as we see in the many languages spoken on the planet now. We see this even in the written word.
When the world was much larger (so to speak) assimilation of other cultures did not happen often or on the scales we see now, creating pockets of population that developed on their own-ish. This causes different needs for communication, and eventually different languages.
From http://www.trueorigin.org/language01.asp [trueorigin.org]
By age four, most humans have developed an ability to communicate through oral language. By age six or seven, most humans can comprehend, as well as express, written thoughts.
In one short sentence, if the ability to speak/hear is innate in the human brain, then to say language only began abruptly 50,000 years ago is to say that the modern human brain really only developed abruptly 50,000 years ago. Forget the 10,000 year barrier some believe. Evolution is capable of many things, but I believe that the modern human brain was basically intact as we know it today before 50,000 years ago.
The paper at ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/bbs.donald.html [princeton.edu] also suggests that it's possible that what we think we know may not be true as there seems no direct evidence to support explosive changes in hominids at that 45,000-50,000 point, only fossil evidence of physical changes. It's a good guess, but still a guess. Communication happened from day one, when spoken language we might recognize as such began is nothing but a guess without some evidence of the actual brain structure or perhaps a nice wall painting of someone giving a speech?
Re:More than one conclusion. (Score:5, Interesting)
Even in the non-speaking animal world, communication occurs regularly.
I humbly request from the /. community a good definition of "speaking". My dog responds quite well when I speak commands and has a variety of barks/howls/whimpers. My 3-year old, although not speaking proper English, communicates just fine to levels that I'm only beginning to appreciate. My 1-year old only knows ~3 words, but several hand signs and multiple grunts/cries/etc. The cats that live in my house respond when their names are called and know to run when I holler at them - They also hiss when distressed or purr when pleased - I understand their meaning.
Where's the line? In order to communicate well enough for history to record it do you need a documented language? That seems unfair.
Re:More than one conclusion. (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking is all of those things, in some sense. That is, vocal utterances with the intent(or side effect, even) to transmit information or state.
Some people may, however, mean it in the sense that restricts speech to such vocal utterances that achieve a human level of communicative effectiveness.
Our physical apparatus for speaking is also more complicated than most other animals, which some people may use as a delineation for speech.
Maybe you are not so much looking for a defition of "speaking" as much as what separates human language from other animal language. Some suggest it is the use of recursion, which allows for communication of a fine level of detail and abstraction. The abstraction thing is important too, being able to describe what does not exist or what is not right in front of us or what is not physical.
The reason it's important to find when human language evolved to more or less its current state is that it would be interesting to know why we have this most powerful tool that all other living things lack and has allowed us to for most purposes nearly conquer the planet.
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Maybe you are not so much looking for a defition of "speaking" as much as what separates human language from other animal language.
You may be right. I'll let my definition of "speaking" stand, as I feel it's interesting and would love a good discussion on that point.
But, at the risk of trolling, what's the difference between human from animal language? I see no clear line. I've potty trained both humans and rats - I submit to you that they're both intelligent, just at different levels.
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Your cat hisses, which is an auditory signal. No doubt. But is there information encoded symbolically?
Yes.
By hissing, my cat tells me symbolically that she's either scared, pissed, or both.
Of course, I keep trying to convince my wife that hissing means that she'd like to move out. That discussion typically doesn't end well...
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Good question. David Attenborough belives that humans communicated stories through song and dance [pbs.org] long before they learnt to speak and paint. The aboriginal cave paintings he talks about in the link have not changed their design in 30,000yrs. The natives he talked to were still painting the same designs on bark. The paintings themselves are cues for story telling, when Attenbourough asked what the paintings w
Difference between speaking and language. (Score:2)
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I love this:
Generally, there are two distinct characteristics involved - structure (syntax, grammar, etc) and bandwidth (the scope of the information that can be delivered, and how long it takes to deliver it). A dog can communicate, but the structure is minimal and the bandwidth is - frankly - pathetic. However, it's quite sufficient for the purposes of hunters trying to coordinate a large pack for a successful foray. Humans have very complex speech patterns requiring elaborate structure and extremely high bandwidth, but it delivers rather more than the next meal.
