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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
excusing bigotry

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
If we accept the view that homophobia is the outward expression of inner insecurities about one's sexuality or even tensions arising from unacknowledged (unacknowledgeable?) same sex attraction, is there any reason why the same logic and analysis shouldn't be applied here?

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
You may define the word as you wish.

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
Wiki gave more than one definition, as does most dictionaries, according to its use. You chose to go with one that fit what you are trying to convince me is true.

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
Since you insist on using your definition...

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
What is it about the newborn making sounds (crying, whimpering, ect) that is specifically human for communication?

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
"Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication."

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ORIGINAL: GotSteel
Here's another example hopefully it'll be a bit more helpful in cueing you in on what I'm talking about, language. It's natural for humans to speak languages. You can certainly take the position that oh say french is unnatural in that it's a human invention which needs to be taught however the predisposition of a certain portion of the brain and the existence of a language learning stage in human development would suggest that language is similarly natural to humans.

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ORIGINAL: GotSteel
I'm not excusing bigotry whether it's against homosexuals, members of various races, transsexuals or even against homophobes. I don't think the end justifies the means which is why the conversation actually started when you pulled out this line of bigoted propaganda and I called you on it:

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
If we accept the view that homophobia is the outward expression of inner insecurities about one's sexuality or even tensions arising from unacknowledged (unacknowledgeable?) same sex attraction, is there any reason why the same logic and analysis shouldn't be applied here?

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I'm not excusing bigotry whether it's against homosexuals, members of various races, transsexuals or even against homophobes. I don't think the end justifies the means which is why the conversation actually started when you pulled out this line of bigoted propaganda and I called you on it:

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
If we accept the view that homophobia is the outward expression of inner insecurities about one's sexuality or even tensions arising from unacknowledged (unacknowledgeable?) same sex attraction, is there any reason why the same logic and analysis shouldn't be applied here?

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
It seems this hissy fit relies on two claims: the first is that the standard psychological explanation for homophobia is “a line of bigoted propaganda” and the latter that “hate is natural”.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
When the claim that “hate is natural” was first advanced, my response was :
“"Hate is natural" is a cop-out used by people too cowardly to face up to their own flaws" (post 245) Despite GS's claims to the contrary, I have not altered this position and don’t intend to.

In this area, my experience is that people who use this claim do it to defend, reduce or excuse bigotry.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
So the idea that “hate is natural” carries a bit of baggage as any one who is involved in the area knows. People working in the area regard it as a cliché along the lines of “Some of my best friends are gay/Jewish/black/transgender …." Except it’s far more murderous. Other people fond of using this idea to rationalise their hate are just about any racist (eg white people are naturally superior to blacks) or sexist (men are naturally superior to women) and so on …. It’s not too much of a stretch to describe it as a kind of all-purpose bigot’s cliché.

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
What is it about the newborn making sounds (crying, whimpering, ect) that is specifically human for communication?

No no let's try again. You don't get to define my argument, kdsub doesn't get to define my argument, I'm the only one who get's to define MY argument.

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ORIGINAL: GotSteel
Here's another example hopefully it'll be a bit more helpful in cueing you in on what I'm talking about, language. It's natural for humans to speak languages. You can certainly take the position that oh say french is unnatural in that it's a human invention which needs to be taught however the predisposition of a certain portion of the brain and the existence of a language learning stage in human development would suggest that language is similarly natural to humans.

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
The drive to learn how to communicate is self-centered. But humans are not the only ones who can speak. Many species have the ability to communicate from the onset. What makes their attempts not a "human" attempt is the lack of grammar, syntax, recursion, and displacement... yet if these make their attempts "not human" then an infants attempts are also equally not human. Birds even have dialects.

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl

The instinct to communicate is there at birth, though the argument could be made that the drive to communicate is only there because of the Id's desire for gratification. The way we communicate is a learned process. The ability isnt there.

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Someone started the process. They taught each other a means for communication. I dont see this as instinctual... its still learned.

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Even focusing one's eyes takes a little while to learn, but we pick up that skill intuitively, based on instinct and hardwired ability.

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Actually, nobody started the process. There were kids around with a desire to communicate and no means to do so. Thus, the kids instinctively started communicating with each other, creating a language in the process. Nobody with knowledge of sign language was involved in that process. It is a language isolate, developed with no external influence beyond there being humans in a place with the desire to communicate with each other and no languages with which to do so.

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Before the 1970s, there was no deaf community in Nicaragua. Deaf people were largely isolated from each other, and used simple home sign systems and gesture ('mímicas') to communicate with their families and friends. The conditions necessary for a language to arise occurred in 1977, when a center for special education established a program initially attended by 50 young deaf children. The number of students at the school (in the Managua neighborhood of San Judas) grew to 100 by 1979, the year of the Sandinista revolution.

In 1980, a vocational school for adolescent deaf children was opened in the area of Managua called Villa Libertad. By 1983 there were over 400 deaf students enrolled in the two schools. Initially, the language program emphasized spoken Spanish and lipreading, and the use of signs by teachers was limited to fingerspelling (using simple signs to sign the alphabet). The program achieved little success, with most students failing to grasp the concept of Spanish words. However, while the children remained linguistically disconnected from their teachers, the schoolyard, the street, and the bus to and from school provided fertile ground for them to communicate with each other, and by combining gestures and elements of their home-sign systems, a pidgin-like form, and then a creole-like language rapidly emerged. They were creating their own language. This "first-stage" pidgin has been called Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense (LSN), and is still used by many of those who attended the school at this time.

