Orangutan’s whistling and the study of evolution of speech
08 December 2008
The evolutionary presupposition is that all humans and animals have a common ancestor. Large amounts of research go into trying to blur the line so that instead of humans being built in the image and likeness of God, humans are nothing but animals that like to wear clothes. This idea pushes people to give animals human like attributes to rationalize their claims.
Bonnie, a 30 year old orangutan living at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. began whistling one day after hearing one of her caretakers whistling. Dr. Serge Wich from the Great Ape Trust said, “This is important because it provides a mechanism to explain documented between-population variation in sounds for wild orangutans. In addition, it counters a long-held assumption that non-human primates have fairly fixed sound repertoires that are not under voluntary control. Being able to learn new sounds and use these voluntarily are also two important aspects of human speech and these findings open up new avenues to study certain aspects of human speech evolution in our closest relatives.”
Animals have been trained for many years to mimic sounds and gestures of humans. Parrots telling you their name, and monkeys whistling do not prove they are evolving into humans. A whistling noise is produced by simply air moving through the mouth. Speech requires an intelligent source with premeditated meaning.
Years are spent teaching an ape to recognize shapes and symbols and they receive a treat for doing it correct. After years of training the ape can correctly match words to pictures. The researchers then make the audacious claim that this means they can understand speech. This is ridiculous. Trained recognition is a long way from intelligent thought. They are on that side of the cage. We are on this side.
Animal are animals, humans are humans. God has clearly given us the ability to communicate and we use that ability to worship Him. We have all been given rights endowed by our Creator, and we should not be treating animals the same as humans.
http://www.greatapetrust.org/media/releases/2008/nr_79a08.php