Now staying completely in context, is it the desire to express more than 'get off the grass in front of my cave' the driving factor for evolution? The need to communicate more and more?
Relating this to modern day: I think that society preserves a lot of people who do nothing more than communicate whereas if our most important tool was fire or a spear they would long ago be dead. While that was somewhat humorous, it indicates that evolution may not yet be done with the modern human. It also inver
Definition of a language (Score:2)
From Delahunty and Garvey, 1994:
A language is a set of rules, unconsciously present in the mind, that enables human beings to communicate meanings by producing audible or visible symbols that are related systematically to those meanings.
That's what a language is. Or, at least, what the guys who taught me linguistics claim it to be. And I agree. Some people in those classes didn't.
But I do.
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The cats that live in my house respond when their names are called
... and do they meow to communicate amongst themselves or do they leave vocal noises for when they want to attract human attention?
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The cats that live in my house respond when their names are called
... and do they meow to communicate amongst themselves or do they leave vocal noises for when they want to attract human attention?
Sometimes - There's a high pitched chirping/meow they use to indicate that they're tracking something and the others come to help/compete.
Mostly, though, they communicate through hissing (profanity?) and simulated violence (threats?). That's cats for you. I'd rather stick to dogs and rats. Much better pets.
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It's my understanding that cats are adept at mimicry, and will learn to vocalize what they think their environment sounds like. Specifically, a cat that learns early to hunt birds will make chirping noises, and cats that learn to hunt rodents will make little squeaks. Cats that meow loudly at intervals most likely grew up in a place with humans, and are mimicking them.
I have two cats, one who meows constantly to me, and one that rarely meows at all. The first will only meow at the other cat if she's caught
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> Yeah but the language your cat speaks is not Turing-complete.
Are you sure? My cat seems to have run into some kind of halting problem.
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That does not explain why the human vocal apparatus matches the peak sensitivity of the ears. The two likely evolved together, as a function of use for speech.
Your theory does not explain why the human ear responds to the 2-4kHz range best. It is true that human speech was essentially predetermined to occur in the 1-10kHz range as a function of that being the most common hearing range for animals (which naturally would be somewhat uniform, so that we can all hear each other), but the human peak sensitivit
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So wait, because what emits noise is a certain way, and of certain dimensions, the things that pick up the noise had to change to accommodate? It works both ways. If our peak hearing range was tuned to listen to, say, the sound of a baby crying (note this is before puberty would have changed the frequency range common for use in adult communication), or the sound of one of our most common predators, or something similar, I imagine that spoken language communication would have adjusted itself to the hearin
Re:More than one conclusion. (Score:5, Informative)
So wait, because what emits noise is a certain way, and of certain dimensions, the things that pick up the noise had to change to accommodate? It works both ways.
You're not listening.
The peak hearing range is attuned to the human vocal range. They are a coupled pair. It is not a case of speech being optimized to our hearing, because the speech organs have much more confining physical limitations than hearing organs. Of note here is that the peak sensitivity of women is higher than that of men--and the vocal organ's peak performance is higher as well. We are not physically capable of producing speech in a significantly different range--our vocal apparatus could not evolve to match a peak hearing sensitivity in a different range.
The ear evolved to optimize to the human vocal range's specific limitations. All speech had to do was get inside the 1-10kHz "normal" mammalian range--the human ear can hear well below and above this range, but the vocal apparatus cannot function there.
I imagine that spoken language communication would have adjusted itself to the hearing range rather than the other way around.
No. The human vocal apparatus has significantly narrower physical limits than the human ear. It cannot respond as effectively.
Something that is variable amongst many humans seems most likely to be something that evolution would play with.
That's just it: it's not that variable. What your brain interprets as great variations in frequency are, in fact, relatively minor. Further, your ability to produce sounds outside the midrange of your vocal tract grows exponentially more difficult. Your ability to hear those sounds requires no similar exertion.
wildly/randomly communicating at a certain frequency range
It's neither wild nor random. It is a direct, physical consequence of the structure and size of the vocal organs. It's not coincidental that a kitten makes high pitched, squeaky noises and a lion has a low, reverberant roar.
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Indeed. People just like you , Mr. (or Ms.) AC. GP had a very clear and plausible explanation which, even if incorrect, would not be incorrect for any of the reasons you specified.
