Human VS Animal

[steevolution]

i believe the bonobos also have big red asses. and the females' genitals are red and enlarged. this i can do without. the males genitals... i don't know. i have no interest.

fu** i gotta spend some time with somethin other than a computer :-S

[Jamesy]

bonobos are very passive sensitive creatures, abit like a race I know...

[steevolution]

yeah, they're onto something. i'm passive and sensitive too, with a regular oilchange.

[Neo]

In experiments, Great Apes have shown the abllity to master a few hundred words - the ability to recognize and use them together to convey thoughts, not vocalize them.

In a recent New Scientist there's a story about a monkey researcher who noticed repeated vocal words and phrases (from the monkeys) and even figured out what they mean. Don't remember the species but it wasn't one of the great apes.

[Dominique355]

Hard to tell.Some farangs with hairy chest looks almost like a Gorilla to me.

If I shave, would you consider me as a human being?

[Deester]

Hard to tell.Some farangs with hairy chest looks almost like a Gorilla to me.

If I shave, would you consider me as a human being?

That might help a little.

[CiaranM]

Hard to tell.Some farangs with hairy chest looks almost like a Gorilla to me.

If I shave, would you consider me as a human being?

That might help a little.

what about an all-over body wax ??

[Deester]

Hard to tell.Some farangs with hairy chest looks almost like a Gorilla to me.

If I shave, would you consider me as a human being?

That might help a little.

what about an all-over body wax ??

On you? No, thank you.

[zeusbheld]

What makes human different than animal?

being able to control oneself :shock:

the careful observer will note that human beings ARE animals.

or... what do you think we are? vegetable? mineral? protozoan?

as for what makes human beings different from OTHER animals:

1) sophisticated language. many animals appear to have SOME language ability, none have OUR language ability. and the ability to acquire language is hard-wired, not random.

2) culture. a byproduct of language. we can communicate ideas, store them, build on what went before.

3) a moral sense. this appears to be a byproduct of our being social animals. it also appears to be built-in.

note that having a moral sense doesn't imply that we always act according to it ...

[zeusbheld]

Stress :roll:

all animals have that.

you think *you* got stress, you shoulda seen that cockroach when it figured out i was trying to step on it. now THAT is stress.

[zeusbheld]

In experiments, Great Apes have shown the abllity to master a few hundred words - the ability to recognize and use them together to convey thoughts, not vocalize them.

In a recent New Scientist there's a story about a monkey researcher who noticed repeated vocal words and phrases (from the monkeys) and even figured out what they mean. Don't remember the species but it wasn't one of the great apes.

in every experiment attempted so far, no primate--not apes, not chimps, not bonobos etc..-- has shown the ability to acquire grammar except homo sapiens. none. zip zip zero.

and the ability to acquire grammar is hard-wired, we're born with it or kids couldn't learn languages just by hearing them. once your'e "imprinted" with the language(s) you learn as a kid, it becomes somewhat more difficult--the wiring's 'set' and you have to study more systematically.

[zeusbheld]

The really neat trick we humans have that no other species seems to have mastered (as far as we know) is sophisticated speech which enables us to communicate - mind read each other almost - and thus cooperate.

Thats kind of a myth really. There are lots of animals that have quite sophisticated vocal communication, even having grammar and including eachother's names in their sentences. It might not be as sophisticated as ours, but its basically the same thing.

that's a myth.

if you can cite *any* sources saying *any* other animals have grammar please do, i'm sure i can find a few dozen researcher who say they can't.

[i_love_som_tam]

that's a myth.

if you can cite *any* sources saying *any* other animals have grammar please do, i'm sure i can find a few dozen researcher who say they can't.

woof woof. bow wow 8)

[Loburt]

In experiments, Great Apes have shown the abllity to master a few hundred words - the ability to recognize and use them together to convey thoughts, not vocalize them.

In a recent New Scientist there's a story about a monkey researcher who noticed repeated vocal words and phrases (from the monkeys) and even figured out what they mean. Don't remember the species but it wasn't one of the great apes.

in every experiment attempted so far, no primate--not apes, not chimps, not bonobos etc..-- has shown the ability to acquire grammar except homo sapiens. none. zip zip zero.

and the ability to acquire grammar is hard-wired, we're born with it or kids couldn't learn languages just by hearing them. once your'e "imprinted" with the language(s) you learn as a kid, it becomes somewhat more difficult--the wiring's 'set' and you have to study more systematically.

