Abstract

© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 27 March 2002

Are Chimpanzees Human?

In 1967, Vincent Sarich and Allan Wilson studied blood proteins and discovered that chimpanzee and human protein molecules are very similar. In the early 1980s, Charles Sibley and Jon Ahlquist measured a 98.4 percent similarity between human and chimpanzee DNA, which makes humans closer kin to chimpanzees than either gorillas or orangutans. This 1.6 percent difference means that humans are nearly as genetically similar to chimpanzees as bonobos, and because bonobos are a second species of chimpanzee, Jared Diamond has proposed that humans are a third species of chimpanzee. New genetic data have altered primate taxonomy so that humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans are now grouped as hominids, a word once reserved for humans and human ancestors alone.

While language used to be a criterion for distinguishing the difference in kind between humans and chimpanzees, experiments since the 1960s show that chimpanzees have the ability to communicate using sign language. Allen and Beatrix Gardner studied primate language abilities in an ape called Washoe. Differences in the larynx and tongue mean chimpanzees cannot vocalize like humans, and Creationists were relieved that only humans were clever enough to talk. Chimpanzees did however use pant-hoots to communicate and the Gardners realized that they used gestures to other chimpanzees. They then found that chimpanzees could learn and use American Sign Language, and could understand English.

Washoe lived with the Gardners and was cared for by Roger Fouts. Washoe easily and naturally learned hundreds of signs and could communicate in sentences. She could improvise signs and invent language. She signed to herself. She was seen sitting in her tree leafing through a magazine and signing to herself as she identified objects in photographs.

Washoe was unable to have her own children but Roger Fouts gave Washoe an infant named Loulis. Washoe soon was signing “Come Baby” to Loulis, who jumped in her arms. On his eighth day with Washoe, Loulis started to sign. Deborah Fouts showed on videotape, that the chimpanzees communicated to each other using American Sign Language even when humans were not present. Loulis not only signed to Washoe, but with other chimpanzees, signing more often to his best friend than to Washoe.

In “Nature” a group of scientists, after decades of separate study of chimpanzees in seven regions of Africa, comparing their data found that differences in behavior among the groups suggests cultural variation. Culture means behaviour common to a population, not inherited through genes, but learned from others in the group. Being able to crack nuts with two rocks is an example. An ape familiar with the skill was introduced to a group that was not and, though the adults showed no interest in her ability, the young ones did, and learnt the new trick from watching her! Chimpanzees learn through social learning such as imitation, and individual learning. It means that humans are not separated from chimpanzees by having culture.

Frans de Waal and other scientists do not think that ethics or morality separates humans and animals. De Waal’s book, “Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals,” suggests ability to empathize with others, make behavioral choices, and teach/learn moral behavior in animals. Because primates may more closely resemble human ancestors than humans, primate behavior and social organization may give clues about the evolution of morality. The idea depends on evolution—that there is continuity between humans and animals.

Morality in animals is based on cooperation being more important than competition in facing a common enemy, reciprocal altruism—cooperative behavior in which the return of a favor may be long delayed, conflict within a group being a condition for the evolution of morality and community concern, where each animal has a stake in the quality of the social environment on which its survival depends.

Sympathy or empathy in human behavior lets us sense and act on another’s pain or misfortune. Wild chimpanzees called out and made charging displays upon finding the corpse of a male who had broken his neck in a fall. While crying, displaying, and hurling rocks in all directions, the chimpanzees were embracing, mounting, touching, and patting one another with big, nervous grins on their faces. Later, the chimpanzees stared at the body, one juvenile female for more than an hour. Lucy, a captive ape socialized in a human family, responded to her human “mother’s” illness, becoming disturbed, comforting her by kissing her and putting her arm around her, by stroking and grooming her and by feeding her. Among lemurs too de Waal reports that a grandmother severely chastised her daughter who rejected an injured child. The mother accepted her injured baby! The grandmother lemur taught her daughter how to behave though older lemurs normally do not meddle in conflicts between daughters and grandchildren. Note too that the mother was not being altruistic, she was being selfish.

De Waal has identified constituent parts of moral human behavior are recognizable in animals. Why, though, should we be surprised that primates, such complex beings to begin with, have this capacity? Why should only humans have it? Empathy is a useful quality in animals, and will have been positively selected in the evolution of many? Our surprise is the legacy of Christian anthropomorphism. Not only chimpanzees but other animals too have some of the qualities that have always in Christian tradition distinguished us from them. And chimpanzees are genetically so close to us that they could be called human, or humans are a species of chimpanzee.

The Origin of Language

Language no longer distinguishes humans from primates. Many researchers look to chimpanzees and primates for the Nature and origins of communication and language. A J Premack and D Premack explain that many animals have elaborate communication systems:

Language is a general system of which human language is a particular, albeit remarkably refined, form. …certain features of human language that are considered to be uniquely human belong to the more general system, and that these features can be distinguished from those that are unique to the human information-processing regimes. If an ape can be taught the rudiments of human language, it should clarify the dividing line between the general system and the human one.