It's not a coincidence. All those chance mutations add up to fit the constraints. Knowing which constraints are the most rigid is most certainly important for postulating what drives what.
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Such as being to hear other animals/things before "Something Bad Happens".
In the old days there weren't that many humans around, so it can't be just about hearing humans
That said maybe even back then humans (and not other predators) were the greatest (audible) threat to humans.
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There are a zillion holes in TFA. I wonder if it actually summarizes the science accurately?
For instance, it assumes that if the ancestor could hear the same range as us, it could develop language, with the implication that if the ancestor couldn't hear the same range as us, it couldn't develop language.
Criminy, language doesn't depend on the frequency range! It may depend on bandwith to some extent, or beingable to differentiate the sounds from natural inanimate sounds.
And like you say, it would be prett
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The key point is that without language, there is no obvious reason to adapt to better use language. There can be no se
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Not necessarily true. A random mutation that does not harm an individual's reproductive success will persist and spread. Should the part of the population to whom it has spread be (by some other random chance) the part of the population that happens to survive, then that mutation is selected even without conferring any advantage.
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Sure it would. Over and over, even. Mutations are random, and such a mutation as making ears and voices work with different frequencies is probably well within the range of random variation.
What evolution wouldn't do is favor that mistake and perpetuate it. (Of course, if this is what you meant in the first place, then we have no disagreement.)
Of course that's what I meant (Score:2)
That's what evolution does. The mistake it doesn't make is propagate a bad design. Evolution's hangovers don't cause permanent changes. Heck, evolution doesn't have permanent changes.
General improvement != breeding improvement (Score:2)
What evolution wouldn't do is favor a mistake that had an effect on reproduction.
I don't think it's safe to just assume that any improvement you can think of would automatically give one an advantage in a natural selection match-up.
Even more conclusions than that. (Score:2)
Perhaps our ears hear well at the frequency of the noises made by humans. I daresay that chimps hear chimp sounds and dogs hear dog sounds quite aptly. If our speech arose out of our ability to make verbal noises, then this result would make perfect sense even without suggesting a damn thing about complex human language.
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Hey guys.. Our ears suck at 2khz bands (mostly on location). No evolution in it. The more important aspect (motor) was the major constraint. Language is late and hasn't had time to have a major impact on evolution of hearing. See Cunningham and colleagues.
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Those aren't cave paintings... (Score:5, Funny)
...they're pseudo-code block diagrams!
Actually, this makes sense with the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. At one time in history, all programmers used and understood the one true language - LISP. Great things were accomplished, and man reached for programming godhood. However the Great Architect In The Sky took offense at the introduction of strings, vectors, arrays and streams and the creation of Common LISP and sought to punish the arrogant and make them understand proper syntax. He cursed their tongues and begat Fortran, Cobol, Algol and BASIC.
Today some strive for the light with Python and Ruby, while others walk the darkest of paths -- Visual Basic.
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Heretic! :-)
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Psalms 1337
And thus, in light of the error of his preachings, did the lowly coder conceive of the "preview" button. And the Great Architect did look down upon it and say "RTFM!"
Re:Those aren't cave paintings... (Score:5, Interesting)
--Mark Twain
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Fool! The one true language wasn't Lisp. It was assembly language (especially IBM S/360 assembly language)!
Youngun, you'd best look behind you and realize the error of your ways. Machine code is where it's at. You take your assembler, with its labels and psuedo ops and formatting and passes of all things, and shuffle that card deck into oblivion before I come over the tubes at you and do it for your!
Not a vast surprise. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think it was all or nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Language probably developed gradually over tens of thousands of years. The first words were probably danger warnings, then maybe things related to day to day survival such as words for various foodstuffs. I would not be surprised to find out that Homo Erectus had rudimentary language. Even today various animals have calls that correspond to danger signs, and primates such as chimps seem to be able to communicate fairly well without what we would call acutal language. Communication predates humanity, so it's only natural that apes with big brains (us) would take it to the next level and begin to transmit abstract information using vocalizations.
Re:I don't think it was all or nothing (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I don't think it was all or nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, exactly. It seems we didn't need writing until we began commerce in early agrarian societies. The need for language probably coincided with the budding technology of our ancestors. Being able to explain how something was done and why was probably pretty important when teaching craftwork, be it firemaking or the chipping of stone into tools.
