Recovering Evangelicals #188 – Human evolution is just like the evolution of English
The questions “who was the first person to speak English?” and “who was the first human?” are equally ridiculous and unanswerable, and for the same reasons.
For many Christians, the many recent discoveries of our ancient hominid ancestors have raised uncomfortable questions. Some of them will cope with this by just trying to avoid any reports/discussions of these discoveries, or simply denying the data (“they’re all hoaxes”), or deciding to re-interpret or re-define the data (Answers-in-Genesis, for example, will simply re-define a new discovery as either human or ape … no intermediates are allowed). We’ve addressed these coping strategies in previous episodes.
Some other Christians will accept that humans and hominids have been evolving, but will still find it necessary to draw an arbitrary line in the sand, declaring humans on “this” side of the line as completely separate from any ancestral humans and hominids on “that” side of the line. For example, they might claim that, at some discrete point in time, God picked up a couple of those ancestral humans and gave them a massive upgrade, with new hardware and software (advanced cognitive abilities; a “soul”; the “image of God”), and then started a unique relationship with those newly created beings. But the scientific data that we have on hand — including genetics, bones, tools and art work — just do not reflect a sudden and dramatic change in the human line. It simply is not possible to claim that there was a “first human” or a first primal pair.
But many people find that hard to understand. They might insist that “there just had to have been a first human!?”
In this episode, we want to directly confront this claim using an excellent metaphor that everyone should find easy to understand: the evolution of language. More specifically, the evolution of English. We talked to an academic linguist — Dr. Gareth Roberts, at the University of Pennsylvania — about the history of the English language and the forces that drove changes in that language. The Old English that was spoken by King Alfred, the Venerable Bead, or Aethelstan [the 1st king of England]) gradually morphed into the Middle English used by Chaucer and Henry the 4th, which eventually became the “modern” English used by Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth. Dr. Roberts gave us a great example of that evolution: the skeptical listener should listen to the Lord’s Prayer spoken in the English of the 10th century, and then the 13th century, and then the 15th century!
Throughout this discussion, we tried to point out the similarities between the evolution of language and the evolution of biological life forms. New languages or new dialects are the same as new species. The new languages spoken by enslaved people combining parts of their home language with the language of their owners is equivalent to biological speciation through hybridization. Societal pressures on “proper” language are equivalent to sexual selection of genetic traits. Even complicated biological phenomena such as “ring species” and “founder effect” have their correlate in languages.
But the most important point that we wanted to leave with the audience is this: the question “who was the first person to speak English” is just as ridiculous — or impossible to answer — as the question “who was the first human” ….. and for all the exact same reasons.
As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …
Find more information about Dr. Gareth Roberts at his university faculty page and his research lab’s homepage.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out our collection of episodes on human evolution, or Luke’s book Standing On The Shoulders of Giants: Genesis and Human Origins.
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