Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past | Hacker News Reader

Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

sciencemag.org

204 pointsccwilson1093 comments

Puts on critic hat

The article is making a claim that can be summarized as...

the cognitive capacity to share with conspecifics something learned more than 120 seconds ago, is unique to humans and orangutans

They also inform you that bees have this capacity. That should be enough to make anyone skeptical. It seems like they identified a particular behavior unique among apes to Orangutans - suppressing vocalization in response to threat - ran an experiment to confirm their bias, and are spinning it as a story about the ability to talk about the past (rather than simply that Orangutans have evolved to deal with perceived threat by keeping quiet while the threat is present, and then going bananas after it's gone).

Conveying info about the past is something bees can do; yet it escapes Chimps and Bonobos. Yeah, ok.

So you're idea is that lots of living things innately perform this sort of skill, and that choosing to look at from a certain perspective lends the impression that it's a hallmark of intellectual distinction, simply because they're choosing to look at things the wrong way?

I think the idea is that it takes a bit more abstract symbolic thought to look at rival predators, then look at peers of the same species, and make eye contact and include a gesture that expresses a suggestion to stay hidden and keep quiet.

If I hop a fence, hide from the cops, and then unexpectedly find you in the same place, also hiding, then for me to hold up my finger over my lips would represent my recognition of you as a fellow peer on the run also threatened with arrest and jail.

That's a certain sort of interesting cognitive leap that I would not expect to see in most apes. If orangutans can do it, it's notable.

I suspect you might see something like this in squid or octopoda.

In bees, signaling dances aren't precisely the same kind of symbolic thought, because they don't have capacity to select what they dance about. It's a somewhat inflexible, robotic gambit of flowers, nectar, hive, honey, and nothing that deviates from the program, as complex as the program may be in its own right.

This is the problem with regarding intelligence as just a collection of externally-observable behaviors. We simply don't know, at this point, the extent to which the orangutans are choosing this pattern of behavior as a result of considering the possible outcomes of the alternatives.

As someone who spends a fair amount of time hiking in woodlands, I am familiar with the squeak of a chipmunk dashing for its burrow after spotting me, and I get the impression that they are silent if I have come close to them before they notice me. It is not difficult to posit how this pattern of behavior could arise from the interplay of a couple of related instinctive responses, and the same can be said for this orangutan behavior (though it does require the ability to remember a recent threat.) Whether there is more to it than that cannot be deduced from these observations.

True, but note that this is also true of observations about other humans. How do I know that the behaviour of other humans isn't just instinctive?

I'd argue only assuming that mt experience is similar to theirs. I think it is far more reasonable to extend this line of thinking to orangutans, than it is to jave different standards for humans and other apes...

> How do I know that the behaviour of other humans isn't just instinctive?

Ultimately, you don't. If you contemplate this sort of issue long enough, you will likely go through the three stages of solipsism:

    1) What a ridiculous idea!
    2) There must be a way to prove that this is wrong...
    3) Occam, can I borrow your razor?

By our definition, instinct is something automatic and available without training. Humans and at least some apes are known to exhibit an empathy instinct, potentially tied to presence of specialized mirror neuron networks and surrounding neural architecture. Even small children down to potentially neonates have it.

Contrast to something that is higher level, like the ability to recognize a reflection in the mirror as yourself, which requires inference most likely, but part of it might operate as an instinct while another may be learned. (So it makes sense that it is appearing quite late in primate life.)

Forming language might be an instinct, recognizing patterns, many kinds of learning.

I agree with the general call for skepticism against the idea that displaced reference is so unique in the animal kingdom. Where I do not agree, is the implicit argument of "if a bee can do it then it's trivial".

Within the animal kingdom, the sophistication of the honey bee's waggle dance, with predicates and combinable to a large number of phrases, is rare. The only other major example I can think of are primate calls.

