Pharyngula::Why is it called biblical literalism?

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Friday, June 03, 2005

Why is it called biblical literalism?

PZ Myers • 55 Comments (last page)

How nice—having an open thread overnight provided me with some entertaining reading this morning!

Henrik Aasted Sørensen mentioned this fascinating description of a creationist comic book—it has an account of evil angels leading the dinosaurs on a last-minute assault on Noah's Ark, and announces that 'THIS EVENT IS NOT A FABLE AND IS NOT A "MYTH"…IT IS VERIFIABLE SCIENTIFIC FACT!' It looks like a fun story, but what might the evidence for this be?

The fossil remains of numerous dinosaurs have been found with their heads and necks arched upwards, as if in their death throes they were straining to to keep their heads above water!

Wow. I've seen lots of dead birds with their necks arched in that same way, and in the deserts of Utah and Eastern Washington I've found deer and antelope skeletons in the same pose. I'd always thought that it was because when neck ligaments dried, they tended to pull the head back. I guess instead they must have all drowned.

The author also throws in the old story that the Chinese character for "boat" is verification of the Noah's Ark myth: a story that has been debunked, but still gets wafted around in creationist circles.

The description says that the book can't be bought anymore, but I discovered that this is not true. The author, Jim Pinkoski, has a website and sells the book and many others for the low, low price of $4.95. I had to order a copy to add to my collection. I also ordered the one that gives the Christian interpretation of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which shouldn't be too much of a stretch at all.

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Comments:

#27093: Mutant Cat — 06/03 at 12:18 PM
Does this mean that dinosaurs were actually Satan in physical form? That's the message I'm getting from his 'toons.

#27094: Ken Cope — 06/03 at 12:19 PM
Now I'm wondering what other words I take for granted that are also tainted with christianism.

Many many given names, sodomy, onanism...

#27102: — 06/03 at 12:42 PM
Oh dear, someone mentioned cryptozoology. I have come to a greater realisation this year of just how weird humans are, in part due to reading of some professor in the USA who wrote apparently wrote the definitive critique of velikovskys books, then later on claimed that there was good evidence for the Loch Ness monster that scientists were ignoring. Speaking as a Scottish Scientist, I am not aware of any scientific evidence for Nessie, in part because if it did exist, the tourist trade would be shouting it from the rooftops.

#27106: Alon Levy — 06/03 at 01:02 PM
I'm not a trained linguist either, but I've read a lot of material about linguistcs on various websites, including everything related to languages on Zompist.

The reason mama and papa became mater and pater in Proto-Indo-European is that PIE had a kinship suffix -ter, preserved in English mother, father, brother, and daughter.

Babytalk can in fact become acceptable language, as witnessed by the use of the words mama and papa by adults in English even though they couldn't come directly from any language.

Further, the words mama and papa have global spread; the Swahili words for mother and father are mama and baba, the Malay word for father is bapa (but mother is emak), and the Turkish word for father is baba (but mother is anne). These two words are core vocabulary and hence are rarely borrowed and rarely change meanings, so the only explanation other than common descent, which contradicts other evidence, is parallel evolution via a mechanism such as babytalk.

#27109: — 06/03 at 01:20 PM
Indeed, in an anatomy class I once saw a girl argue with the professor that the skeleton was wrong, and that men had one fewer rib.

BTW, "Not tire tracks, did, tread tracks. Obviously God didn't tell Noah to build a wussy rowboat- the Ark was an amphibious assault vehicle, and anything that didn't drown got run over." is hilarious.

#27110: Thomas Wilburn — 06/03 at 01:20 PM
That's a very good argument. However, if they're all descended from infant sounds, why is the M being consistently chosen as mother, and a plosive consistent for father?

<blockquote>Babytalk can in fact become acceptable language, as witnessed by the use of the words mama and papa by adults in English even though they couldn't come directly from any language.</blockquote

I think this is weaker--they could certainly be imitations of babytalk by parents that have passed into English slang. They would sound similar because the parents would be listening for patterns similar to the words they already use.

I wish I could remember the relevant terms in Arabic. I'll have to look them up now. Awesome.

#27111: Thomas Wilburn — 06/03 at 01:22 PM
In passing: Not to slight either one of us, Alon, but I love the debate here. "I'm not a linguist," we both say, "but I play one on TV."

#27113: Thomas Wilburn — 06/03 at 01:27 PM
Very interesting: Arabic mother = ab, father = om. The consonant pattern is reversed.

I don't think that means anything one way or another on its own. But interesting.

#27114: coturnix — 06/03 at 01:31 PM
Korean: oma and opa
Hebrew: ima and aba
Serbo-Croatian: mama and tata

(all three mother first, father second)

#27116: Thomas Wilburn — 06/03 at 01:34 PM
Ahem.

Right. I guess I'm going to have to admit I'm wrong on this one. Thanks, guys.

#27119: — 06/03 at 01:46 PM

Has anyone looked around the cartoonists web site? He is ALL ABOUT the "late, great" Ron Wyatt...

Waitaminute, the guy who discovered Same Old Susan's dratted chariot wheels was Ron Wyatt. Fellah sure gets around a lot.

#27125: — 06/03 at 02:22 PM

Arabic mother = ab, father = om.

No, those are the wrong way round. In Arabic: mother = 'umm; father = 'ab.

I'm not great at Arabic (the excessive number of different s sounds got to me) but even I can remember some of it. Plus I checked with my book on Arabic and also quickly on the internet to confirm my recollection.

