Image-set 1: gibbon-like primate brachiation at high speed.
Filtration: compare and contrast with birds/bats/bugs winging; regard attributed power to “excite” as speaker’s idiosyncracy, to be electively shared or not, at the hearer’s discretion.
Image-set 2: arboreal primate ancestors of humanity experiencing pleasurable emotions.
Filtration: hearer is licensed by the speaker to compare and contrast the proffered image with his/her own general experience of images in dreams or reverie, and assign credibility accordingly.
Image-set 3: (deliberately?) unbounded, ambiguous image: either the undefined sum of all distinguishable preëminent experiences available to the common progenitors of apes and humans, or the same sum available (also) to every subsequent species belonging to the phylogeny rooted in those progenitors.
Filtration: analogize ad libitum with whatever (other) experiences the hearer may independently esteem as “great” concomitants of being alive.
Image-set 4: human ancestors with nearly gibbonish anatomy.
Filtration: caution; acceptance of this image risks incongruity with other unnamed but prevalent image(s) in all or most suitably informed brains.
Image-set 5: moderately brachiating arboral ape a million generations previous to its first human descendant.
Filtration: assign elevated credence to the date but only attenuated credence to the conjectural size and habit.
Image-set 6: two images; gibbons’ habitual bipedal locomotion on branches, and habitual brachiation from one branch to another.
Filtration: both images due to consensus of numerous other sane communicant human brains’ actual sensory intake, hence presumptively veracious; structural analog of image-set 12, q.v.
Image-set 7: duplex protasis; Concestor 4 bipedally locomotive and genetic legator of that trait.
Filtration: hypothetical preterite notions, no cognate images available conclusively either to credit or discredit.
Image-set 8: duplex apodosis; trait assigned to brain and reëmergent on another continent after epochal dormancy.
Filtration: interrogative, ergo implicitly subject to subsequent verification, if ever.
Image-set 9: emotional gratification stemming from ideation.
Filtration: entertaining this image is its own reward, if any, and leads credibly to nothing else.
Image-set 10: various apes bipedally locomotive.
Filtration: images due to consensus of numerous other sane communicant human brains’ actual sensory intake, hence presumptively veracious.
Image-set 11: protasis: preterite image of Concestor 4 as vocally analog of gibbons; apodosis: present-tense image of human speaking and singing.
Filtration: tagged as fantasy with little hope of even eventual deferred verification.
Image-set 12: two images; gibbons’ perdurant single matings and human males’ labile multiple matings.
Filtration: both images due to consensus of numerous other sane communicant human brains’ actual sensory intake, hence presumptively veracious; structural analog of image-set 6, q.v.
Image-set 13: two either/or images; Concestor 4 an analog of gibbons or an analog of great apes in mating habit.
Filtration: Zero credibility; no cognate images support credence for either image in this set.
Image-set 14: cluster of of Concestor 4’s attributes of suspended description
Filtration: caveat auditor; the succeeding series of images as a whole is of dubious verity, each explicit image of the series being predicated on certain other here unspecified further implicit images of inconclusive import.
Image-set 15: all apes possessing numerous traits like their Concestor’s.
Filtration: Tenuous credibility derivable solely from analogy with average tendencies of known genetic inheritance in other phyla.
Image-set 16: two images differing in two features: Concestor 4 more arboreal and smaller than Concestor 3
Filtration: deductive from unspecified analogs; no directly verifying data available; cf. image-set 18.
Image-set 17: protasis; primate of brachiant anatomy and behaviour.
Filtration: justifying data, if any, withheld; assign the image credibility consistent with overall credence accorded the image maker.
Image-set 18: continuant of image-set 16; image of shorter arms less adapted to brachiation than gibbons’.
Filtration: deductive from unspecified analogs; no directly verifying data available; cf. image-set 16.
Image-set 19: continuant of image-set 18; image of face like gibbons’.
Filtration: credibility at par with preceding set.
Image-set 20: acaudal primate posterior.
Filtration: justifying data, if any, withheld; assign the image credibility consistent with overall credence accorded the image maker.
Image-set 21: elaboration of image-set 20; coccyx of fused vertebrae.
Filtration: same as image-set 20, q.v.
In respect of its self-confessed credence-worthiness, this piece at least of Dawkins’ expository fable is every whit as frail a fabric as any folktale or ballad of wondrous content, only three of its twenty-one image-sets (6, 10, and 12) being offered as unqualifiedly veracious, the other eighteen all certified by at most nothing stronger than their author’s figurative “trust me.” Any good Märchenfrau does as much, which in no way denigrates Richard Dawkins’ eminent biological learning.
The base ideation of either the Märchenfrau or the evolutionary biologist together with the local cultural filtration belonging to each is manifestly fatuous in the absence of some channel for its communication from an originating brain to other brains able to receive and (re)process it. And the reciprocal of this proposition is even more compelling: there is insufficient evident utility in the efflorescence of human languages except as they afford that very channel for easy transfer from brain to brain of sixth-sense images with the local qualifying filtration.