Bees are also highly intelligent; on a watt for watt, pound for bound basis, their only other rival might be the portia spider. Bees can communicate angles, distance and adjust for the movement of the sun when relaying these. They can learn abstract patterns and generalize. If you asked me which was more intelligent, the honey bee or the chicken, I'd be hard pressed to give an answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_learning_and_communication

Ok, I'll ask - is a bird or a honey bee more intelligent?

Before you answer, let me just say a few things...

Pound-for-pound honey bees are indeed impressive. I actually didn't know all of those things, so thank you for sharing. Since I am no bee expert, I can only offer general principles. But yeah, that's a lot of fancy behaviors crammed into just ~1 million neurons; great optimization. However, with so few neurons, and so many programmed tasks, it leaves very little room for flexibility in their behavioral responses, which are likely to be exceptionally dependent on environment stability (see #1). I assume most people would include behavioral flexibility in their working-definition of intelligence. So it would make sense to consider not just the total number of behaviors an animal can perform, but also the degree of cognitive plasticity baked-in to the system overall.

Birds also display an exceptional repertoire of behavior, despite their bird-brain (#2). Youtube has endless examples of birds doing incredible and hilarious things beyond flying and singing. For example I remember watching a few vids on Bowerbirds not too long ago, which build incredibly elaborate domiciles in an attempt to impress their lady friends; the ones making nests near urban areas were incorporating a lot of colorful man-made trinkets they scavenged from the big city to woo the ladies (which I think suggests some level of flexibility). Crows are even more impressive. These birds are so smart they get bored; and when they do, sometimes they like to fuck with other animals for entertainment (or so it seems). Also this: #3. I think chickens could potentially display similar highly adaptable behaviors; but they are written-off as nitwits because you often find them as the product of being stuffed into a cage for 18 hours a day, and all basic needs taken care of by humans. I hold the same prejudice to the rats in my lab (good for nothing idiot rats, can't learn jack, so lazy); until I see a rat in the wild and it's all athletic and reading books and stuff.

All that said, I actually agree with your sentiment - that you cannot assume certain species are more or less intelligent than others, simply based on the relative sizes of their brain. However, if you take humans as the gold-standard for a highly intelligent species on Earth, and someone starts talking smack about our cousin being dumber than a honey bee, I'm going to take some liberties to make some sweeping generalizations of my own... but yeah, thanks for reeling me in on this. Apologies to the honey bee.

#1. This is highly speculative, but behavioral inflexibility might be a contributing reason to the unprecedented rate of Colony Collapse Disorder we are seeing in western honey bees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder.

#2."Birds are remarkably intelligent, although their brains are small. Corvids and some parrots are capable of cognitive feats comparable to those of great apes. Olkowicz, et al. (2016) "Birds have primate-like numbers of neurons in the forebrain". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4932926/

#3. Parrot singing Drowning Pool song https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uguXNL93fWg

> the ones making nests near urban areas were incorporating a lot of colorful man-made trinkets they scavenged from the big city to woo the ladies (which I think suggests some level of flexibility).

If they avoided man-made objects, that would indicate that they're smart enough to tell the difference. They're just grabbing any object they find that stands out. If anything, that implies less intelligence.

> If they avoided man-made objects, that would indicate that they're smart enough to tell the difference... If anything, that implies less intelligence.

Are you assuming there's something "wrong" with using the colorful man-made trinkets?

Cultural appropriation?

>If they avoided man-made objects, that would indicate that they're smart enough to tell the difference.

Perhaps bower birds don't give a fuck if the object is man-made or not?

Ignoring vs not ignoring man-made objects could indicate a lot of things. Maybe ignoring man-made objects is an indication of instinctual fear, which would imply less adaptability and therefore less intelligence?

> is a bird or a honey bee more intelligent?

That's a broader question than chicken or bee. A crow is definitely more intelligent than a bee.

