Human brains wired for language, according to a report in ScienceNOW 24 March 2008. Communicating with complex speech language is unique to humans, and it has long been known that human brains have specialised regions in the frontal and temporal lobes that are used for speech production and the understanding of language. Scientists who study how the brain uses language have also found that these areas must also be connected to one another for effective language skills.

Anthropologists at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia used a new brain scanning technique to trace the bundles of nerve fibres within the brain, showing where the internal connections are made. They compared the brains of humans, chimps and macaque monkeys and found "dramatic differences" between the human brains and primate brains. In human brains there are large extensive connections between the speech production region in the frontal lobe (known as Broca's area) and the language understanding region (known as Wernicke's area) in the temporal lobe. In chimps they found only limited connections between the corresponding regions of their brains, and hardly any connections in the macaques. The researchers concluded that the evolution of speech involved the re-wiring of the brain to make the connections between Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Kuniyoshi Sakai, a language researcher at the University of Tokyo in Japan commented that the brain scan study demonstrates "the uniqueness of the human brain, because it has been widely assumed that the basic brain structures are essentially similar between humans and apes."

Editorial Comment: In spite of numerous efforts to find similarities between ape and human brains, specific studies, like the one described here, keep finding differences. Speech language is unique to humans so it is not surprising that human brains have specialised structures that do not exist in animals. This is exactly what you would expect to find given human beings were unique creations, designed as the image of the Speaking God as described in Genesis 1. The idea that an extensive, complex system of nerve fibre connections would come about by chance random processes is as foolish as the idea that the cables of a computer network would grow and connect themselves to the right computers all by themselves. (Ref. neuroanatomy, neurology, anthropology)

Evidence News 23 April 2008