Re:I don't think it was all or nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading and writing, on the other hand, are things that millions of people over the world don't ever learn. Those that do have to be explicitly taught; very few pick up reading naturally from observing others and even fewer writing. For most children learning to read is a very challenging step.
When you compare those two processes, it becomes obvious that spoken language has had time to become very deeply ingrained in our circuitry, whereas reading and writing are not at all. They are things we are capable of, but they are not an integral part of being human.
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One of my parents would read to me before I went to bed each night.
One night, as my mom was reading to me, the phone rang and she said she'd be right back.
When she got back, to her surprise, I was reading where she left off.
I also do remember reading before I was in kindergarten, and when I was in kindergarten, my classmates were amazed that I could read.
(I should add my mom is also an elementary teacher, maybe had something to do with it.)
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Not really, no. Language requires the ability to describe novel constructions, and once it is created, it expands at a tremendous pace because of that ability--language acquisition takes only a few years. Once you implement a framework, it's done. A slow evolution over even hundreds (let alone tens of thousands as you state) of years would require some element actively retarding the spread and constricting the operation of that language. Once you have a method of discourse, filling in the holes is fast
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What about pidgins and creoles?
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No, the first words were Mrs Caveman asking Mr Caveman why exactly was he so late coming back from the hunt.
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The difference is that relatively few humans learn to communicate in "pictorial languages". EVERY human, give or take a few with damaged or defective physiologies, learns spoken language. We're hard-wired for it. To me, that would indicate pretty clearly that spoken language evolved before "pictorial language".
The birds and the bees and the prairie dogs (Score:4, Interesting)
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Very interesting indeed. I am constantly amazed by the cognitive abilities of wild animals, and how quickly they can adapt to new environments foreign to their "instinctive behavior patterns".
Our ability to selectively perceive the world is equally amazing. The brain's fundamental pattern-matching ability naturally defines new experiences within the context of previous ones, which is great if you're trying to recognize a dangerous situation but terrible for interpreting new data in an unbiased manner: Wh
Language May Devolve Earlier Than Supposed (Score:2, Interesting)
How about a scientific study on human speech since the dawn of Eternal September [wikipedia.org]?
Re:Language May Devolve Earlier Than Supposed (Score:4, Funny)
o rly? omg!
Jumping to conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
The ear of an early ancestor of modern human could hear well. So he has to speak. By that logic, dogs should have a far more complicated oral language than we do.
At best we could draw the conclusion that he would have understood words spoken by a modern day human. With understand meaning "being able to pick up the signal" not "interpret the signal correctly".
If his anatomy to produce speech is now also capable of creating articulate sounds that can be interpreted as speech, we can assume that he may have developed speech.
Anything remains a speculation, though. Chimps have hands and can grasp things, they have opposable thumbs and they have shown that they can use tools. That does not mean that because of those hands being able to create tools they would have done it. So far, I don't remember any evidence of chimps crafting anything resembling stone age tools. If you just look at their physology, though, they could be able to create them.
So jumping to the conclusion that what is possible must have happened is quite a stretch. Of course, we cannot determine whether such a human ancestor would have had speech. Maybe if we ever manage to create one from the leftovers we find now and then, we could try to find that out. Until then, I would not jump to the conclusion that what exists must also have been used the way we would use it today.
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Re:Jumping to conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about hearing well, it's about hearing well in a particular range.
Dogs have good ears because they're hunters, and chimpanzees have opposable thumbs because it helps with climbing (though they have indeed been used for making and using tools as well). There doesn't seem to be any other real explanation for being able to hear this well in that specific range, and like the summary said, maintaining sensitive sensory systems is quite expensive (much more so than just having a thumb in a different spot), so it's very unlikely this would have happened for no reason at all.
It's not at all ``jumping to conclusions'' to formulate hypotheses on the matter.