Indeed, I completely agree that some birds are very intelligent, managing to pack quite a lot of punch in such a small package. Parrots, corvids, even pigeons are examples of such intelligent birds. This is why I was careful to select Chickens as the example that I did.

Near the 48th second of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exsrX6qsKkA, you can see the bumble bee actually hesitating to work out which option will yield a reward for the least amount of effort. That kind of laziness is an excellent display of flexibility and intelligence.

It's also interesting that you mention colony collapse. If as is likely, neonicotinoids play a significant role in colony collapse then the bee's sensitivity to disruptions in acetlycholine pathways is an argument for their relying heavily on cognition for foraging and navigation. But yeah, I'm not saying bees are just as intelligent as primates, corvids or parrots; just that they too are capable of quite unique sophisticated behaviors and learning.

That video is really cool! Bees are the shit.

why not ? What's to say that mental computations can't come in discrete units ?

Maybe communication about the past is a self-contained computation that can evolve independently in brain networks as diverse as those of bees, orangutans and humans

It's not impossible, just highly improbable given everything we know about population genetics and behavioral neuroscience. It seems their claim is based on a single behavior that was selected because they observed it during field study and found it interesting. They confirmed the behavior in their experiment; this itself would have been an interesting report. To make a Science paper out of it though, it needed to be framed as a study about some uniquely human capacity (since we can't get over ourselves, and love being reminded of our big brains).

However, as far as uniquely human cognitive capacities go, I've not heard of this one yet. And seemed like a pretty outlandish claim given my Australian Shepard will paw at a basket containing her leash while looking at me - which seems very much like she is trying to convey to me some info she learned in the past.

and I guess delayed signalling implies mental time travel and consciousness, which being special and mysterious to us implies an expensive process - but maybe consciousness isn't expensive, and maybe it can be of only certain discrete things (like whatever bees might be conscious of).

Dogs like yours are undoubtedly conscious.

Yea, I agree. It's plausible. To clarify, I'm not at all saying bees aren't capable of conveying learned information. My position is that you, me, my dog, birds, bees, orangutans... we all seem to have this capacity. In fact, it seems more like a ubiquitous capacity, than a uniquely human capacity.

The authors of this paper don't agree though; instead they are promulgating the idea that "Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past". Which directly implies that Chimps and Bonobos never refer to learned information in their conspecific communications. Maybe they don't engage in delayed warning calls after exposure to a predator, for whatever adaptive reason. Nevertheless, I'd bet the farm Chimps refer to episodic or declarative memories is some way/shape/form in some instances of communication (and I'll double down, given the criteria is only 2-minutes elapsed time since the referenced event took place).

Social insects have a way of spoiling intelligence tests.

The mirror test is a good example. To recognize yourself in mirror, you need to understand that you are a person. Not many animals recognize themselves: apes, some ravens, elephants dolphins... all usual suspects known to be intellegnt.

Give them a mirror and once they figure it out they spend the next hour making faces and checking out their own ass. Mark their face and they'll try to clean it in the mirror.

Then ants.

Ants seem to get mirrors too. So either ants are self conscious or the test is no good.

Getting how the mirror works is different from recognizing the object in the mirror as the image of yourself.

The test has come trouble differentiating between the two.

E.g. the ant might perceive the mirrored marked ant as another ant which would reasonably well fool this test.

They controlled for that using transparent glass with real ants on the other side.

https://www.udocz.com/read/are-ants-capable-of-self-recognit...

> Give them a mirror and once they figure it out they spend the next hour making faces and checking out their own ass.

If you've good links, I'd be curious to see this.

Bees aren't great apes, though. Doesn't the article make the claim that amongst the great apes, this is their finding?

Your argument that because bees display a similar behavior, that it's grounds to invalidate the credibility the people conducting this study of Orangutan's cognitive abilities is based on conjecture. You are conflating a reference to another intelligent species as evidence to support a counter view to a commonly agreed upon advanced cognitive capabilities of the Orangutan.

