Posted: Nov 24, 2010 11:51 pm
Mr.Samsa wrote:No mathematics is a specific application of intelligence. That would be akin to testing the intelligence difference between you and I by using "knowledge of behavioral psychology" as the measure of intelligence - assuming that you have no formal qualifications in the area, then the test would conclusively demonstrate that I was far more intelligent than you.
How about 'ability to learn knowledge of behavioral psychology'?
jez9999 wrote:As for language skills, I'm saying that I struggle to see how our ability to use language could evolve over small, incremental steps. I don't see why no other species - in the history of the world - would have developed language as advanced as ours if that were something that evolution was even rarely capable of.
Well I think the problem is with how you're thinking about it. We haven't evolved the complex language that you see us using, we've evolved to be capable of using language - that is, understanding abstract symbols and make sounds with our vocal chords. The complexity of language, like grammar, metaphors, humour, etc, is largely a product of the cultural effects on language. We don't evolve these advanced aspects of language through evolution, we create them ourselves through learning and experience. In other words, it's like saying you can't understand how tool-use could evolve because building rockets is so amazing. We didn't evolve to build rockets, we evolved the capability to manipulate things with our hands.
So did chimps, but they can't build rockets. Or anything remotely as advanced. You can say that they didn't need to, but why did humans need to? Couldn't we have hunted and gathered largely on instinct and a handful of grunting and hand signals?
The reason no other species has reached this advanced stage of language is because they don't have all of the right conditions that we have. One of the key features for the development of language as advanced as ours is bipedalism and opposable thumbs - this automatically rules out large sections of the animal kingdom. Then we need advanced control of our vocal chords, and a sufficiently intelligent brain to process language.
The sufficiently large brain is the humdinger for me. There have been animals (even if you give it a massively unfair bias to creatures which are similar to us, namely chimps) who have been brought up in similar conditions to deaf children (gets past the problem of their not having human vocal chords) such as Washoe, with humans attempting to teach them sign language; the best they ever muster is a few dozen gestures. This would seem to be putting them on a level playing field with (deaf) human children in every respect apart from their brains. It is somethnig very unique to the human brain that allows very complex language to be learnt, and I'm just wondering how we got from something like where the chimps are now, to where we are now.