Soul, Anatomy, Speech

Can any anatomy embody a human soul?

Can you take a ... pig? ... being God omnipotent, insert a human soul, and hey presto, it can communicate in language as humans do, even if the accent is somewhat oink oink?

In that case, God would have to alter the laws that govern the relations from sound production to sound, and from ear anatomy to hearing.

Thomas Bailey*

@Hans-Georg Lundahl right and ours is the ONLY possible physical design that would befit a soul? Cmon now, that's just ridiculous. Besides, our physical design would be pointless without one, we'd just be another animal. It's not our physical design that separates us from Chimps.

From a debate under my comments on a Fr. Gregory Pine video on Pints with Aquinas.

But didn't Animal Farm feature a talking pig? Yes, but it's allegory - the animal bodies are standins for real faces, like if you were having a drama referred to be screen names like "Donald Duck" or "Mickey Mouse" ...

But didn't C. S. Lewis (who liked Animal Farm) also have talking animals?

Yes, and as he knew a thing or two about music, he also made a rationalisation. A Narnian talking animal is NOT the anatomy the animal kind has in this world plus a human soul. C. S. Lewis made it clear. When Aslan chose couple after couple, they went away from the rest of the type and followed Him - and He talked to them, telling them to be talking beasts. At one of these moments, they changed in anatomy. Hares and hedgehogs became bigger, elephants and elks smaller. At the same occasion one must presume they changed speech and hearing as well as brain anatomy and FOXP2 gene.

If one of Maugrim's wolves had been sent to our world, and been shot under circumstances demanding a scalpelled examination by a vet, the vet would have been very surprised at how the glottis and other articulatory region anatomy looked.

Now, here is the reason. A flute cannot go on changing between two notes very quickly for as long as a violin can - because the flutist does it breathing, the violinist with an arm, fatigue isn't suffocation. A flute can play one note at a time, a violin two (neighbouring strings) and a guitar up to all six strings if each has a note fitting into a chord (meaning some of the strings need a left hand finger on a fret). A flute - or guitar - could hardly imitate a violin glissando correctly, and neither a guitar nor a violin could imitate a flutist doing a Flatterzunge ... (pronouncing an Italian R while blowing into the flute).

Flutes, oboes, clarinettes, bassoons, even trumpets and tubas : all of these are wind instruments, and all of them sound different, even when playing the same notes. On big church organs, you can combine the different types of sound by pulling out or pushing back in "registers" - and the organ that can imitate each, is built different from all of them.

When the organ registers have some claiming to imitate violins, that's more approximative.

The human capacity to pronounce vowels very different from each other in "sound" - like having "formants" at different pitches - is very like an organ's capacity to do a flute or a clarinette, but superior.

The human capacity to pronounce different consonants is like an instrument doing the special effects of different instruments - we can even do a Flatterzunge, if our R phoneme is pronounced with the Italian R allophone!

All this is necessary, if not a combination of all these (half would suffice) at least around the same order of magnitude.

A bestial repertoir of sounds, any beast, is between one and two orders of magnitude smaller.

Sounds are no good for communication if not heard. You want to listen to a heartbeat, you use a sthetoscope, not the microphone you hold out to someone you are interviewing (never mind why you would need a microphone to hear him in the first place, the microphone could not catch the heartbeats).

And the human ear is to some other beasts' ears (notably chimps'), like sthetoscope to mike.

So, no, the human could not communicate in a chimp's body as in a human body. And probably the chimps brain would, I will not say obliterate the human rationality, but considerably warp it, especially about language, as lacking the areas known as Broca and Wernicke. If drugs can warp your rationality just by a changed brain state, what would changed brain anatomy do?

But what if the human anatomy had evolved prior to the gift of human soul? I am afraid, a chimp soul in a human body would be quite as lost. Human hyoids have no hooks, chimp hyoids have hooks. Human hyoids are stabilising the movements of the tongue, chimp hyoids attach movements of the tongue to amplification and distortion in air bags. A chimp dominant male in a human body (never mind the brain again!) would feel very lost as to why he couldn't shriek to his normal amplitude. The first ape to loose such hooks and airbags between Australopithecus and Man (assuming the paradigm, just to refute it) would be at an evolutionary disadvantage, precisely as if he had lost a leg or an arm.

How do evolutionists get around this?

Aren't they aware that human bodies are built for human communication, chimp and autralopithecine bodies for chimp and australopithecine communication?

Oh, they are. Their solution is, not "chimp to human" (that's a strawman) but "common ancestor to human" was a very gradual process for each side, mental / grammatical and physical equipment. But once you accept this, you have thrown out Christianity and the sharp divide between Man and Beast. Also, several things prove the gradual process impossible, none proves it possible, except the fact it is a postulate for Evolution believers.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Holy Martyrs Cyriac, Larg and Smaragd
8.VIII.2022

Sanctorum Martyrum Cyriaci Diaconi, Largi et Smaragdi, qui, cum aliis viginti Sociis, passi sunt decimo septimo Kalendas Aprilis. Eorum corpora, via Salaria a Joanne Presbytero sepulta, sanctus Marcellus Papa in praedium Lucinae, via Ostiensi, hoc die transtulit; quae postea, in Urbem delata, in Diaconia sanctae Mariae in via Lata fuerunt recondita.

Footnote
* See the post:
Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Fr. Gregory Pine OP attempts to talk about evolution - part 1
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2022/07/fr-gregory-pine-op-attempts-to-talk.html