I did not write that they had the ability to acquire grammar.

[zeusbheld]

that's a myth.

if you can cite *any* sources saying *any* other animals have grammar please do, i'm sure i can find a few dozen researcher who say they can't.

woof woof. bow wow 8)

ok i should rephrase most, not all, humans have grammar.

[zeusbheld]

There was a documentary, Project X about the monkey Virgil that had learnt sign language.

8)

you mean the 'documentary' starring matthew broderick, right?

dear 2antique, i think slurms has hacked your profile.

[Ngairo]

"Don't remember the species but it wasn't one of the great apes."

They call them "Humans".....they have had far too much to say for themselves and still haven't sorted the 'world cup' out....hurry the fcuk.... up......

Argentina....xxxxx

[Dekka]

I like all Animals, but not all Human Beings. Animals don't **** in their own Nest.The human race does.Look at what we have done to this Beautiful Planet. We keep on Polluting it. All my respect is for the Amimal Kingdom, we should follow their example in this regard.I think we are too Dumd & Selfish to follow it.

[Loburt]

Hmmm... this was a surprise to find. Didn't expect it at all.

WASHINGTON (AP) April 26, 2006 -- The simplest grammar, long thought to be one of the skills that separate man from beast, can be taught to a common songbird, new research suggests.

Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature.

It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language.

Yet what they learned may shake up the field of linguistics.

While many animals can roar, sing, grunt or otherwise make noise, linguists have contended for years that the key to distinguishing language skills goes back to our elementary school teachers and basic grammar.

Sentences that contain an explanatory clause are something that humans can recognize, but not animals, researchers figured.

Two years ago, a top research team tried to get tamarin monkeys to recognize such phrasing, but they failed. The results were seen as upholding famed linguist Noam Chomsky's theory that "recursive grammar" is uniquely human and key to the facility to acquire language.

But after training, nine out of Gentner's 11 songbirds picked out the bird song with inserted warbling or rattling bird phrases about 90 percent of the time. Two continued to flunk grammar.

"We were dumbfounded that they could do as well as they did," Gentner said. "It's clear that they can do it."

Gentner trained the birds using three buttons hanging from the wall. When the bird pecked the button it would play different versions of bird songs that Gentner generated, some with inserted clauses and some without. If the song followed a certain pattern, birds were supposed to hit the button again with their beaks; if it followed a different pattern they were supposed to do nothing. If the birds recognized the correct pattern, they were rewarded with food.

Gentner said he was so unprepared for the starlings' successful learning that he hadn't bothered to record the songs the starlings sang in response.

"They might have been singing them back," Gentner said.

To put the trained starlings' grammar skills in perspective, Gentner said they don't match up to either of his sons, ages 2 and 9 months.

What the experiment shows is that language and animal cognition is a lot more complicated than scientists once thought and that there is no "single magic bullet" that separates man from beast, said Jeffrey Elman, a professor of cognitive science at UCSD, who was not part of the Gentner research team.

Marc Hauser, director of Harvard University's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, who conducted the tamarin monkey experiment, said Gentner's study was important and exciting, showing that "some of the cognitive sources that we deploy may be shared with other animals."

But Hauser said it still doesn't quite disprove a key paper he wrote in 2002 with Chomsky. The starlings are grasping a basic grammar, but not the necessary semantics to have the language ability that he and Chomsky wrote about.

Hauser said Gentner's study showed him he should have tried to train his monkeys instead of just letting them try to recognize recursive grammar instinctively.

But starlings may be more apt vocalizers and have a better grasp of language than non-human primates. Monkeys may be trapped like Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa, a man metamorphosized into a bug and unable to communicate with the outside world, Hauser suggested.

[zeusbheld]

In experiments, Great Apes have shown the abllity to master a few hundred words - the ability to recognize and use them together to convey thoughts, not vocalize them.

In a recent New Scientist there's a story about a monkey researcher who noticed repeated vocal words and phrases (from the monkeys) and even figured out what they mean. Don't remember the species but it wasn't one of the great apes.

in every experiment attempted so far, no primate--not apes, not chimps, not bonobos etc..-- has shown the ability to acquire grammar except homo sapiens. none. zip zip zero.

and the ability to acquire grammar is hard-wired, we're born with it or kids couldn't learn languages just by hearing them. once your'e "imprinted" with the language(s) you learn as a kid, it becomes somewhat more difficult--the wiring's 'set' and you have to study more systematically.