John McCrone thinks that language evolved gradually over thousands of years and that this evolution changed social behavior. Behaviour and language changed recursively, and probably with many other peculiarly human habits involved too. A recursive chain produced language, intelligence and the need for a long period of parenting. Bonding was important. Most primates bond through grooming. Bonobos seem to use copulation. Humans used gossip. Then the long period required for human infants to mature. Mothers were spending more and more time with their slow maturing infants chattering to them and to the other females in the group.

The evolution of language among other things led to the expansion of our cognitive capacity. Much of our thinking is in language. Even deceit. Leslie Aiello writes

The evolution of increased social intelligence would be closely linked with the evolution of language. The reason for this is simply that an increased ability to communicate symbolically would be tied with the increased ability to cheat.

Primatologists have shown that chimpanzees are capable of cheating. This evolutionary view of language is now accepted:

Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of paleoanthropology, evolutionary psychology and theoretical linguistics… It is now widely accepted that no other theoretical framework has equivalent potential to solve the major outstanding problems in human origins research.

Chris Knight

A theory of language evolution should be consistent with the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution… Therefore we should look for theories in which language did not arise “de novo” in the human brain, but is based in pre-existing animal cognitive faculties.

Robert Worden

Language, communication, and culture co-evolved to coordinate relations with others—for protection or acquisition of resources, alliances, and mates—necessary for survival. They gradually adopted the habit of talking or gesturing to avoid conflict with others of their kind. The chattering habit would have been passed on primarily from mothers to their offspring gathering food with them in communal groups. Cultural transmission is “the transfer of information between individuals by social learning,” and Kenichi Aoki says it is not limited to the human. The songs of most perching birds are culturally transmitted. Without it we would have no languages, there would be no toolmaking, and civilization would not exist.

What then distinguishes us from animals?

Jane Goodall among distinguished primatologists and zoologists say that human beings and chimps are both cultural beings, and Stephen J Gould wondered why anyone was surprised. We learn:

A cultural behavior is one that is transmitted repeatedly through social or behavioral learning to become a population-level characteristic. By this definition, cultural differences… are well-established phenomena in the animal kingdom and are maintained through a variety of social transmission mechanisms.

So, humans have no special qualities and deserve no special place. Evolutionary theory with our growing awareness of the language facility of dolphins, apes, and other animals, means conceding that language is itself evolving. Because there is nothing especially sacred about the origin of language, there is nothing especially sacred about the human condition. We should accept that we are one of Nature’s experiments, no different in degree from all the other experiments she has attempted. We should doubt any view that places humanity on its old anthropocentric pedestal.

Amardo Rodriguez of Syracuse University complains that the primatologists do not have an inclusive definition of culture. They say language is not its defining element. They accuse opponents of evolutionary theory of wrongly and mistakenly using language to limit culture to a uniquely human phenomenon. No spiritual relation supposedly exists between being human, communication, and language—neither communication nor language performs any sacred function. That seems to be what he cannot abide. Anyway, he wants to know:

What then distinguishes us from animals?

One might retort: What is the point of the question? What distinguishes any animal from any other? In other words, to ask the question is to presume that we are peculiarly different from all other animals. The author is hoping to retrieve God somewhere. Rodriguez insists that the distinction must be made because without it, “the integrity of many worldviews collapses.” This seems to be meant as a serious reason!

Rodriguez knows that many intellectuals are accepting humanity is not inherently and uniquely distinct from other life forms, and to persist in trying to answer such questions is to be searching for distinctions that are nonexistent. Furthermore, to continue to contest our primate origins is ignorant and anti-scientific. In this brief summary, Rodriquez is correct but he also claims that many consider the argument means that society should be a free for all, devoid of control such as governments and… da! da! religions!

Theology and Evolution

A particular target, admittedly an easy one, of Rodriguez is Nancy R Howell of the Saint Paul School of Theology. Observing on evolutionary theory and chimpanzees in an article A God Adequate for Primate Culture in the “Journal of Religion and Society,” she is concerned that in underestimating chimpanzees, theology has underestimated God.

She says Sallie McFague narrows the relationship between God and the world to those inclusive of Nature. Those of us who have not benefitted from a highly specialised training in theology can only say, “Wow!” with as much false amazement as we can muster. But Howell assures us that some proposals of how God relates with the world do not include Nature, “and so are inadequate.” Apparently the “organic” model says the world is God’s body, thus treating Nature as most important, but it is pantheistic, collapsing God and the world and making the world divine! That certainly will not do!

All of this nonsense, the latter day equivalent of the medieval schoolmen debates, is exactly because theologians can consider any crap they like because little of it bears on reality. How any hypothesis of God’s relationship with the world can ignore Nature is beyond comprehension. Nature is the world! And, indeed, Nature is divine. There is no need at all to consider the relationship between God and the world if the world is Nature is the divinity!