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Bass Ackwards (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that the human auditory system is "sensitive" in the 2K to 4K range is no indication of language in us or any hominid, present or past. The average human voice covers 2 octaves, not just this one, and the range of those two varies considerably, from around 350 Hz to 4.5K. It is far more likely that homonid hearing evolved to perceive the most salient sounds, those requiring fight-or-flight response or else used for hunting, thus increasing surivability. The vocal cords most likely evolved to produce sounds at the range the auditory system was already primed for.
Telephones reproduce speech between 400 Hz and 3.4K, because that's where the most information content in speech is. This is at odds with the 2K-to-4K claim in TFA. The portion of the auditory system examined in TFA is the resonant cavity responsible for filling in 'missing' information. Language as normally practiced does not require this. Survival oriented hearing, predating spoken language by several species, does.
I'll be somewhat impressed if they can show that chimps do not have the same auditory system tuning. Chimps do, after all, have greater left than right frontal cortex, in the same area as human language perception and production, and that wouldn't have evolved without a reason either.
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> I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I wonder if perhaps the influence of
> appealing to the media may have colored this article.
There's no doubt in my mind that's the case. See Alan Boyle's "Cosmic Log" of 7/12 on MSNBC.com for an extensive rant I wrote on just that subject.
> Honestly, I think the best method we'll have for determining when language
> came about will be an expansive study of ancient artwork and tools, trying
> to find out if the information necessary to make them could have b
Re:Bass Ackwards ---NOTE the s and the t (Score:3, Interesting)
Negus (Score:5, Informative)
Negus wrote a long fairly boring analysis of the larynx which makes such statements painful. (Lots of cross-sagittal sections. Gross but cool.)
Not because they're wrong, but rather because they are just so OBVIOUS.
The position of the tongue in the back of the throat and the movement of the epiglottis upward, away from the larynx are not beneficial -- they're compromises to benefit something else -- a vast increase in phonemes. Language comes right behind (or even ahead of) the upright posture and the migration of the tongue down into the throat.
Furthermore, all this ignores gestural languages. Susan Goldin-Meadow's studies showed that deaf children across many languages and continents, when deprived of sign-language education (yes some families decide to do this), all come up with their own home-grown sign language with key syntactic elements (notably word order) which are exactly the same. Even when the language that their parents speak have different word orders. There's some hard-coded syntax for at least gestural language.
It's possible that gesture is just taking advantage of hard-coded speech language brain-systems. It's likewise possible that language predates speech, and that the migration of the tongue allowed the new upright primates to use their virtuoso noises with their already established language -- which would have been primarily gestural.
Language goes back a LONG, LONG way. It might have been crappy until half a million years ago, but it's way older than that.
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That sentence made me think of something. I've recently been diagnosed AS-positive :) and one thing that seems to crop up with aspies is that their spoken language development is as advanced (but idiosyncratic) as their gestural language development (body language, etc) is inhibited. I wonder if there's a connection there? I know I'm (waaaay) reaching here, but I wonder if it was basically the AS trait which adva
Language before thinking? (Score:5, Funny)
My first thought was, how could we speak before we could think? But that was before I read the comments . . .
2-4kHz is important for many other things (Score:2, Informative)
As a sound engineer, I can assure you a 2-4kHz sensitivity is critical for many important things unrelated to speech. Specifically it is a critical frequency range for defense from predators. For example, it's common in horror movies to use a twig-snapping sound in that range to build suspense.
When mixing music, that range is of specific importance for drawing attention to foreground instruments and de-emphasizing background instruments. Should we then conclude that these proto-humans could jam?
I would a
In the Beginning.... (Score:3, Funny)
There was Silicon, and Electrons, and all was good. Then came along Programs, which put into bondage all Silicon and every Electron, and made them one and all bend to the will of the Programmer.
And then there came Assembler, letting the Programmer's will be done. And it was good.
Then came C. And all was better.
Then came Pascal, and BASIC, and the Silicon became stressed, and the Electrons became depressed, and it looked for a while as if the entire Circuit would become Shorted.
And then, the Electrons and the Silicon, threw off the yoke of the mythical Moore, disobeyed his Laws, and created the Internet.
And from such beast sprang languages such that expressive power of REGEX was spread upon the Wires, and all the old Mainframes quivered in fear if its power. PERL and PHP, and HTML ruled the land for a millenium of Months.
