Apes may be closer to speaking than many scientists think

Barely? Humans have an incredibly unique ability to constantly create new sentences, infinitely many of which can express the same idea. That is a unique facet of the human brain.

Being snide about humans doesn't make apes any more intelligent. They simply don't have the same linguistic capabilities.

edgy/10

That's just the main way we are able to recognize intelligence. At least thus far we have had a devil of a time figuring out how to identify intelligence in the absence of communication.

The eyes might be windows to the soul, but communication is the best window to the brain that I know of.

You heard a human recently?!? All I've been getting for the past couple of years are incoherent emails and text messages with all sorts of weird smiley faces.

Every time I go out I see lots of humans but they're all staring at these strange devices that you used to be able to talk into.

I have to say I'm very thankful to have found HN. I grew up in a decent, moderately sized city (300k) going to a private religious school with children whose parents were similarly strongly interested in the intellectual development of their children.

I had access to all the sports teams. I played soccer through Varsity, played with the golf team [but note I was not on the golf team, hehe], and basketball in middle school. I played piano for 8 years. I attended one of the top 5 schools of my field in the nation, and graduated into a small company with other graduates from my school, MIT, etc. From 'good places'.

Because of this, education was always something I always took for granted. I always valued it, but always took it for granted. My education, however, took humans for granted. Your value to society was sometimes considered limited by what you could produce. Additionally, many of those I highschooled and undergraduated with held little reservation filtering people out of their life based on, I'll call it, 'being dumb'.

This always bothered me. I believed in the intrinsic value of the human, so I always sought to correct for it. Because I always tried my hardest, it never occurred to me how people could willfully and knowingly not aspire themselves to something greater than what required minimal effort. Everyone I grew up with did, I did, and my parents did, so naturally I assumed everyone else did, too. As such, I was regularly perplexed at the value judgements certain colleagues would place on other members of humanity.

So I left that company, and struck out on my own. I have since discovered what a rare breed my background nurtured, and now understand the wisdom in filtering those you spend time with. Instead of a prideful superiority [which I certainly observed], I exercise with a cautious respect for, and in protection of, talent and time. I exercise without placing value judgements on the people I come in contact with, but I do judge the values of the people I spend time with. In this way I safely continue to respect their humanity, and avoid pride.

It's only since I moved and became aware of my need to protect that I became aware of how hard it is to find knowledge seekers. And so, when I come across someone from a different field but similar excellence, who carries with them persuasive content helpful for advancement, I am thankful.

And so I am thankful to have found HackerNews, and specifically this lecture material that I can't wait to watch.

It's very important to surround yourself with excellence. You'll become the ones you're around, and believe their idiocy, if you're not careful.

Be careful.

So which primates have corticospinal projections for their vocal cords? Okay, that's actually a trick question because the vocal cords are innervated via cranial nerves emanating from the medulla [3], rather than via spinal cord. However, in humans, there are direct monosynaptic projections from cortex to these medullary motor neurons. These projections do not exist in macaques (and presumably not in other monkeys) or in chimpanzees [4, see fig 2]. I'm not sure if it's known whether gorillas or orangutans have them.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramidal_tracts#Corticospinal_tract
  2. http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n5/full/nm1595.html
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_ambiguus
  4. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943881400107X

When a dog is leashed to a tree, and runs around it until there's no more slack, I have yet to see one that figures out it needs to run around the other way.

Before science started correcting itself, it was correcting perceptions based on religion and culture. For example, the germ theory of disease ran headlong into the older idea (not based on science) that doctors couldn't have dirty hands because they were gentlemen.

The belief that animals do not share capabilities with man arises from culture, specifically Western Christian culture. God made man in his own image and gave man dominion over the dumb beasts of the world. Man ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which set him apart from animals.

This still dominates theoretical thinking of animal behavior. If scientists went purely off of observations, most questions would have this answer: we don't know yet. Instead observations are climbing uphill against preconceived notions.

Studies of consciousness run into the same thing. The distinction between brain and mind goes back to the body/soul distinction from thousands of years of religion and culture. There is no evidence at all to suggest that minds exist apart from brains. Yet the question of "where consciousness comes from" is still asked seriously by people who think of themselves as serious scientists.

Of course we'll make mistakes along the way. That's how you learn. Some will in fact be disastrous. Such is the cost of scientific progression. Best we can do is hope to mitigate the negative affects as much as possible.

As a counter example, despite all the negative things we read about, life expectancy and quality of life continues to go up. The system appears to be working.

I fundamentally disagree. An enormous amount of science has been right, and has lasted essentially unchanged since the time of discovery. No one is refuting the germ theory of infection, information theory, or classical mechanics any time soon.

A lot of belief has been asserted and sustained by people who stand to gain from that belief being widely held. This is always happening, whether it is the Pope or Dow Chemical, and this is most of the science that gets discovered wrong after the fact. Most of it would have been proved wrong immediately if results hadn't been faked or attempted verifications hadn't been prevented or suppressed.

I'm excluding theories that are first approximations that are further refined later from 'made up' science, of course.

And none of those things are science per se. They are technology and just mistakes in general.

Also see Isaic Asimov's The relativity of wrong: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

Also, even if a single smart chimp discovered complex language on its own, what good would it do? (S)he would also have to know another smarter-than-average chimp who was smart enough to pick it up, and then, the knowledge would have to spread to a larger group fairly soon in order to survive.

Chimps could be relatively close to the brink of learning complex language, needing only a relatively small push to get over it.

http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-languag...

http://www.ibtimes.com/octopus-made-better-world-cup-predict...

We could go with a purely information theoretic notion of genetic complexity, but that's not ideal because genomes with a lot of random accumulated cruft would seem more complex than they really are.

Maybe with the benefit of hindsight, we could say an organism was more evolved if its lineage remained relatively stable over long periods of time or across different environments. By that measure, it's still too soon to say whether humans are more evolved than cyanobacteria or the crocodile, but at least we have a chance.