Apparently, McFague whips up her models and finds a suitable recipe that does not include as an ingredient a classical supernaturalism that separates God from a mechanistic world. Howell likes a panentheistic model which makes sure that God is in Nature through the ecological metaphor of the world as God’s body. Yet, McFague’s panentheism preserves divine transcendence because God is not reducible to the world and its processes. McFague describes the panentheistic relationship of God to the world in this way:

The principle reason, then, for preferring spirit to alternative possibilities is that it underscores the connection between God and the world as not primarily the Mind that orders, controls, and directs the universe, but as the Breath that is the source of its life and vitality. The connection is one of “relationship” at the deepest possible level, the level of life, rather than “control” at the level of ordering and directing Nature.

And it goes on… and on… Bishop Ecclesiasticus or the Reverend F I Baines on these pages write more intelligible theology. If this means anything to any reader, I suggest they see a psychiatrist immediately. Slightly more intelligibly, McFague writes:

I owe my existence at its most fundamental level—the gift of my next breath—to God. God is my creator and recreator, the One who gives and renews my life, moment by moment, at its most basic, physical level. And so does everything else in creation also live, moment by moment, by the breath of God, says our model.

God here is simply a supposed Life Force. Howell is impressed that this “God’s presence, creativity, and empowerment pervade all of life.” This reduced God is plainly simply an agent of the Goddess Nature, so why are these women not Pagans instead of apologists for patriarchy?

Anyway, Howell has decided that “McFague’s ecological theology moves us closer to a theology adequate for primate culture,” doubtless a great comfort for apes. She has discovered that “the creative, empowering presence of God lives in all life, including (I presume) chimpanzee life.” Before patriarchy, Howell might easily have been worshipping an ape or some other animal as a god, and now after 2500 years she has decided that apes deserve a share of her panentheistic god.

Evolution for Theists

It took 1000 years of Christianity for a Christian saint to recognize that animals lived on the earth, and now after another 1000 years some Christians are starting to think that they might be sentient or even have some rudimentary consciousness, language and learning—perhaps even ethics and morality. John Haught in “God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution,” has a theory of evolution that claims God is far more complex and interesting than humans have ever imagined. He relates to all creatures and connects intimately with their experiences and futures. “Does he send them to hell fire if they sin?” we ask. Do we meet our pets in heaven? Is it possible that a pet Rottweiler might be looking down on we Pagans cooking in the eternal flames while he blissfully chews slippers in heaven?

It seems that Haught’s theology of evolution yield up a God as a directionless and random process of natural selection. That then is one in the eye for the Creationists, but if that is what God is, why cannot we dispense with him and just have what we already had in evolution—random processes and natural selection? Haught’s rationale for such a God rests in divine kenotic love, meaning something that is not love at all, because, according to Nancy Howells:

Love cannot compel, and a God whose essence is love should not overwhelm the world with coercive power or an annihilating presence. Infinite love must absent or restrain itself to give space to become distinct from the creative love that constitutes it as “other.” Any universe rooted in an unbounded love would have some features that appear random or undirected.

So there you have it. Randomness is evidence of God’s love! Remarkable stuff, this God’s love. It seems to mutate into everything there is, and again, finishes up being nothing at all. We also discover that God has mutated again too. He is now “inexhaustible futurity.” Well! Whad’ya know? Howells goes on quoting utter codswallop from Haught:

God regards highly the world’s freedom by “continuous arrival in the present” with a range of potentialities to lay before the universe.

As God envisages the futures relevant to the cosmos, God is neither dismissive nor forgetful of the past because “God’s compassionate embrace enfolds redemptively and preserves everlastingly each moment of the cosmic evolutionary story.”

Evolution and God may coexist only if Nature possesses both the subjectivity necessary to respond to novel possibilities presented by God, as the power of futurity, and the genuine freedom for evolutionary self-transcendence in the presence of divine kenotic love.

Anyone who can understand this ought to log on to the wisdom of Ecclesiasticus and they can read it to their heart’s content. It is pure Hans Anderson and only gets published to add to the trash intended to confuse more the poor believer, and persuade them that God is just beyond them.

Howells tells us, “any theology involved with evolution and ecology must be concerned with the grand scheme of Nature,” leaving us still wondering why we need theology at all, and why Howells and the tribe of talentless comedians called theologians who waste their time on bullshit do not study ecology or some other biological science, or even physical science. Too hard!

Pantheism or Panentheism

There is continuity between humans and Nature,

perhaps a profound revelation to those who think incessantly of the transcendent but something known to normal human beings since 1859. She draws it all together on the basis of things being able to experience events. Personality is the accumulation of experiences ranked by the individual to form an particular recognizable pattern. None of this has anything to do with God, so Howells hastily brings him into it. For these things with personality

The range of potential offered by God, as the power of futurity, is far greater in proportion to their consciousness, experience, and sociality.

