redhen, on 10 December 2012 - 01:57 PM, said:
That's most probable. I just wanted to make clear that I don't believe there are any differences in cognitive abilities based on ancestry. We all have the same potential, except of course for those unfortunates with congenital disorders, head trauma, etc.
Distinctly? How so? Humans are slotted in the category
hominidae which consists of chimps, gorillas, orangutans and humans.I submit that we are not different in kind, only by degrees.
Sure, there are always exceptions; the prime one being the sad cases of feral children. Nurture, or lack thereof, seems more consequential than nature.
The newer research is leaning towards the idea that although apes care about each other, and we have all heard, "monkey see monkey do" humans take an interest in each other a step further, and this is likely what lead to humans developing language. Language has made humans greatly different from other animals.
Yes, other animals can understand sounds and some even repeat the sounds we make, like birds. Chimps and bonobo seem to take language even further and demonstrate some skill in abstract thinking. Such as they think it odd to see a bird used as hammer. This means a degree of conceptual thinking. Especially the tragedy of chimps who were taught language and humanized, and then were released in the wild, should make us contemplate the morality of what we are doing. The problem is, unlike a human child, these chimps do not learn so well our concepts of good behavior, and their bad behavior is what results in people wanting to get rid them. Three year olds in adult bodies are a problem, especially after hormones set in. We learn more than the animals, and our ability to learn is accumulative over our life times. No one will teach a 3 year old high school math, because their brains are not developed enough. Having intellectual discussions with teenagers can be interesting, but also frustrating because their brains still are ready for the thinking we do later in life. Perhaps I should say, it is what happens to the human brain over many years, that makes us different from animals. Our brains develop rapidly and do not stop developing. However, our brains slow down and go through many different phrases of development.
The case of feral children is excellent when comparing with the most intelligent apes and the extreme immorality of playing with them and then releasing them in the wild. We have two things going here. One is the development of the brain, and windows of learning. Somethings can not be learned by animals, birds, humans, once the window for learning has passed. For this reason feral children can be taught technological skills like speaking and wearing clothes, but they do not become as children who always lived with humans. There is something in our humanness that must be early in life, or we do get a well adjusted human. How far chimps go in learning this is the big question? It might be as wrong to humanize them and turn them back into the wild, as it would do to this to a human child.
Which leads to the second part, learning is cumulative. If we humanized whole troops of bonobo and taught them language and gave the technological objects that support the language, say spoons and plates, clothing, etc. would they pass this on to the next generation, and would each generation add to this pool of knowledge as humans do? That is, if we worked with them enough, would we put the hairy apes on the same evolutionary path that naked ape travel?
0