Staff at the school, unaware of the development of this new language, saw the children's gesturing as mime, and as a failure to acquire Spanish. Unable to understand what the children were saying to each other, they asked for outside help, and in June 1986, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education contacted Judy Kegl, an American Sign Language linguist from MIT. As Kegl and other researchers began to analyze the language, they noticed that the young children had taken the pidgin-like form of the older children to a higher level of complexity, with verb agreement and other conventions of grammar. This more complex sign language is now known as Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN).

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Incidentally, you might want to read "The Language Instinct", in which prof. Pinker provides a better introduction for the layman than I could possibly provide through online posting. There is some dispute as to whether the instinct is a product of specific selection (Pinker's position) or an incidental benefit of other traits selected for (Chomsky's position), but that's rather secondary to the question at hand, namely whether the language facility is learned. The question has been resolved, and it's quite clearly an innate facility, not one that needs to be taught.

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Pinker, Chomsky and Piattelli-Palmarini, in rejecting a preadaptive or exaptational basis for the evolution of language in the visual or motor systems of the brain because it is impossible to see how such as a basis could accommodate the formalisms of transformational-generative grammar, government and binding, or principles and parameters, ignore the unwelcome possibility that there is something fundamentally wrong with the linguistic theories, not with the Darwinian process by which there can be conversion of function from an already existing complex neural system for perception or action to serve as the basis for speech and language function. Chomsky is left in the awkward position of being unable to conceive of a Darwinian origin for language even though he asserts that it must have a biological basis; this leads Pinker to propose a gradualistic account of language evolution as the product of a series of minimal genetic and language changes, which is implausible in accounting for the step-by-step accretion of the elements required for Chomskyan phrase-structure theory, and even less plausible to account for the development of other complex grammatical and lexical features of world languages. The way out of the impasse is to see the evolution of language as a system founded on, reflecting and expressing the pre-existing complexities of the perceptual and motor systems of the brain.

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl

A language gene? Like a cooking gene? Or a shopping gene? Or a bike riding gene?

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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery

A breathing gene? A heartbeat gene?



[I am *soooooo* glad I don't teach science in this day and age.]

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
Good, then you agree language is learned.

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Brain activity in the left-hemisphere language centers can be detected in infants as young as five days. Behavioral experiments have demonstrated that days- or weeks-old infants can distinguish the "melody" of their native language from the pitches and rhythms of other languages. They can assess the number of syllables in a word and perceive a change in speech sounds (such as ba versus ga), even when they hear different speakers.

Now new research shows that infants born to bilingual mothers possess, at birth, the ability to discriminate two languages. "Hearing two languages regularly during pregnancy puts infants on the road to bilingualism by birth," reports the Association for Psychological Science, announcing a study published online January 29.

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ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2009) — From their very first days, newborns' cries already bear the mark of the language their parents speak, reveals a new study published online in Current Biology. The findings suggest that infants begin picking up elements of what will be their first language in the womb, and certainly long before their first babble or coo.

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Even without such intrusions, the womb is not a silent place. Researchers who have inserted a hydrophone into the uterus of a pregnant woman have picked up a noise level "akin to the background noise in an apartment," according to DiPietro. Sounds include the whooshing of blood in the mother's vessels, the gurgling and rumbling of her stomach and intestines, as well as the tones of her voice filtered through tissues, bones, and fluid, and the voices of other people coming through the amniotic wall. Fifer has found that fetal heart rate slows when the mother is speaking, suggesting that the fetus not only hears and recognizes the sound, but is calmed by it.

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
A language gene?

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FOXP2 didn’t give us language all on its own. In our brains, it acts more like a foreman, handing out instructions to at least 84 target genes in the developing basal ganglia. Even this full crew of genes explains language only in part, because the ability to form words is just the beginning. Then comes the higher level of complexity: combining words according to rules of grammar to give them meaning.

Language is nearly endless in its forms. So the search for its behavioral fossils—genes associated with grammar and syntax—should keep scientists busy for decades to come.

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A mutation that appeared more than half a million years ago may have helped humans learn the complex muscle movements that are critical to speech and language.

The claim stems from the finding that mice genetically engineered to produce the human form of the gene, called FOXP2, learn more quickly than their normal counterparts.

..........

Faraneh Vargha-Khadem, a neuroscientist at University College London who has studied the KE family in which FOXP2 is mutated, thinks that the new findings could help explain the gene's role in perfecting the facial movements involved in speech.

But she does not see how changes in basic learning circuitry could explain how FOXP2 helps humans to automatically and effortlessly translate their thoughts into spoken language. “You are not deciding how you are going to move your muscles to form these sounds,” she says.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
When the claim that “hate is natural” was first advanced, my response was :
“"Hate is natural" is a cop-out used by people too cowardly to face up to their own flaws" (post 245) Despite GS's claims to the contrary, I have not altered this position and don’t intend to.

In this area, my experience is that people who use this claim do it to defend, reduce or excuse bigotry.

So in other words you've taken a position that I hold i.e. that the normal range of emotions are natural and applied your own prejudice. Your inaccurate prejudice does not justify your vilification of me simply because I apparently hold a different belief on emotions than you.