How did he get back in? Because it is God who offers “visions of their futures, but God does not determine the futures of self-creating persons.” God has become the capacity to envision. We now discover:

Just as God contributes to the formation of persons and all of Nature, each creature contributes to the being of God by adding new experiences to the body of God.

Now here Howells is drawing on A N Whitehead. From his idea of internal relations, each person being formed of its relationships, Howells concludes that God is being built himself of the experience of the elements that constitute Nature—conceived as God’s body. Howells is utterly unable to see that God is utterly superfluous to all this. God is His body, just as Howells is her body. But the body is Nature, so God is Nature. Let us therefore dispense with the supernumarary concept God!

Howells opts for panentheism on the model of Whitehead and others because she cannot let go of the unnecessary concept of God and grab hold of the idea of pantheism in the Goddess, Nature. She is trying to bring animals other than humans, notably the chimpanzees, of which we seem simply to be a type, within the gamut of the Hebrew God that she desperately wants to preserve. To accept the simplicity of the divinity of Nature itself would solve the problem that she has to machinate about to try to find a solution. Her final words are:

When human experience is decentered from theology, panentheism provides a model for seeing far more about God and chimpanzees—and, ironically, far more about ourselves.

Pantheism does not require any “decentring” of human experience because it is automatically “decentred.” It also dispenses with theology which becomes science, and God, because He is a patriarchal invention to give power to drones and loafers with an ability to write utter rubbish. If it were not for the comfortable living that the ill-gotten money of the churches provides for these feminist “theologians,” one suspects, from the way they talk, that they would switch to pantheism and veneration of the goddess tomorrow, but even the sisters have their price.

Some Truths

Rodriguez argues that the theology that Howells seeks already exists. He thinks an overly narrow monotheistic conception of God has contributed to our separation from Nature by limiting our conception of God. He admits that the current theology posits a deep suspicion and distrust of the world. In it the world is in conflict with us and our progress—even survival—requires that we subdue the forces of the world, which is outside of us. Our imagined superiority to the animal world is born out of separation—our separation from each other, the world, and our own humanity. A new theology needs to redefine our relation to the world, and what we understand to be human. Underestimating the complexity of the human condition, makes a theology that underestimates and distorts our understanding and relation to God. As much as Howell endorses a broader conception of God, she gives us no new understanding of God that makes for new and different ways of being in the world.

Rodriguez says he finds nothing in distinguishing between humans and primates, nor our supposed superiority. If we are uniquely blessed, we have more responsibility for the condition of the world and all the life that inhabits it. All life forms are uniquely complex and deserve the opportunity to evolve and flourish.

But downplaying human complexity and potentiality fosters a deep distrust and suspicion of our humanity, and legitimizes the view that we have no inherent capacity for goodness. Above all, it turns out, Rodriguez is concerned with the rise of a new secular hegemony—the belief that there is nothing inherently sacred about the world—and its penetration into our ethics, politics, and economics through the rise of hyper-capitalism and our being increasingly beholden to market forces. The cost of ignorance is high. We have to understand we have the potentiality to make a world without inequality and injustice. Hierarchy is not our destiny or capitalism is the only path to progress. Nothing is redeeming in any politics that assumes a narrow and secular understanding of what being human means.

Much of this sounds attractive and Adelphiasophists would agree, but the last sentence gives us the clue about what Rodriguez is really getting at. A secular undertanding of being human is narrow. What then is a non-secular understanding of being human? He means that we have to believe in God! 2000 years of Christianity have led us to rapacious exploitation of the world and poisoning ot the air water and people, all in the interest of profit. That is the legacy of the Christian god for whom poverty was a virtue. But Rodriguez is so addicted to his dishonest reigion and its god that he wants us to have more not less.

He says Howell’s new theology poses no threat to the “status quo,” and he is right but what threat has the old theology, or any modification of the jaded religion it justifies? He says “we are still imperfect creatures who must look to God rather than our own blessed potentiality for redemption,” showing that he cannot get away from God and redemption. We shall never be anything other than imperfect simply because we are all different and any one will be imperfect according to the criterion of another. What we can do is live better lives and make sure that our successors have a better world in which to live, and a better moral code to live by. Howell does not give us it, but that does not mean that there is not one on offer.

We have to do both—embrace and celebrate the continuity between all life forms and us and also embrace and celebrate the uniqueness of all life forms.

Quite so, but why then bring a transcendental god into it?

Criticisms of Language Theories

Rodriguez sets up aunt sallies, a normal ploy of Christian apologists. He tells us that the evolutionary view of language and culture means that complex languages reflect complex organisms with a complex and sophisticated understandings of the world. He also tells us what “we” do, though it is not something that most scientists, at any rate, do. He must mean it is what most Christians or theologians do.