A previous study shows Orangutans do indeed have excellent memories and are able to communicate with humans using commonly agreed upon visual symbols. Long past the 120 seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwslHICR7K4

side-note: I feel that often, parent's comment gets a lot of likes, not for the validity of the argument but rather being contrarian for the sake of it. It's troubling because often it appears that they are providing commentary on an area totally unfamiliar and outside the usual field of expertise like engineering. Instead what I see is erroneously inferring logic based on the specific pieces mentioned without taking account in to the larger picture. These scientific studies are conducted not one off but to support previous widely held beliefs by the scientific community with vastly more focused experience on their topic of research, just wish that HN folks would give them a more credit and practice modesty. Some people on HN don't even bother reading journals or studies being posted here, instead they just blindly hop on the bandwagon with serious holes in the argument.

You've clearly mistaken my primary qualm. I'm not saying that Orangutans are not fully capable of the things these authors claim. Moreover, I'm not even saying bees aren't capable of conveying learned information. On the contrary, my position is that everything from bees to orangutans to humans have this capacity. In fact, I see this type of communication happening between lots of animals. It seems more like a ubiquitous capacity, than a uniquely human capacity. The authors of this paper don't agree though; instead they are promulgating the idea that "Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to 'talk' about the past".

This is FALSE

In this article...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4350813/

*Chimps used intentional gestures to coordinate with an experimentally-naïve human to retrieve hidden food. In each trial, Experimenter #1 hid a food item anywhere from 3 m to 26 m from the outdoor enclosure under natural cover (e.g. log, soil, leaves, branches) in a trial-unique location in the surrounding woodland, whilst the chimpanzee was watching. The experimenter hid the food and concealed any signs of the hiding place (e.g. breaking up of soil). The chimpanzee could not enter the woodland itself. In order to retrieve the food, the chimpanzee had to recruit the assistance of an uninformed person (Experimenter #2) and direct him to the food item.

The chimpanzees dynamically and flexibly modified their intentional gestures in relation to the naïve experimenter's search efforts towards the hidden food, and successfully guided experimenter #2 to the food item.

You can see in the supplementary videos that experimenter #1 finishes hiding the food at time 4:19...

Screenshot of timestamps: http://bit.ly/ChimpsCanToo

The chimp doesn't greet experimenter #2 until after 4:30 (see same screenshot above). If Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past, how the hell is this Chimp communicating with a human to retrieve food it saw buried at some time in the past?

"orangutan" if i translate to my Native Languange (i'm Indonesian), orang = human in general (could be man/woman), utan = forest, so i can say "orangutan" mean "The Human that Live in Forest"

> The name "orangutan" (also written orang-utan, orang utan, orangutang, and ourang-outang) is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning "person" and hutan meaning "forest",[10] thus "person of the forest".[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan

That's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures. I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature. There are so many prejudices and world views embded in our languages. We call ourselves hackers, but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?

What would one do at such an event? Maybe something like that already exists, just without "hack" in the name.

I think that we, as a civilization, don't really have the infrastructure (habit?) to talk about language i.e. look at it as technology, much less modify it. There's people creating artificial languages, which is really cool, but there's no obvious way to apply that in a mainstream way.

Then again, if someone were to start using English in a different way, it might catch on. He would just have to optimize his changes for acceptable backwards-compatibility. I guess the beauty about people as communicating devices is that they can adopt to changes in protocol, as opposed to some others (looking at you internet devices).

Edit: an artificial language is a bad term, there's no such thing, because it would imply that there's a natural language. It's just a new language, sometimes academic.

We easily treat language as a malleable device. Just look in literature or internet subcultures, but you can see it in day-to-day life if you think about it. You probably do it, too.

The idea and exercise of this is so ubiquitous that I think you're blind to it, like when people suggest there is no American culture.