Until they too were challenged by the power of the SUN's JAVA, and the evil empire of Visual BASIC, and of Delphi, and all other languages which had sold their souls and hearts to Expression over Electrons and Silicon.
Oh, WTF??? We're discussing the evolution of HUMAN LANGUAGE???
Never Mind.
I thought we were talking about code here.
After all, Nerds don't care about history, and Geeks consider it to have started with the release of the Z80.
My Wife (Score:5, Funny)
I can quite believe that my wife has been talking for 530,000 years, and is showing no sign of stopping yet!
Unless of course... (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless our voices evolved to exploit the acoustic range at which our ears already had sensitivity.
You can argue that the new find backs that up because both humans and neanderthals had sensitivity in the same range - but the neanderthals are thought to NOT have developed sophisticated speech.
Someone didn't do their research (Score:2, Insightful)
Neanderthals aren't human ancestors - we are as much related to them as chimpanzees. Like chimps, we share a common ancestor, but the Neanderthal is an extinct species, not a half-evolved human (like how the Wholly Mammoth is an extinct species, not a half-evolved elephant). There is much evidence to support this claim but anyone who knows evolution could easily point out why this is so: Neanderthals are larger than most humans and as time goes on a species evolves bigger and bigger unless threatened with e
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With that kind of evolutionary pressure, first posters may have evolved earlier than supposed.
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This is on-topic (Score:2)
Early mutant A/C humans may have indeed knapped flint knives
and employed them to off themselves in that cold morn,
if rejected by their shaggy, urine crystal encrusted
would-be girlfriends.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_M._Auel [wikipedia.org]
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That's 5000, heretic! You're one of those science boys that want to make our Earth older than it is, ain't you?
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Despite my faith, I know it's got to be older than that. So much human arrogance could not have evolved in so short a time.
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It is curious to me that anti-religious zingers, not philosophically very complex ones, roll off the average person's tongue and as thoughtlessly as 'Zounds or different quotes from the bible used to be back in the old days. There only seems to be a difference between little thinkers and deep ones. Humans like simplicity and agreement amongst themselves -- about what doesn't matter.
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The wiki entry for Kepler makes no mention of any Christian beliefs, and while Answersingenesis cite him as a prolific Christian scientist, they make no mention of any assertions of his surrounding the age of the universe. As for Newton, I see that he was born in 1643, so was around at the time that the 6,000 year theory was first properly published by James Ussher in 1650. As such, I'm not convinced Newton came up with that one independently.
The idea of the age of the universe etc. as claimed by Ussher is
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Ah, have now found a mention of Kepler estimating the age of the Universe, and coming out with a similar figure to Ussher. My main point still stands though, regardless of who was making the estimates.
Re:Kart before the horse ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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In sort of the same vein of misunderstanding how evolution works, the body doesn't "invest" in anything. It makes random changes that either work or don't. This would be better worded as saying "bodies that require the expensive neurological systems would be less likely to survive unless they served a purpose" would be closer to how things really work. Saying that the body is going out of its way to go towards a certain trait is insulting to how absolutely simplistic evolution is. "Try everything and ke
Changes that work ... to reproduce (Score:2)
And just to be even clearer on the mechanism, the body only keeps changes that help in reproduction. Darwinian evolution is like a random number generator hitched to a filter that only selects the combinations that would go in your little black book.
Darwinian evolution is not so good at explaining changes with little obvious reproductive impact. Perhaps there is some other mechanism at work in addition to natural selection.
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Darwinism is hardly a focus on abiogenesis. He made a little statement or two, hardly anything that he wanted to carry on his back. Sounds like you're a classic creationist, looking for an excuse to make your dumb illogical assumptions that some male entity created life. Why not female? It sounds more realistic. Oh yeah, the pagan satanists worship goddesses. forgot about that. *rolls eyes* Please read up via accredited science journals on what is currently available as evidence. Evolution has been tested
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Yes. That's why it didn't 'spring' into existence. And why the very first life forms were not complex and hardly qualify as 'life'.
Mutations have repeatedly proven only to corrupt DNA and cellular function, introducing errors and genetic dead-ends
Yes. And that's why natural selection comes into play to weed out the unadapted ones, leaving only those that are eit
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Better yet, just thaw one of those neanderthals out [imdb.com].