Hi Carmel,
Yes, some of the book was slightly "creative" (hehe), but I found that his overall concept, of evolution occurring across very large numbers of intersecting "gradients", a very refreshing take on the theory. A lot (or in fact most) people in the world, even educated ones, think that evolution is something that "just happens" and that it happens suddenly and dramatically. What Dawkins emphasizes is that this is NOT so, and that there is no "goal" for evolution - there is only the "goal" of information trying it's best to survive.
I personally think that evolutionary gradients will become a very promising field of research in the near future - they make a lot of sense!
Another poster said:
1) You suggest that "the ancestors of humans had the same ability to communicate as modern apes" and that this ability has gradually developed into the thousands of human languages we have today. Would you then say that this gradual improvement also works over shorter perdiods of times - that is the "historical" periods of time that we know something about for sure (as opposed to the prehistorical ones, no written records, etc.)? For instance would you say that languages spoken four thousand years ago should be more complex or less complex than languages spoken today according to your theory?
This is an interesting question. We of course have no way of knowing how complex very ancient human languages were, purely because there was nobody around to record them, but logically, early human languages couldn't have been as complex as modern-day languages.
Even within all humans living today there is a massive disparity in vocabulary and complexity of language. What I mean is that a Nepalese Sherpa won't be able to write a doctoral thesis on particle physics.
However, I still don't see what all of this has to do with evolution. Evolution is not equal to language. Language is an entirely different thing, because it's shaped by conscious thought. People INVENT words.
2) There are thousands of languages all around the world. According to the evolutionary view most of them must have evolved for many thousands of years independently of one another - just like human races (take Australia and North Canada for instance). Would you then assume that some of them should be less developed or less complex than others because they have been shaped by different environmental factors?
Different vocabularies exist, yes. However, there has been a lot of work done by people like Chomsky in establishing a "universal grammer" in the human brain. Babies are adaptable at birth to any number of languages - in fact, parts of the hearing mechanism are simply unused. Babies are born as one-size-fits-all when it comes to language, but they soon adapt to the language around them. For example, Japanese babies lost the ability to distinguish L and R sounds at a very early age, and French babies can easily distinguish the three distinct R's of French, which babies from other language groups might find impossible. So there's a whole lot more going on there that we don't know about yet...
3) Please name some features that you think all human languages have in common and which make them different from "animal communication". In this way we will know what we are arguing about.
It's impossible to draw a definite line here. Coco the gorilla is capable of fairly complex sign language - she can tell her trainers she's sick, or that her leg hurts, and so forth. Probably the single most important part of human speech is the idea of "self", or "Me". However, it's been proven that dolphins can recognize themselves in mirrors, through experiments. So hard and fast rules are very difficult to make here. Once again, this is supported by the gradient theory, with animals being lower on the linguistic gradient than humans.