We commonly associate peoples with supposedly complex languages with complex cultures. Conversely, we view peoples with supposedly less evolved languages—or associated racially or ethnically with any—as less evolved and of backward and primitive cultures. Different languages and cultures supposedly reflect different levels of evolution and progress.

Immediately he contradicts what he has said by now saying that linguists and anthropologists have never found a less evolved language. In none of this does he tell us what the criteria are that he, or indeed, philologists use to judge the degree of evolution of a language. Looking at a human hand, a seal’s flipper, and a bird’s wing, who will say which is the most evolved? Since they are all currently in use by living species, they are all equally evolved. Why should language be any different? Rodriguez calls this an “absence of data” and declares that it is “no doubt” a major problem. No doubt it is to dumb clucks who are doing their best to bring back God from the fossilized stratum that he should by now be in.

Rodriguez, like most Christians, is a compulsive citer of authorities. He cites Noam Chomsky as rejecting the evolutionary view of the origin of language, believing that language is uniquely human, and programmed into the human brain. If we are programmed with language then someone must have priogrammed us, so the implication is that God did. Chomsky is a great, courageous and creative man, but he is also the son of a Hebrew scholar, and might feel some need to justify belief in a God. Rodriguez cites Chomsky as having written in “Language and Mind,”:

Anyone concerned with the study of human Nature and human capacities must somehow come to grips with the fact that all normal human beings acquire language, whereas acquisition of even its barest rudiments is quite beyond the capacities of an otherwise intelligent ape… It is widely thought that the extensive modern studies of animal communication challenge this classical view; and it is almost universally taken for granted that there exists a problem of explaining the evolution of language from systems of animal communication. However, a careful look at recent studies of animal communication seems to me to provide little support for these assumptions. Rather, these studies bring out even more clearly the extent to which human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world. If this is so, it is quite senseless to raise the problem of explaining the evolution of human language from more primitive systems of communication that appear at lower levels of cognitive capacity.

Chomsky wrote these words in 1967, before the discoveries of the abilities of apes in sign language and the abilities of whales and dolphins were known properly. What was Chomsky’s later view? He proposed a Universal Grammar (UG) that all humans had innately. So, there is no hierarchy in language competency, and they are all equally complicated. Language differences are cultural not biological. Rodriguez cites David Lightfoot:

There seems to be nothing in other species remotely comparable to the kind of computations and compositionality made available by the human UG.

Theologians have no concept of time passing, a curious thing when they praise their Lord and God as the God of history. If these dim wits stopped to think for a moment instead of decorating their mental lingam they would quickly realise that the human race is astonishingly uniform despte our geographic distribution and excessively large population. We have all evolved from a small population of apes only a few hundred thousand years ago, perhaps less. Language has certainly been an attribute of humans for 40,000 of those years. Why then would these amateur philosophers think that human beings should show different linguistic abilities?

Despite the 1968 statement of Chomsky, the wealth of more recent data shows his opinion to have been wrong. Chimpanzees can formulate their own compound words and sentences, showing that the Chomsky’s UG must have already been “programmed” into apes before humanity split off from them. The human race almost died out and we who remain came from a tiny stock. It is not surprising therefore that we all have the same linguistic ability. What is important is that we get at explanations of these things through hypotheses and observation not by speculating on the shape of God’s navel.

So apes cannot compute, but Japanese studies show that they can put numbers into order, and human beings have only been able to calculate for a few thousand years. Evolutionary theory suggests that each evolutionary niche can be occupied by one organism. The niche for intelligence was occupied first by humans. That means others could not enter even if they had had the ability. We know from the fossil record that humans survived other hominids with which they shared the planet at first. They seem to have hunted them to extinction, one of the talents we excel at. The great apes were not such a threat and survived in remote forests, but they too are enslaved by us and gradually destroyed. It is all in evolutionary theory but intelligence allows us to know it and do something different, on purpose. Chimpanzees are no threat to us, let us leave them be.

Communication and Culture

Rodriguez, like most theologians, is unable to keep within the bounds of his own competence. He tells us that communication is ontological not informational. He snaps out a series of assertions with not a sign of justification, other than that each one seems to have been meant to justify the others.

• It is to let us know where we are in the world.
• It precedes and exceeds any understanding or information of the world.
• We exist in relation to the world and this relation recursively shapes us.
• We are never divorced from the world.
• To be human is to be intertwined with the world and to be always relating with the world.
• Communication is fundamentally a relational rather than an informational phenomenon.
• We are humanized through communication.
• Consequently, cultures too are ontological rather than informational in origin.
• Cultures exist within us and through us.