You missed my point. I elaborated in this comment [0]. I'd call the malleability you're talking about cosmetics in comparison. The examples I gave are human-centricity and sexism embedded in the very way we refer to objects.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18468142

It is ubiquitous: jokes, puns, banter, poetry, the constant reinvention of slang...

what usage of "it" are you referring to?

Its use when referring to animals. Many languages have features of grammatical gender in general which has a specially humanizing effect on discussions about animals, even when their biological gender has nothing to do with it.

I actually mean the even more general usage. The English vocabulary of objects is hierarchical: he, she, it are the major categories. Male and female humans fall under the first two. All other objects under "it". Not long ago even children were "it"s, I believe. Not certain about English, but certainly in some other languages.

That exerts a lot of ideology on communication, which has far-reaching effects. Simple examples:

- a human can only be talked about in the context of his gender; - humans are talked about differently than any other object. Human-centricity is just the most basic example of that.

You could come up with many examples, and that's just how we refer to objects without the context of their unique identifications. Then there's the whole nouns-verbs model of language, which has a far bigger effect on how we see the world and reason about it.

> Male and female humans fall under the first two.

No. Male and female anything fall under the first two. For example, when we talk about our dog, we say "He's a good boy". People use he or she for animals too.

> Not long ago even children were "it"s, I believe.

We use it for 'gender neutral'. For example, when my sister was pregnant, everyone used 'it' to refer to the baby. "I can't wait for it to be born". "I wonder what it's gender will be". Once people discovered the gender, we used he or she.

> - a human can only be talked about in the context of his gender;

This is simply not true. Ask anyone with a dog or a cat.

It's so funny how people with agendas are. Languages with gendered everything like spanish is attacked for gendering everything. And languages with a sensible gender system is attacked for not gendering everything. Seems like there are too many useless people with too much time on their hands.

At least we can agree on the point that gender is important for humans and other sexually reproducing organisms.

Whether the language used to describe this idea is important remains to be seen. Saphir-Worth's linguistic hypothesis has not been proven and is probably false as the afte many ways to have a reasonably complete map of the world in many languages.

I'm not sure what you meant by people having agendas.

Do you agree that the English language imposes an opinion about what's important and what kind of categories of objects there are in the world? That's what I'm saying. English is just an example. The principle of looking at human language as a tool is the same for all languages, so if it's your native tongue don't be offended.

To restate what I said, why are there these three top-most categories -- he, she, it? Is that ideal? How cognisant are we of the effects of this choice?

Many languages also gender chairs. Does this humanize them?

I'd be on the side of "no". It does not even animize them.

there are invented language conventions and meetups. There's also the Esperanto community.

I already struggle to keep up with the politically correct term of the day. I don't want to offend anyone so I do do my best but our language is changing too fast to keep up.

> That's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures.

What's "admirable" or not "admirable" about. It's just language. If you read about the way orangutans are treated in indonesia, I doubt you'd feel it was admirable.

> I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature.

Then don't use it.

> We call ourselves hackers

Who is we? I haven't seen many hackers here. Just people with agendas, particular leftist social agendas.

> but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?

Are you saying english is the "human language"? Also, math is the closest thing to the ubiquitous communication medium.

Not sure what your complaining about. Orangutan is part of the english language as well. You don't have to use 'it'. And as for your "hacking the language", I don't care for your or anyone else Newspeak. Language is a tool and it should evolve as the need requires, not because people have a social agenda to push.

With 6500 languages to choose from, I'm sure there are more than a few incorporating a world-view which aligns with yours. Rather than create something entirely new, wouldn't it be more reasonable to delve into what is already on offer?

Germans have a saying: Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache.

Upvoted for your excellent XKCD reference.

https://xkcd.com/927/

What is it about my post that summoned these mean, snickery comments? It's upsetting, but I'll respond anyway.

The idea is to actively influence how we communicate, not merely analyse it. Suppose I think Sanskrit had some good ideas. The question would be how to bring that use.