The baby-language mama issue was one topic discussed on a recent TV programme here. I can't recall the title though. I think it discussed the evolution of language in combination with biological evolution, using comparisons with other primates. It was certainly plausible, though the evidence was necessarily circumstantial since spoken sounds don't fossilise (just some aspects of the vocal tract do, along with developmental clues, plus derived languages and later written forms of course).

#27126: — 06/03 at 02:22 PM
The first phase of infant "speech" is babbling and starts at around 6 months. This is, unless the consensus has changed since I did a bit of linguistics at university, a distinct process from ordinary vocalisation and is much more a question of the baby "trying out" it's vocal chords than it is a question of imitating the parents. The range of phonemes babbled is reduced from adult speech and is largely common across cultures Imitation only comes later. Sounds resembling consonants /k/, /g/, and /d/ tend to be produced first, followed by /m/, /p/, /d/ and /n/. Because sounds used in later babbling tend to be used as the basis for early speech words, mama, papa and dada are very likely to be among the earliest words. And obviously, adults who know them as words are more likely to recognise such vocalisations as words. It's a bit of a feedback loop.

#27142: judgeMC — 06/03 at 03:50 PM
"ma" is the easist sound that a baby can replicate. It uses the fewest muscules and can be done accidentaly. It doesn't require use of the tounge to produce. The baby keeps repeating the sound when it gets positive feedback from the parent. "da" is the same thing requiring minimal use of the tounge and can be produced accidentally.

#27147: — 06/03 at 05:20 PM
'from the orthodox Christian perspective'

And what would that be? All Christian beliefs are heretical to each and every other Christian group. And none have any more basis for being correct.

#27159: — 06/03 at 07:40 PM
Obviously all dinosaurs suffered from stiff backs that got locked into position after straining for air. Backs so stiff they remained locked in positon after death when the body sank through the swirling flood waters. There is plenty of evidence for this. When dinosour bones first arrive in museums, they are often covered in a hard rock like substance, which is probably the result of severe dino arthritus.

#27163: — 06/03 at 09:07 PM
Hold on now. Both my children muttered "Dada" a month or more before they ever muttered the ever popular Ma. This of course led to a irreversable rift between my ex-wife and the children, leaving a single parent for most of my adult life. If she finds out it was "chance". a mere slip of an infantile tongue... Yikes!
(fortunately for me, she will never be able to navigate to this blog).

As for the attack dinosaurs, the only ones which would have been able to navigate to the ark and mount an attack would have been the swimmers, plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, etc.
Hmmm....
Oh wait... OK, I got it. The evil angels were so stupid, they convinced the LAND dinosaurs to do it. That's right... But the North American ones would have drowned in the Atlantic just trying to get to the Mid East. Hmmm... no, wait. How about this? The Angels forgot that the Ark floats, and....

#27172: — 06/03 at 10:33 PM
Here are some things you people might find fun:

Patriot University analyzed

The Ark, by Queen of Swords, a take on the Noah's Ark story. If that link takes you to the master directory of "Content" instead, then go to "Free Thoughts", then to "The Ark".

#27182: Alon Levy — 06/04 at 01:58 AM
I didn't mention Arabic because I thought the pattern was too different from ordinary mama/papa. In Hebrew, however, it's interesting that the older words are ab (now av) and em, and aba and ima are more recent, suggesting that the babytalk patterns got attached to the older words.

#27184: — 06/04 at 02:29 AM
Has anyone heard the theory that "mama" is derived from suckling motions? Sounds plausible to me; but then again I theorized that "ocelot" came from Latin "ocellatus" (refering to the eye-shaped spots), only to find out that it's from Nauatl "ocelotl" (meaning "ocelot").

Btw, thanks to Thomas Wilburn for the link to zompist. Our desire to find concordances and patterns everywhere has served us well, but can go haywire when presented with a large enough data base, such as a language. Especially when we're pushed by an agenda, such as religious belief.

PZ, of course I didn't make up the stuff about the thyroid cartilage. A little intelligent designer whispered it in my ear...

coturnix- in Viennese dialect, "oma" and "opa" are "grandma" and "grampa".

#27189: — 06/04 at 04:40 AM
Have a paper on the subject of mama and papa.

The older-word attachment has a simple cause: the process of parental overinterpretation of infant babbling repeats, over and over and over again. `mater' and `pater' are recognisably produced by this process.

#27191: Merlijn de Smit — 06/04 at 05:35 AM
A propos "mama" and "papa", there was this dreadful item on the New Scientist web section about a year ago claiming that these were loanwords from the Neanderthals: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6188

The consonantism does vary though from language to language - in Georgian, you have "mama" for father, and "deda" for mother.

#27202: Alon Levy — 06/04 at 08:46 AM
The paper Nix linked to demonstrates that it's impossible for mama and papa to have a global common origin.

#27203: — 06/04 at 09:11 AM
I like this explanaition of God's creation. Maybe we should refer to it every time Creationists start their nonsense?

Trackback: Creative Creationists Tracked on: The Panda's Thumb (66.15.48.88) at 2005 06 04 15:28:52
The Ferrett has a description of an “interesting” graphic novel. The evil fallen angles stampede the dinosaurs toward Noah’s Ark, hoping to destroy it… . The flood waters drowned and killed the dinosaurs… . This event is not a fable...

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Friday, June 03, 2005

Why is it called biblical literalism?

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