Some of these statements are true but this whole series simply does not hold together as an argument as it is meant to. They are divorced statements, true in themselves but not cohering together or answering the question. It betrays the fact that Rodriguez in common with theologians generally does not understand change. Motion baffles them. They think in terms of stasis, and simply cannot follow the idea of evolution. Communication cannot have had anything to do, at its simplest level, with letting the organism know where it was in the world. And, if it did, why is that not information? All of that about being intertwined with the world is plain enough but cannot be understood by theologians simply in terms of Nature, as it should be. Finally, why does all this apply only to humans? What this man is trying to do is establish that the supernatural is necessary. He cites Lee Thayer:

A culture… is comprised of all of those means by which we mystify ourselves. Mind, therefore, is something more than merely internalized culture, and culture is something more than merely externalized mind. That something more is that they are the same thing, and the trick of language, of communication, is to make them appear to us to be separate things, so that we can pretend to an innocence long lost to us, in the same way that the trick of language, of communication, is to make the knower and the known appear to us to be separate things, so that we can pretend to be innocent of both.

Thayer himself is obviously part of culture! Mind is the same thing as culture, but it is more than culture and culture is more than mind, all at the same time! You have to admit that for someone who can believe in the Trinity, this is a minor conundrum, but for the rest of us it is pure nonsense, and the trick of language is to persuade rabbits that they are gods-in-waiting by talking utter claptrap.

Rodriquez now defines culture in his own way so that it fits his theorem. “Cultures are born of our questing to bring meaning to bear on our inherent relation to the world.” The idea that cultures are just habits that are taught within a community is rejected because it is too animal, and a better definition excludes animals other than one, the Christian animal, and those of the same species with similar delusions. All of his earlier assertions are now repeated with culture being the key element. QED.

Therefore, to view culture as behavioral modification resulting from informational processes masks the spiritual dimension of our culturing and reduces the complexity of what being human means. After all, no one contends that primates forge complex understandings and relations with the world.

We get to where he wanted to get, to the supernatural, via purely spurious argumentation, and after it all, he shows that he has no idea at all of the complexity of animals. Animals are simple—humans are complex. Animals are not spiritual—humans are spiritual. This is the essence of his view. To be certain he adds that all cultures known to anthropologists posit a spiritual dimension.

Someone called Derek Bickerton says that the claim that we are just another species ignores the range as well as the power of human behavior. Bickerton thinks that animals only seek food and sex, rear and protecting young, resist predation, groom themselves, fight rivals, explore and defend territory, and play. Bickerton is pleased to boast that human beings do all these things! But they also “do math, tap dance, engage in commerce, build boats, play chess, invent novel artifacts, drive vehicles, litigate, draw representationally, and do countless other things that no other species ever did.” He wants to know why there is not a continuum of behaviors, growing gradually from amoeba to human? “Why don’t chimpanzees build boats, why can’t orangutans tap dance?”

Bickerton is obviously not a scientific man and, from his simple mindedness, we can guess that he is a theologian. He betrays the pure anthropocentric arrogance that people like Stephen Gould try to warn against and seems oblivious to it. The argument is not that human beings are the same as other animals as Bickerton seems to think, or rather that animals are the same as us, or ought to be. His categorizarion of the abilities of animals is so puerile it requires no answer, but while humans can do math all right, they cannot in themselves communicate by sonar or sense magnetic lines of force and a million other things that animals can do that he failed in his blinkered piety to list.

Moreover, as we have seen, evolution depends upon animals filling ecological niches, and each ecological niche is dominated by a single animal. It seems assured that there is only one niche for an intelligent animal like human beings, and we have occupied that niche. That is why chimpanzees do not do what humans can do, and that is probably why chimpanzees have declined while human beings have exploded in numbers. It really would do some of these Christian cracked pots a bity of good to go to school and learn some science before they tell us what God thinks.

Rodriguez thinks it is our proclivity and capacity for creating meaning and our ability to forge complex relations with the world that make us uniquely human. What he is getting at is nothing to do with the real world but the world inside his head. He wants to know how to deal with the “rich mystical schemes of the world that all peoples develop,” to explain “the universality of spirituality,” to ensure that we continue to seek a relation with a nonphysical world. He is, in short, worried that new outlooks will reject the ancient but empty misconceptions of religion.

The only thing that Christian theologians are good at is coining peculiar new words that are unnecessary and nobody understands. Rodriguez likes the word “narrativity,” which sounds like a Somerset way of pronouncing “nativity” but it is not. Rodriguez is not interested in questions like, “What is the origin of language?” Nor is the continuity of primates and humanity important. Complexity of the human condition is what is important to Rodriguez, and that means “narrativity—our capacity to construct deep and complex relations with the world.” It is plainly mistaken to think that we did not have to construct relations with the world because we had them naturally by being born into it. It is one of those things that theologians discover, then we all worry about because we had not been constructing vigorously enough. What we really have to do is to get away from the misinformation fed us by theologians and begin to notice that we have these natural relationships. In some cases they have been weakened by various types of patriarchal clergy sending us off into dead ends, so we need to rediscover them, but if we have to construct them, we cannot have had them in the first place and so cannot have been part of Nature. Anyway, nobody need take any notice of a man talking about language who cannot coin the word “intertwinedness” properly.