And it's not about my world-view, whatever you might think it is. I suppose you're implying that you don't have "world-view alignment" problems with the language you use. Do you think you're just lucky that way? The idea I'm putting forward is that the language in which you communicate (and think) actually shaped your world-view.

> The idea I'm putting forward is that the language in which you communicate (and think) actually shaped your world-view.

That's not a particularly original view. It's called the linguistic relativity or Benjamin-Whorf hypothesis, and it has a very long history. But so what? It's not even a problem. It's simply a feature of thought that it is inherently interconnected with language.

What I don't understand at all is your proposed solution. While entire communities have strived over millenia to create linguistic tools to suit their particular needs, you propose to do the same, and better, by yourself, in a few months or years, by "hacking" (whatever that means).

No offence, but it just sounds slightly juvenile.

Can we load them up with magic mushrooms and see if they become capable of abstract thought? [1].

For those that don't want to click on my link, there's a (not very scientific) hypothesis that human consciousness evolved from our ancestors eating magic mushrooms.

[1] https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis

In stand-up comedy format if anyone doesn't feel like reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hreGAxAjt1c

I really don’t understand why we don’t just do this.

I'm pretty sure orangutans have been able to do this for a while. Headline should be "We just realised that Orangutans can also talk about the past."

But the headline doesn't claim it's a recent development...

I believe the headline may have changed since I posted.

Soon only humans will talk about orangutans in the past.

For anyone wondering why/if orangutans are a threatened species:

- Dramatic decline in Borneo's orangutan population: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/15/dramatic...

- Palm oil producers are wiping out orangutans: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/10/palm-o...

I've always been impressed by this picture of an Orangutan spear fishing: https://primatology.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/orangutan-to...

https://youtu.be/JdpspllWI2o

UK ban on efforts to save Orangutans in return for an arms deal is perhaps worth a mention here.

This advert was banned for the same reason as ALL political lobbying adverts are banned from UK TV. Political lobbying is not allow on UK TV.

I think it's a great ad, and that it's an issue that will benefit from wider awareness (although it's got that anyway in spades during this whole thing), but I'm 100% with the decision to disallow this ad from being broadcast on TV. It is a Greenpeace ad, and Greenpeace is a political organisation.

I agree with you 100%.

I also think that we should just ban palm oil in general. I'm not sure that it has any applications worth the damage to rainforests.

An article came across my feeds today suggesting that banning palm oil might have unintended side effects [1]

Basically, a reduction in consumption of palm oil would result in manufacturers switching to soybean oil instead. A lot of soybean oil is grown in South America and contributes to deforestation over there. Banning palm oil simply shifts the environmental damage. Palm oil is also apparently one of the least land intensive oils to grow. Instead of banning specific products, we should work towards sustainable growing instead.

I haven't done any additional research on those claims, but it is food for thought.

[1] https://theconversation.com/palm-oil-boycott-could-actually-...

> I also think that we should just ban palm oil in general. I'm not sure that it has any applications worth the damage to rainforests.

That would be totally misguided.

> While only 5 percent of the world's vegetable oil farmland is used for palm plantations, palm cultivation produces 38 percent of the world's total vegetable oil supply.[82] In terms of oil yield, a palm plantation is 10 times more productive than soya bean and rapeseed cultivation because the palm fruit and kernel both provide usable oil.[82]

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_oil

Banning palm oil would increase demand for oils which have lower yields leading to an increase in the cleared areas.

No doubt it would reach more people if it was not banned - the Christmas TV adverts are exceptionally visible in UK. I think it was rejected by Clearcast (a commercial company) because its emotional punch was too intense: "There's a human in my forest, and I don't know what to do..." - Emma Thompsons delivery of this would have had hundreds of thousands of UK households sobbing and soul searching instead of watching the next segment.

