I have read many times that the development of the vocal chords is what sets man off from the rest of the animals. This comment assumes the present Darwinian canard that things just happen, nature just experiments around and when something like vocal chords accidentally happen, then, whoosh, a whole species evolves around it. Characteristics evolve in nature only when there is a need for them in nature. The mind didn't develop from the vocal chords, the vocal chords developed from the mind, and the reason we have more complex grunts than other animals is that we have a clearer process of comparison going on in our minds.
Last May, Tom Wolfe, that perceptive outer of cultural absurdities, among other books, he wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities, delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, much to the dismay of The Washington Post Critic. In the speech, he developed a rather unique theory of evolution.
He starts (this was only one section of an hour long talk): "My idol, Emile Zola published a novel entitled The Human Beast in 1888, just 29 years after Darwin's The Origin of Species broke the stunning news that Homo sapiens -- or Homo loquax, as I call him -- was not created by God in his own image but was precisely that, a beast, not different in any essential way from snakes with fangs or orangutans ... or kangaroos ... or the fang-proof mongoose. Darwin's doctrine, evolution, leapt from the pages of a scientific monograph into every level of society in Europe and America with sensational suddenness."
He goes on about this for several minutes, then states: "I love my man Zola. He's my idol. But the whole business exudes irony so rich, you can taste it. It tastes like marzipan. Here we have Darwin and his doctrine that in 1859 rocks Western man's very conception of himself. We have the most popular writer in the world in 1888, Zola, who can't wait to bring the doctrine alive on the page. We have the next five generations of educated people who have believed and believe to this day that, at bottom, evolution's primal animal urges rule our lives to the point where the fourth greatest pop music hit of 2001, You and Me, Baby by the Bloodhound Gang, proclaims, "You and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals./So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel" -- it's rich, rich, rich beyond belief."
He then says, evolutionists haven't the foggiest notion of when or how speech developed, but there seems to be a consensus it developed some 11,000 years ago, and he's not going to disagree. He then makes his major point: "Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech. As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, 'man reasoning,' but Homo loquax, 'man talking.' Speech gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool. Speech was a veritable nuclear weapon. It gave the human beast the powers of reason, complex memory, and long-term planning, eventually in the form of print and engineering plans. Speech gave him the power to enlarge his food supply at will through an artifice called farming. Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary, but also the evolution of animals."
So, Mr. Wolfe falls into a familiar trap. He says evolution died the day man learned to speak, then he justifies it using the Darwinian canard that speech led to everything else. He ends this segment with a very clever ploy, perhaps relevant to the religious nature of empirical science. He says that speech led to religion, and religion, over the next 11,000 years, produced civilization. In the short time since Darwin, evolution has done more to destroy religion that any other force in history.
To understand how speech works, we have to understand what the mind is and how it works. I dealt with what the mind is and how it works in columns 27 & 28-06, but I'll try and make this column as self-contained as possible. We have to form pictures of reality in our minds, and we have to store those pictures. We then have to have a way to recall those pictures in order to compare them with the picture of reality that we see. If we don't have any comparison for what we see, we are puzzled. Species evolution is a flawed concept created by a man ignorant of genetics that was cemented into reality in the face of evolution's long battle to defend itself from Church censorship. Like any religious belief, not to believe in species evolution is not to belief in evolution. There is no other path to the alter. Evolutionists that believe in species evolution never argue species evolution, they always fall back on the statement, if not evolution, what else?
I, of course, believe that evolution occurred over a relative short time as a result of the telluric flows set up in the Earth as it rotates in front of the sun, alternating the temperatures of night and day. These telluric flows occur because the Earth's crust is composed of different elements, and the potential differences of elements changes with temperature, establishing a continuous back and forth flow around which the atoms and molecules of atoms that became life organized themselves. Once life is established, it evolves characteristically, with groups of characteristics adapting to environmental conditions. This occurs in the context of a cooling planet, where gravity is a result of what matter is doing, cooling, rather than what it is. Evolution takes place in the context of a cooling planet with a lessening gravity field.
None of this has to be swallowed though to see a clear path of evolution, from animate, trees and shrubs, to ambulatory, creatures capable of moving purposively with in their environment to sentient, animals with a certain capacity for memory, to homo sapiens, animals that can examine the environment and then reshape it to its own purposes. All sentient matter can, to one degree or another, do this, but only homo sapiens have the ability to alter the vary nature of the environment, change its chemical content to meet its needs.
The vocal chords are the result of characteristic evolution. They are a characteristic that came into existence to satisfy some physical need. The question we need to address is, what need produced the characteristic of the vocal chords?
