Peter:Yes, it was an ad hominem attack, and yes, the bishop asked for it. These were not Huxley's actual words, but Huxley approved this version of the story many years later for publication in the official biography of Darwin. I took this from the discussion by Stephen Jay Gould (mentioned below), in "Bully for Brontosaurus".
If this is what Huxley really said, he was more ignorant than I thought. And not below making an ad homonym attack (even if the bishop asked for it).
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Admitting that evolution is not a scientific theory does not falsify it, it merely acknowledges that it is a metaphysical theory, which is a 50? word for religious theory.
As for historical linguistics, the fossils indicating the existence and development of those languages are the surviving documents written in those languages. Unfortunately, those documents are often just skeletons, even parts of skeletons, unable to flesh out the richness the languages originally had. Where is the skeleton of proto-
Semitic? By your own admission, it doesn?t exist. It is merely a conjecture, based on a theory. To use conjecture based on theory to have veto power over how one should interpret the observed skeleton of a historical language, sounds backwards to me. Especially as long as there is the possibility that the theory may be wrong.
My interpretation of the bones of Biblical Hebrew are that the 22 letters represented 22 consonantal phonemes, each with one sound that existed from Moses to the Galut Babel. The consonantal sounds may have been different than as we interpret the signs left by the Masoretes. Just because a cognate language may have had more phonemes does not mean that Hebrew did. Absent documentary evidence, there is no way to prove, nor disprove, my interpretation.
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