Animals communicate but not with language. Where did language come from and why do we humans all use it? Evolution-based answers are restricted to options that leave out a Creator, even when evidence points right to Him. Conventional researchers have long grasped at any skinny straw that might bolster the belief that language evolved. The latest such straw seems skinnier than ever, and it comes with an inadvertent admission of a creation-friendly answer.
A team of researchers from mostly European universities found a “correspondence between human and chimpanzee face-to-face communication.”1 Their research was published in Current Biology.2 Chimps and many other animals take turns when exchanging gestures. We humans, too, take turns when we talk. This team discovered that the short moments between turns last just about as long between chimps and humans.
So far, so good, but does this close the gap between chimps’ non-language and human language? Not at all, which may be why senior author Catherine Hobaiter of the University of St. Andrews, UK, told EurekAlert!, “We still don’t know when these conversational structures evolved, or why!”1 What keeps them from asking whether or not languages evolved at all?
Language is a huge hurdle for naturalistic dogma. Languages match symbols with specific meanings and arrange those symbols according to a conventional set of rules (syntax) that includes a grammar. Evolution supposedly proceeds bit by bit, but language requires all three bits to come preintegrated: symbols, meanings, and syntax. Language encoded within DNA was such clear evidence of a divine designer that it convinced the once hard-boiled atheist Antony Flew to do an about-face.3
The chimp study’s lead author Gal Badihi told EurekAlert!, “It shows that other social species don’t need language to engage in close-range communicative exchanges with quick response time.”1 For all we know, similarities in response time between animal gestures and human expressions could be a function of the similar speed that the shared biology of our nerves dictate. In other words, such a similarity could have nothing to do with evolution or origins, just biophysics.
Meanwhile, the admission that chimps “don’t need language” is clear. Chimps don’t use language like people do. Why? Finding our origins in Genesis demonstrates that we need language for relationship with each other and with our Creator. After all, He used language to tell us things like “whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.”4 This study of chimp gesture timing ends up reaffirming how peculiar to people language is and how that peculiarity suggests our Creator wants to chat.
References
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“Chimpanzees Gesture Back and Forth Quickly Like in Human Conversations,” EurekAlert!, July 22, 2024, https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases
/1051557. - Gal Badihi et al., “Chimpanzee Gestural Exchanges Share Temporal Structure with Human Language,” Current Biology 34, no. 14 (2024), R663–R674.
- Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2007), 129. 4, Joel 2:32.
* Dr. Brian Thomas is a research scientist at the Institute for Creation Research and earned his Ph.D. in paleobiochemistry from the University of Liverpool.
