rationalskepticism.org

jez9999 wrote:

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'?

The "ability to learn" would be a better measure, since it removes anthropocentric biases and advantages.

jez9999 wrote:

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?

You're ignoring the fact that we've had thousands of years of hugely impressive cultural advances that chimps don't have.. Stick a human baby in with a group of gorillas and see if he comes up with a neat idea for a rocket. Why was there a split between humans and other apes that produced this change in us? I'm not sure, it could have been anything relatively minor. The discovery of fire, for example, that improved our nutrition, and thus brain functioning, which added back to our cultural progress and pushed it further forwards.

The point, anyway, is that we did not evolve the complex language that you are looking at. Our language is too advanced to have come about through evolution alone, that's why we can be reasonably sure that it didn't evolve. We evolved the ability to use language, which enabled us to develop it to such an advanced level. Keep in mind that our language has been changed and improved upon for thousands and thousands of years...

jez9999 wrote:

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.

No animal has been brought up in similar conditions to deaf children - the fact of the matter is that it is impossible to give the same level of training that we give to children, to experimental animals. This is because language requires almost 24/7 training for decades to get people to use it at an adequate level and nobody is really willing to do the same for animals. The closest we have to this is Viki, who was a chimpanzee raised by a suburban family in the 50s. Unfortunately they tried to teach her spoken language, and since chimps have different vocal structures to us, she was only able to form 4 words.

However, we have had some great success with animal language. Washoe you mention learnt 250 signs, which is a decent effort - but this is outdone by Kanzi who can reliably use 360 signs on a lexigram, as well as combining them with sign language to form novel words and sentence structures. The most interesting part of Kanzi's progress is that he wasn't taught how to learn a lexigram board, he picked it up by watching his mother.

We have to remember that the critical period for chimps also occurs at a different stage than in humans, and it occurs in a much smaller window, so for chimps to reach the same level as humans in language, we are expecting them to pick it up at a younger age than humans and at a faster rate. It's like expecting a 1 year old to be able to understand and read out loud a Dr Suess book. Since this is a huge ask, chimps brains don't develop to the same degree as humans - their Broca's and Wernicke's areas remain underdeveloped, like a human child's would if they aren't taught language to a sufficient level within the critical period.

As for how humans got to this point, well Cali's post describes the process by which our brain developed to this level. The jump from chimps to humans is only a small one, they have most of the equipment necessary but they are just missing a couple of things; firstly a massive culture which gives them intensive and continuous language training from the moment they're born, and slightly more developed language centres in the brain.