Rodriguez proposes an exciting sounding agenda for theological change but it turns out to be the same old tired transcendental god. Howells wants us to be panentheists to save old Yehouah. Gould rightly contends that our unwillingness to accept our primate origins is about ego. It is, but not any human ego in general, the human arrogance that patriarchy has fed us in telling us we have God’s authority to be the steward over Nature. By rejecting it and turning to Nature all of this tortuous nonsense can be avoided. Nature is not our enemy. We are the first animals on earth, so far as we are certain, to know that we are Nature’s intelligence if we choose. Let’s do it, and leave the real chimpanzees with their theological bananas!

Comment from Amardo Rodriguez

Greetings Shirlie and warmest regards. Your thoughts on my article made for interesting reading, but you badly misrepresented my stance. I will be brief as I cannot type at all.

First, I am absolutely no theolgian, and definitely no christian either. Second, my concern is with the complexity of the human condition because I believe that hierarchy and patriarchy find origin and legitimacy in simple conceptions of what being human means. This argument is developed in my first book, “On Matters of Liberation (I): The Case Against Hierarchy” (2001). Third, I was not trying to say anything at all about theology in the paper, especially proposing an agenda for theological change. I was merely trying to argue that any new theology—one that undermines the status quo—must begin with a more complex understanding of the human condition. Anything less would make for a reactionary theology. Finally, it was unfortunate to watch you invoke such patriarchal language: “Anyway, nobody need to take any notice of a man takling [sic] about language who cannot coin the word ‘intertwinedness“ properly.” Of course, I would be more than willing to respond fully to your claims if we can find a proper forum.

From Saviour Shirlie

Thanks for your e-mail. I will add this note to the bottom of the article so that any readers will be able to see that you think you have been misrepresented.

I note that you deny being a Christian or a theologian, but you chose to write in an apparently Christian journal, and you sound as though you are both. It does not matter to me that you are not strictly a theologian or a Christian because I am arguing against what you say, not against your status or reputation. I also could only argue about what you said where I read it, and not in any other books that you might have written that were more clearly expressed.

I was merely trying to argue that any new theology—one that undermines the status quo—must begin with a more complex understanding of the human condition. Anything less would make for a reactionary theology.

Few would disagree, and I did say that much of what you said was desirable we agree with, but either you were not being clear or you were playing both ends against the middle, as we say, perhaps to make your paper seem acceptable to the editor, whence my criticisms.

Well, I am probably not much better at typing than you, but when I do get up a reasonable pace, I often transpose letters or hit wrong keys, but I do not have proofreaders and editorial staff to correct me. In a published journal, I assume you had these benefits, whence my pointed remark. What was on your page must have been meant to be there and was not simply a typo! I liked your joke, though, and have corrected the error (talking not takling!).

Anyway, thanks for writing. If you think you do have something to say that might be relevant or even of interest to Adelphiasophists, I would be glad to put it on our pages. No fee, though! And keep it simple for we simple folk!

Amardo Rodriguez has submitted this interesting article about the emergence of speech by Emily Eakins in the NY Times, 18 May.

Michael C Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in a new book, From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language (Princeton Univerity Press), defends the “gestural theory,” that early humans jabbered away with their hands long before they spoke.

Where language comes from remains one of human evolution’s enduring puzzles. Corballis proposes that human ancestors made the switch from gestures to speech quite recently—around 50,000 years ago, a mere yesterday in evolutionary terms. Corballis believes that language itself, and the sophisticated mental capacities necessary to produce it, are far older.

The common ancestor of five or six million years ago would have been utterly incapable of a telephone conversation but would have been able to make voluntary movements of the hands and face that could at least serve as a platform upon which to build a language, Grammatical language may well have begun to emerge around two million years ago but would at first have been primarily gestural, though no doubt punctuated with grunts and other vocal cries that were at first largely involuntary and emotional.

It sounds plausible enough. All you have to do is look around to see how much hand-waving still accompanies human communication today—even people on cell phones do it. But Corballis has yet to convince many linguists of the theory’s merits

Ray Jackendoff, a professor of linguistics at Brandeis University said:

He’s not a linguist, and I think he doesn’t appreciate the sophistication of grammatical organization. I never saw any reason one way or the other to say that language started gesturally rather than vocally. If it started in the gestural modality, you still have to explain how in switching to that vocal modality there’s this terrific adaptation.”

Here, of course, the fossil record is of little help. As Jackendoff put it:

The problem of talking about the evolution of language in any detail is that there is no evidence. It’s pure speculation.

That hasn’t stopped scholars from pursuing all manner of theories—or engaging in charged debate. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all discussion of the evolution of language—presumably in order to keep tempers in check. A few years later, Charles Darwin ventured that human speech may have evolved from animal cries, a notion that was famously derided by his opponents as the “bow-wow” theory. The French philosopher Abbé Étienne de Condillac, whom Corballis credits with being the first gestural theorist, took a more strategic tack: when he presented his theory in 1746, he delivered it in the form of a fable so as not to arouse the ire of the Catholic Church. In those days, the official wisdom was that language came from God.

