Ah.  Myself, I'm still amazed that people can look at, say, the origin
of languages, and say we got it from imitating animals, or from a need
to "socialize", or something else equally inane and unlikely.

Need to sociallize? I don't doubt that something like it happened. Why?

Because humans are both _built_ and _wired_ to speak!

Humans are unique in that we're one of the few vertabrates that choke.
Other creatures are able to eat and breathe at the same time dispite the
fact that all of our trachea and nasal passages cross our mouth and
esophagous. In most vertabrates, this crossing is kept as short as
possible. In fact, almost every vertabrate has the opening for the nasal
passage directly over the trachea such that the trachea can reach up and
seal off, and thus forming two practically isolated pathes for air and
food. Horses are able to drink and breathe at the same time.

Not us.

Our trachea is lower down our throat, and the entrance to our nasal
passages is directly above the oral passage. When we swallow food, the food
has to travel quite a distance. We are therefore at increased risk of
choking than our ancestors. These sort of defects get weeded out of a
population very quickly unless they give the animal that has it an edge.
And there is only ONE justification for this adaptation...

Speech.

Speech is _so_ important that building a larynx for speech is worth the
increased risk of choking. Being able to communicate complex ideas is
better than a drastically reduced risk of choking. And since evolution
doesn't plan ahead, speech must've started around the same time as this
adaptation.

That's the built part.

Now here's the wired part...

All languages are fiendishly complex. However, all languages are complex in
much the same ways. Noam Chomsky showed in his research that languages very
similar to each other. What on the surface seems like very different ways
of speaking, there are fixed and universally obeyed rules that every human
language follows.

Language is also unlike any skill; the rules of languages are much more
complex than the rules of algebra, yet children master their first language
long before they master basic arithmetic. There are mistakes that children
beginning to speak make that wouldn't be mistakes in other languages, and
mistakes that they should logically make that not one child has committed.

The brain has two areas dedicated to speech processing, Broche's area and
Wernicker's area. Strokes that knock out Broche's area impair the person's
ability to understand speech, but not his ability to think or communicate
his thoughts. Likewise, damage to Wernicker's area imairs speech production
but not understanding or thinking. Two areas dedicated to the understanding
and synthesis of speech. That is an adaptation.

Finally, there are cases where identical twins have invented their own
unique language which are, on the outset, very sophisticated. Considering
the arbitrariness of sound and meaning, it's very likely that languages
_can_ spring up this way spontaneously, and likely did a million years ago.

Sorry to shoot down your arguments, but we humans are BORN to speak.

 Sorry
folks, languages *simplify* over time.

It depends. Languages _evolve_ to fit the need of the culture. Whether
languages get complex or complicated depends on the circumstances. The
Inuit language is adapted to life in the arctic, not for the modern world.
The 200+ "words" (actually, it's heavily affixed) for snow is neccessary
for survival, so it's good for talking about snow. It's not so good at
talking about automobiles, however. Conditions in a high-tech world favor
simplicity in grammar over complexity in lexicon.

 Just look at Chinese.  It used
to be polysyllabic and had a complex grammar.  Now it's monosyllabic and
with few (some might say zero) rules of grammar to speak of.

Ohhhhh, no. Chinese has LOTS of rules for grammar, and is FAR from
monosyllabic. Both of your assertions are myths. I've seen Chinese grammars
and they are comparable to English grammars. As for the accusation of
"monosyllabic", the monosyllables are RARELY spoken alone. A fairly simple
concept like "meat" is rendered: "shiyong roulei", "shizhi", and "yaodian".
A single, monosyllabic word in Chinese is a rare thing. The discrete
Chinese characters disguise the language's true complexity.

 The less
advanced the culture, the less quickly their language tends to simplify
over time.  One of the Bantu languages spoken by primitives in Africa
has 26 different noun types.  26!

Actually, all those different "noun types" are actually _affixes_ which
modify the meaning of the nouns, and there are only a few sets of them.
Same with Inuit (sp?). The noun-formation rules are actually very
straightforward. In many ways, they're much simpler than English. Many of
the Bantu languages are rated level one, the simplest and easiest to learn
languages.

 Romance languages, for comparison,
have three:  masculine, feminine, and neuter.

Romance languages are usually level two. A language compensates for
complexity of derivation for complexity of syntax and lexicon.

English, which has NO gender, is rated as a LEVEL FOUR language in terms of
complexity and learnability. This is the highest complexity that a language
can score, and this level is usually reserved for those languages written
in a different script.

 The Tower of Babel was
the way it happened, folks.

Nah, this stuff predates the Babel Tower. Language evolved before
agriculture. You need agriculture to produce enough food to stay in one
place long enough to build towers.

The Bible runs into trouble with history and physical reality because it's
a religious book, not a historical chronicle or physics article.

Take hell. Now, either hell is A) not hot, or B) there's no physicists in hell.

Reasoning:

Hell is described as having "pools of brimstone". In order to have pools of
brimstone, there must be temperature differences in hell. Otherwise, the
pools would solidify, or all the sulphur would melt into this one big pool.
Temperature differences mean that you can use the flow of heat to drive an
engine to get energy.

ie: Air conditioning. :)

And my point is, these same people will look at a miracle of healing,
and call it magic.  *sigh*

...and other people will ask those two groups, "What miracle/magic?"

There is a difference between thinking and believing. I've learned the
difference. I don't THINK that miracles occur, but I do BELIEVE that
amazing things can happen. ;)


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