I would support strong limits on the emotional intensity of TV adverts if fairly applied, but Clearcast have allowed many other exceedingly emotional advertisements, sometimes visceral and disturbing, for subjects such as traffic safety.

The reason they gave for rejection, that Greenpeace is a "political organisation" is a contentious accusation. Greenpeace does not admit to being such and is no more of a political organisation than WWF or Save the Children. In reality the UK supermarkets themselves make political donations and lobby to influence regulation and policy as most big companies do. Its a rhetorical accusation when it does not concern obvious party political organisations - which Greenpeace is certainly not.

How is it political lobbying?

I can see how the original Greenpeace ad could be seen as political lobbying since it calls for viewers to take action, and Greenpeace is a known political organization and their name is on the original ad.

But the Iceland Foods ad that was banned does not do that. It used the same animated section that Greenpeace used to state facts about palm oil driven deforestation and its affect on orangutans, but the message after the animation is different. Greenpeace is not named anywhere in the Iceland Foods ad.

It is just telling shoppers that Iceland Foods is stopping the use of palm oil in their own products until the deforestation from palm oil production stops.

Would a clothing company be allowed to advertise that it has stopped using suppliers that use child labor or sweatshops?

Would a company be allowed to advertise that it has switched its offices to use renewable energy to help with climate change?

Beautiful ad.

It made me think how many strange beautiful worlds humans may have destroyed already.

It's a bit ironic that we then create fiction and movies, say like Lord of the Rings, that invent all sorts of fantastical lost worlds, when we have all sorts of them right now, and we don't bother to preserve them.

So in layman's terms the orangutan's thought process is like so; I just saw a Tiger. The last time I saw one it was hanging around the area for X minutes.

I'll wait till then before I call out the safe noise.

I wonder what happens to orangutans that cry wolf?

What I understood is the the warning sound wailed when the risk is far enough not to notice the alarm.

about the "cry wolf" topic, a related topic is this one: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141125-four-animals-that-li...

The article should have said "we just found that some orangutans can also talk about the past. We are excited to look for other animals that can do the same."

Whales should be able to do so. They have family links that transcend more that fifty years.

Agree, it's minor but I find the headline annoying.

Well, it's a good thing that we're whipping them out by destroying their natural habitat. We don't need any competition. We need that sweet palm oil so we can burn it as biodiesel and destroy the whole planet.

I don't know what about orangutans impresses me, but when I watch a video of an orangutan, it never feels like I'm watching a video of "an animal". There is something very "human" about orangutans, even more than chimps, bonobos or gorillas.

Could we let other apes and animals evolve over millions of years under our supervision and eye?

If so, could a more advance species have done the same with us and is now observing us from a distance?

isn't that the main loop hole of who was born first? chicken or the egg?

Egg was first by millions of years.

Do you mean "cell" which is neither egg (which is a specific specialized kind of a cell - reproductive) nor chicken?

Well, the cellular specialization arose long before amphibians emerged from bodies of water, and amphibians laid eggs long before birds evolved, eventually branching out into any species of chicken.

That's basically the premise of the Uplift series by David Brin.

The premise of that series is that except for the original species, there had always been intervention to uplift not just observation. Humans had been a bit of a surprise because they had no apparent uplifters. IIRC the general viewpoint was that self-evolution in this way was just not possible so there must have been some kind of deception involved.

> Could we let other apes and animals evolve over millions of years under our supervision and eye?

I think we must assume we cannot. There hasn't been any major civilization that has been around for more than a few hundred or thousands of years.

If we construct such a project in a way that it has a 0.01% chance to crumble in a single year (which is why lower than anything our society can achieve right now), there's about a 10% chance it fails within 10k years, a 63% chance it fails in 100k years, and a 99.995% chance it fails within a million years.

Given enough advancements in computer science we could simulate millions years of apes evolution within a span of days or hours and observe the results. Which is the basis of the argument for simulation hypothesis [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

I don't buy it. Gorillas can talk about past experiences also at least

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