Confronting Friends and Family

[Hovik]

Viable is the wrong word.

It is not less anything, Hovik. It is meant to be used within the scope of your science. You realize that other scientists use a less exclusive definition? A biologist is much less likely to go all, "We're going to apply all of these criteria to language that only apply to humans, thus making it an exclusively human behavior." Animals communicate using sounds and gestures that are specific to their species' or even their own groups. That is good enough for me and quite a few others. By necessity, you have to make more of language than the average bear or you would be out an educational endeavor, would you not? Well, the truth of the matter is that a doctor may look at a liver and see all of the things it does and is made up of, while a layman looks at it and sees a bloody wad of tissue. Both are right.

Language is an exclusively human behavior, though. Animals communicate using sounds and gestures, but sounds and gestures alone do not make up a language, only a system of communication. The very point is that the word language only ever applies to humans because language is, by its own definition, a human concept. I accept that there is a layman's definition of language that broadly includes all forms of communication between two livings things, but it's not what language is.

that isn't found in any other system of communication.

How do you know that? That is my point and a number of other people's points. Can you understand monkey? I've always found that it takes quite a bit of hubris to assume human superiority in any endeavor. Frankly, you're the first atheist I have ever seen cough up this argument. I thought it was strictly a creationist boast.

We know that it's not found in other systems of communication through empirical observation. Some linguists, biologists, and perhaps some anthropologists actually are capable of forming tests to ascertain exactly what volume and content of information is being communicated between two animals. We can analyze the frequency and distribution of sounds and gestures just like we do in languages we've never previously encountered or translated to determine whether or not they're being used in a complex fashion. The end result is typically, no, they are not being used in a fashion that would meet the criteria of language.

By the way, there's nothing creationist to say that humans are better than other animals at certain things. Other animals are certainly better than us at plenty of things. It's not hubris to recognize that we're the best endurance walkers and runners on the planet. It's definitely not hubris to recognize that humans are cognitively more advanced than other animals in many respects, and that also includes our communication system--our language. Note, however, that "more advanced" doesn't necessitate "better," it simply means that it's better adapted for its function. Other animals don't need to communicate in the same way humans do; therefore, they don't.