Page 196 - A Historical Lie: The Stone Age

A HISTORICAL LIE: THE STONE AGE

at the heart of language evolution. 69
All languages on Earth are complex, and not even evolutionists
are able to imagine how such complexity could have been acquired
gradually. According to the evolutionist biologist Richard Dawkins,
all languages—even the tribal ones regarded as most primitive—are
highly complex:
My clear example is language. Nobody knows how it began . . .
Equally obscure is the origin of semantics; of words and their meaning
. . . all the thousands of languages in the world are very complex. I am
biased towards thinking it was gradual, but it is not quite obvious that
it had to be. Some people think it began suddenly, more or less in-
vented by a single genius in a particular place at a particular time. 70
Two evolutionist brain researchers, W.K. Williams and J.
Wakefield of Arizona State University, say this on the subject:
Despite the lack of evidence for intermediate stages in linguistic evo-
lution, the alternatives are hard to accept. If some species-specific
characteristic did not evolve in piecemeal fashion, then there would
seem to be only two ways to explain its appearance. Either it was put
in place by some still-undiscovered force, perhaps through divine in-
tervention, or it was the result of some relatively abrupt change in the
development of the species, perhaps some sort of spontaneous and
widespread mutation . . . but the fortuitous nature of such a happen-
stance mutation makes that explanation seem suspect. As has been
pointed out (Pinker and Bloom, 1990), the chances against a mutation
resulting in a system as complex and apparently so ideally suited to its
task as is language are staggeringly high. 71
Professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky comments on the com-
plexity of the ability to speak:
I've said nothing so far about the production of language. The reason
is that there is little to say of any interest. Apart from peripheral as-

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