Linguistics Question of Pagel

"Apes around the world can understand each other, so why do intellectually superior humans have

around 7,000 distinct languages? queries evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel.  Pagel, a professor at the University of Reading in the UK, heads a team searching for an evolutionary explanation for our many languages. * “Why,” he asks, “would humans evolve a system of communication that prevents them with communicating with other members of the same species?”*

In other words, *if humans evolved language in order to communicate with each other, then why did language continue to evolve in a way that interfered with such communication?* Pagel finds the biblical explanation best. Of course, he does not consider the Bible to be a reliable historical source and therefore tries to apply its principles to his model of social evolution. He writes:

This perennial question [why there are so many languages] was famously addressed in

the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, which tells of how humans developed the conceit that they could use their shared language to cooperate in the building of a tower that would take them to heaven. God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower and to ensure it would not be rebuilt he scattered the people and confused them by giving them different languages. The myth leads to the amusing irony that our separate languages exist to prevent us from communicating. The surprise is that this might not be far from the truth. . . .
For the myriad biological species in the tropics, there are advantages to being different because it allows each to adapt to its own ecological niche. But humans all occupy the same niche, and splitting into distinct cultural and linguistic groups actually brings disadvantages, such as slowing the movement of ideas, technologies and people. It also makes societies more vulnerable to risks and plain bad luck. So why not have one large group with a shared language?

Pagel adds, “We should expect new languages to arise as people spread out and occupy new lands because as soon as groups become isolated from one another their languages begin to drift apart and adapt to local needs.” But then he notes that the opposite appears to have happened, writing, “But the real puzzle is that the greatest diversity of human societies and languages arises not where people are most spread out [like the Arctic], but where they are most closely packed together [like Papua New Guinea, where neighboring tribes typically speak distinctly different languages].”
Research recently published in Science compares linguistic data in an attempt to trace the origin of Indo-European languages. The authors suggest that these languages emerged from the region of Anatolia (Asia Minor).

 Genesis 11:4 records, “And they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.’” Thus the tower was part of the unifying efforts of the people as they combined their efforts to build a single civilization in one place in defiance of God’s instruction.

The biblical history of the dispersion from the tower of Babel also indicates that diversity of language emerged from the area of “a plain in the land of Shinar” away from which many groups of people traveled some time after the global Flood. Noah’s Ark had come to rest in “the mountains of Ararat,” so geographically the region would have been in the region we know as the Middle East. Thus, not only Pagel’s linguistic analysis but also the geographical conclusions from the latest linguistic research (suggesting the Indo-European languages diversified from the region of Asia Minor) are essentially consistent with the historical facts supplied to us through God’s Word." AIG