In recent decades, resistance to the origins question has come less from clerics than from cutting-edge linguists and biologists. Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor whose ideas have dominated the field for more than 40 years, has often been accused of depicting language as a trait so remarkable that natural selection is virtually helpless to explain it.

Chomsky’s celebrated theory of Universal Grammar supposes that human languages share an underlying set of rules that are innate rather than learned. But some readers of his work have taken him to mean that the capacity for language arose all at once rather than incrementally, the product of what one critic derisively termed “the cognitive equivalent to the Big Bang.”

Lately, however, Darwinian accounts of language have begun to proliferate, buoyed by new research on primate communication and human sign language as well as the more general scholarly vogue for evolutionary theory. In his 1994 best seller, “The Language Instinct,” the MIT professor Steven Pinker eloquently defended the idea that language evolved by natural selection, though he conceded that “the first steps toward language are a mystery.” If forced to speculate, he added, he would be inclined to bet on primate calls rather than gestures as a likely precurser to speech.

Pinker’s book seems to have opened a floodgate of possibilities. In 1996, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that language had evolved from primate grooming behavior. Among apes and monkeys, physical contact—tickling, scratching and picking at each other’s lice—functions as social glue, establishing hierarchies and alliances and communicating empathy or remorse. But back-scratching a whole band of baboons takes time. As early hominid populations expanded, Mr Dunbar theorizes, speech simply became the more efficient option—think of it as a kind of group massage.

More recently, Peter MacNeilage and Barbara Davis, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, have developed an “ingestive theory,” which links the evolution of speech to the movements the mouth makes while chewing. “The mouth closes and opens in chewing just as it closes for consonants and opens for vowels,” Mr MacNeilage explained in a telephone interview

Meanwhile, Michael Arbib, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, is working on a variant of the gestural theory based on the discovery of similarities in the way human brains recognize language and monkey brains recognize gestures.

“The whole field is not settled,” said William Calvin, a neurobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose own theory is that language evolved from the rapid mental reflexes required to, say, throw a spear at a running mammoth. “Everybody’s got a theory.”

Corballis says evidence to support the gestural theory is growing. Researchers now know that sign languages are as grammatically sophisticated as spoken ones. Moreover, both speech and signing depend on the left side of the brain—the same side that happens to control most people’s dominant hand, the right one.

From an evolutionary standpoint, Corballis argues, the gestural theory has several advantages. For one thing, it would help explain why chimpanzees—mankind’s close cousins—are adept at learning forms of sign language and notorious failures when it comes to imitating human speech or even controlling their own cries.

The upright posture adopted by early hominids—humans’ apelike ancestors—as long as two million years ago would have facilitated hand-based communication. “Bipedalism encouraged manual gesturing,” Corballis said in a talk at a recent Harvard University conference on language and evolution.

He hinted that gestural theory could clear up another mystery about this period as well: why the stone tools of these early hominids show little evolution for almost two million years, despite increases in brain size. What if these bipedal creatures were so caught up in five-fingered chit-chat that it got in the way of their tool making? In the 1970’s, one anthropologist went so far as to suggest that the reason humans evolved unpigmented palms—unlike other primates—is so their hand signals would show up better around the campfire at night.

That leaves the sticky questions of why and when these hypothetical skilful signers bothered to switch to speech. For a while, Corballis speculates, they probably used a mix of both. Then, about 50,000 years ago, there was a momentous change: an explosion of technology, cave art, textiles and even musical instruments. Corballis’s interpretation? Freed from the task of communicating, hominid hands were finally able to get down to the real toil of creating civilization.

But his most provocative idea is that human ancestors stopped gesturing and started talking not because their brains underwent a sudden mutation—a cognitive Big Bang—but rather because it seemed to some Homo sapiens at the time like a good idea. He called the advent of autonomous speech a “cultural invention,” like writing, and one that “may have occurred long after it became possible.”

And once speech caught on, he argues, it gave Homo sapiens a decisive advantage over less verbal rivals, including Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, whose lines eventually died out. “We talked them out of existence.”

The gestural theory makes for a captivating story. Yet like so many other theories, it may turn out to be little more than that. The question of where language comes from may simply be unanswerable, said Richard Lewontin, a professor of biology at Harvard.

If you don’t have a closely related species with a similar trait you have the problem of novelty, and what you and I are doing right now, no bonobo or chimpanzee will ever do.

Chomsky agreed:

This task intrigues people because it’s about us, but that doesn’t make it a scientific question. It may be important for us to know where we came from, but if we can’t answer that question scientifically, we can’t answer it. If you want to tell stories, well then, tell stories.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/18/arts/18GEST.html?ex=1022746569&ei=1&en=83e532e95a541526

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