The definition of life in my view is quite simple, as is most everything else in nature. Life is the organization of atoms and molecules of atoms around electrical flows. As long as the electrical flows exist, life will exist. If the electrical flows stop, the atoms and molecules of atoms will start to disassociate themselves from one another and proceed elsewhere to become involved in something else. If the life is quite simple, an amoeba, then it will drift around seeking nourishment from the environment while attempting to avoid environments in which it can't exist. It needs no central center to coordinate its organization.
However, as life gets more complex, it involves more systems, or groupings of characteristics, and requires some sort of center that can coordinate the interactions between and among them. Thus, complexity brought forth the need for a brain, or central organizing center. Simple life requires little or no brain. In fact, entire systems as complex as a tree do not need a brain because there systems are programmed into their cells. They are self-organizing, but they can only obtain the food that is located where they are located, and they have no defenses against outside predators. It's only when animate matter evolves into ambulatory matter, matter that can move from one place to another, that it needs a more complex brain to coordinate the activities of what are now complex subsystems.
Life evolves not only in the context of a cooling planet with a lessening gravity, it evolves under one overriding principle, a basic principle of life that even Darwinian evolution recognizes. It evolves to survive. Survival in my context, however, does not mean survival of the fittest, it means evolution, being characteristic rather than species, evolves strategies that extend the survivability of life itself. Trees are dependent on the location in which they exist, which means the weather, thus my long-standing interest in weather. That is not a very survivable state for life itself. They obtain nourishment from what's where they are and when the forest fire approaches, they wait patiently to join it. Ambulatory matter is a different form of life, a form that advances the survivability of life itself.
If the food dries up in one place, ambulatory animate matter can move in the environment, go someplace else to find food. In the face of the inferno of a forest fire, ambulatory matter can flee to save itself. However, the brain that controls ambulatory matter has to have the ability to allow movement within the environment. If the deer has no ability to recognize the forest fire, it won't flee and will end up like the tree. The brain had to coordinate a whole set of subsystems that would allow the matter to which it is attached move purposively within the environment. First, it needs ways to sense the environment, subsystems involved with feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting, and overwhelmingly, sight. If the matter had no way to sense the external world, it would have no way to move within that world, so subsystems that could be used to transmit electrical information about external reality grouped together and the brain that is needed to coordinate them evolved.
This brain collects information that allows it to recognize patterns that form pictures of reality, store those patterns, and recall them for comparison with reality. If the comparison exists, the matter can move with confidence through the perils of reality. If there is no pattern to compare the pattern of reality with, the matter shuts down, quickly focusing on reality to see what's different, to see why the patterns don't match. It might be an element of smell, the smoke, or touch, heat, or crackling, burning brush, or even something as slight as a trembling coming through the limbs, an earthquake, but when the matter focuses on reality to see what it is about reality that has changed, it is probing other patterns to see if it can figure out what pattern applies. As soon as it finds one, it knows how to act.
This feature of the brain, the fact that the patterns from realty have to match the patterns from memory or the brain will stop functioning, bring the matter to a halt, is extremely important in the transition from sentient matter to homo sapiens. Mismatched patterns are a shock to the physical system, and therefore, something to avoid. Sentient animate matter does not form patterns of reality unless those patterns exist in reality, or reality suggests a pattern exists that is not apparent, in which case, the matter reacts to what it suspects reality is, an approaching fire, and flees. There is no need for sentient matter to create pictures of reality that do not exist in reality because it does not need to do so to survive.
However, life does. It is little use for the survivability of life if all life can do is flee the forest fire. What the survivability of life requires is matter that can put out the fire and replant the forest. This requires the ability to form patterns of reality that don't exist in reality, and then to change that reality to conform with the picture, see if the changed pattern of reality can actually exist in reality. This, of course, is technology.
Holding a pattern of reality in the face of opposing reality under normal evolutionary processes before Homo sapiens simply couldn't occur because it would shut the matter down. However, evolving the ability to hold patterns of reality that contradicted actual reality is a giant step forward in the evolutionary process of extending the survivability of life because it allowed matter to contemplate patterns of reality that didn't exist, and then proceed to see if they could exist. When matter cannot hold patterns of reality that disagree with reality, and here's the important point that deals with speech, there was little or nothing to communicate. Bees could do the bee dance to show direction and distance, and ambulatory animate matter could come up with all sort of ways to accomplish the limited communication it needed, just listen to crows talk to each other, but there was no need for speech, because speech is used to describe reality, and if the only pattern of reality matter can hold is the reality in front of it, then there's nothing to describe, and no reason for speech.
What sets Homo sapiens apart from other matter is its ability to hold patterns of reality that don't exist in reality. When it acquired this ability, it needed a way to communicate exactly what those patterns of reality were. This led to the evolution of the characteristic that we refer to as the vocal chord, to speech, then to writing, and then to technology. It is the ultimate evolutionary development to extend the survivability of life, because it makes possible its extension beyond even the life of the planet upon which it evolved.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com