Thinking and Talking

I don't remember ever reading anything about this, but common sense would seem to indicate that thinking had to come first. Otherwise, what would there be to talk about? I assume we're talking about language here because nonverbal sounds like laughing and crying usually expresses emotion rather than thought. Then there's body language which, if it's spontaneous, usually expresses an emotion, but body language can be learned and practiced deliberately, even deceptively. In that case, a certain amount of thought has to precede it. Laughing and crying can be done deliberately as well, but it takes some practice to make it sound convincing. I seem to remember seeing something on TV about how actors are able to produce this stuff on demand. If they want to cry, they just think of something sad, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the part they are playing at the moment.

Non-human animals certainly communicate with each other, but can their vocalizations be considered language? Some species are said to have an extensive "vocabulary", but that might just be a long list of different sounds that they make. At what point do we call it "language"? Some animal vocalizations appear to serve multiple purposes. I always thought that cars purr only when they are content, until the day I brought an injured cat to the vet. This cat had been run over by a car and was diagnosed with a broken pelvis. I doubt that he was happy about the situation, but he purred while the vet was examining him. I thought we would have to put him down, but the vet told us that, while cats do not usually respond favorably to medical intervention, they often get better on their own. This one made a complete spontaneous recovery and lived with us for years afterward.

I meant to answer Uncle Ken's point about intelligent design theory yesterday, but you know how that goes. While genetics seem to be governed by mathematical probability that borders on randomness, somebody must have ordained the laws of math and random chance in the first place. Or did they just fall out of the sky spontaneously as well? As for all those snippets of vestigial DNA, they might come in handy in the event of some kind of habitat disruption like climate change. Be that as it may, there is no way of knowing if the Intelligent Designer employs the same type of logic that we do. Just because something doesn't make sense to us doesn't mean that it might not make sense to Somebody who is much smarter than we are.