Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
a . Because we have language, we have modern technology, culture, art and scientific inquiry. We have the ability to ask questions such as, Why is language unique to humans? Cristine Kenneally, “What Makes Language Distinctly Human?” Scientific American, Vol. 319, September 2018, p. 56.
The article goes on to explain that the question, “How did languages evolve?” has been banned in many societies and academic circles since the 1870s, because it could not be answered, and presumably was an embarrassment to evolutionists.
b . G. F. Marcus et al., “Rule Learning by Seven-Month-Old Infants,” Science, Vol. 283, 1 January 1999, pp. 77–80.
c . Arthur Custance, Genesis and Early Man (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1975), pp. 250–271.
u “Nobody knows how [language] began. There doesn’t seem to be anything like syntax in non-human animals and it is hard to imagine evolutionary forerunners of it.” Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998), p. 294.
d . “Projects devoted to teaching chimpanzees and gorillas to use language have shown that these apes can learn vocabularies of visual symbols. There is no evidence, however, that apes can combine such symbols in order to create new meanings. The function of the symbols of an ape’s vocabulary appears to be not so much to identify things or to convey information as it is to satisfy a demand that it use that symbol in order to obtain some reward.” H. S. Terrance et al., “Can an Ape Create a Sentence?” Science, Vol. 206, 23 November 1979, p. 900.
u “... human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.” Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (Chicago: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), p. 59.
e . “No languageless community has ever been found.” Jean Aitchison, The Atlas of Languages (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1996), p. 10.
u “There is no reason to suppose that the ‘gaps’ [in language development between apes and man] are bridgeable.” Chomsky, p. 60.
f . “... [concerning imitation, not language] only humans can lose one modality (e.g., hearing) and make up for this deficit by communicating with complete competence in a different modality (i.e., signing).” Marc D. Hauser et al., “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” Science, Vol. 298, 22 November 2002, p. 1575.
g . David C. C. Watson, The Great Brain Robbery (Chicago: Moody Press, 1976), pp. 83–89.
u George Gaylord Simpson acknowledged the vast gulf that separates animal communication and human languages. Although he recognized the apparent pattern of language development from complex to simple, he could not digest it. He simply wrote, “Yet it is incredible that the first language could have been the most complex.” He then shifted to a new subject. George Gaylord Simpson, Biology and Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969), p. 116.
u “Many other attempts have been made to determine the evolutionary origin of language, and all have failed. ... Even the peoples with least complex cultures have highly sophisticated languages, with complex grammar and large vocabularies, capable of naming and discussing anything that occurs in the sphere occupied by their speakers. ... The oldest language that can reasonably be reconstructed is already modern, sophisticated, complete from an evolutionary point of view.” George Gaylord Simpson, “The Biological Nature of Man,” Science, Vol. 152, 22 April 1966, p. 477.
u “The evolution of language, at least within the historical period, is a story of progressive simplification.” Albert C. Baugh, A History of the English Language, 2nd edition (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1957), p. 10.
u “The so-called primitive languages can throw no light on language origins, since most of them are actually more complicated in grammar than the tongues spoken by civilized peoples.” Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 9.
h . “It was Charles Darwin who first linked the evolution of languages to biology. In The Descent of Man (1871), he wrote, ‘the formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.’ But linguists cringe at the idea that evolution might transform simple languages into complex ones. Today it is believed that no language is, in any basic way, ‘prior’ to any other, living or dead. Language alters even as we speak it, but it neither improves nor degenerates.” Philip E. Ross, “Hard Words,” Scientific American, Vol. 264, April 1991, p. 144.
u “Noam Chomsky ... has firmly established his point that grammar, and in particular syntax, is innate. Interested linguistics people ... are busily speculating on how the language function could have evolved ... Derek Bickerton (Univ. Hawaii) insists that this faculty must have come into being all at once.” John Maddox, “The Price of Language?” Nature, Vol. 388, 31 July 1997, p. 424.