have to already have a complex mind to explain how you got one. You also need language. Darwin spent a lot of time looking for animal analogues to human language. I think it fair to say that we are still yet to find anything like human language in any other type of animal. The “language gap” marks us off from other species. However tempted we may be to “narrow the gap” between animal and human, our evolutionary stories about language depend on the compression of the differences (and simultaneous exaggeration of similarities) between complex language and brutish grunts. Like an upside-down Thomas Aquinas, Darwin reasoned by analogy and anthropomorphism. To make his case he often ironed flat the differences between the human and non-human. He tended to describe human behaviours in terms of animal behaviours and animal behaviours in terms of human behaviours.5 But this tends to obscure the differences we are trying to explain: the difference between a grunt on the one hand, and a language capable of expressing a theory of evolution or a truth of mathematics on the other. As Roger Scruton observed in the course of an argument about the limits of Darwin’s explanations of human
See C. Darwin, The Descent of Man, chapter 3 and chapter 4. 5
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