I did not write that they had the ability to acquire grammar.

my bad. wasn't intended to be a direct response to you guys, just reacting to primat language skills in general.

before the bolded part i *should* have written something to the effect of

"while some primates have the ability to acrquire a few words of sign language and even express themselves to a limited degree, this does not imply they have the capacity for sophisticated language. researchers have been consistently frustrated in trying to teach primates more sophisticated language."

the songbird article is interesting--while chomsky would likely respond that what they're doing is memory and not grammar, whatever songbirds do with their pea-sized brains is damned interesting. and damned complicated. will be interesting to see what further research along these lines turns up. i've seen where some researchers suggest they may even have a degree of cultural transmission of songs.

the apparent grammatical capacity of pea-brained birds, and apparent lack of grammatical capacity inclever primates, appears to lend some rather strong support to the notion that grammatical ability is hard-wired.

i dont think anything conclusive has been done with whale songs or porpoises, it seems possible that they *could* possess the tools of sophisticated language and even cultural transmission, but that's speculation as far as i know. also, as far as i know they don't seem as intensely social as humans and group sizes tend to be relatively small (group size is likely to have an impact on the evolution of language ability as manifest in humans; for birds its' strictly about mating as far as i know).

PS as to cats' sounds--housecats meow because of the symbiotic relationship with humans--we make a lot of noise so they tend to for our benefit. without human intervention their sounds are for babies to communicate with mommies, and once they're no longer kittens they tend to communicate with a rather complex tactile vocabulary.

the bottom line is it seems that a lot of animals have some form of language and may even have some limited ability to pass on ideas through generations (culture). i think what makes humans different is the degree and complexity of these things. the bottom line of the bottom line: we humans ain't all that special IMO.

[eagle]

Language is something all animals have. From grunts ,singing and signs to verbal skills. My understanding is its ego that seperates humans.

[Neo]

In experiments, Great Apes have shown the abllity to master a few hundred words - the ability to recognize and use them together to convey thoughts, not vocalize them.

In a recent New Scientist there's a story about a monkey researcher who noticed repeated vocal words and phrases (from the monkeys) and even figured out what they mean. Don't remember the species but it wasn't one of the great apes.

in every experiment attempted so far, no primate--not apes, not chimps, not bonobos etc..-- has shown the ability to acquire grammar except homo sapiens. none. zip zip zero.

Yes, the language distinction seems to be just a matter of complexity which isn't surprising since our brains are amongst the most complex on the planet (by glial to neuron ratio dolphin brains are more complex than humans)

But why bother teaching primates when they already have their own language...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4992598.stm

It's too soon to say if these monkeys have something that could be described formally as grammar but their language does seem to have some of the elements of grammar.

Then again, forget the monkeys, dolphins can be taught language rules and abstract concepts. It seems likely that as more research reveals the details of their own language(s) that we will find it has significant structure and quite possibly grammar.

Hardwired? Hmmm, thats a can of worms. If our language skills are hardwired then how come people can develop language skills in other parts of the brain when recovering from disease or injury?

[WHISKERS]

Communication isn't the difference between human and animal. . . animals communicate with each other just fine. And animals understand each other much better than we understand them. The real difference that everyone seems to be missing is that humans record what they've learned. And this knowledge is passed on and improved upon and passed on again and so on. Animals are aware of weather conditions, geological conditions(like earthquakes) etc without any of the technical machinery that we use. We are no smarter than people like Socrates and Plato, but we have their knowledge because it was recorded and we have the knowledge of others like them. Animals have the knowledge of survival because without linguistics or record keeping they are on their own in this big bad world.

(as I see it)

[zeusbheld]

...

Then again, forget the monkeys, dolphins can be taught language rules and abstract concepts. It seems likely that as more research reveals the details of their own language(s) that we will find it has significant structure and quite possibly grammar.

bottlenose dolphins for example have shown some very interesting behavior that would seem to indicate they have what we'd describe as consciousness, intentionality and intelligence.

personally i see their failure to communicate with h. sapiens as a sign of both lack of interest and superior intelligence

Hardwired? Hmmm, thats a can of worms. If our language skills are hardwired then how come people can develop language skills in other parts of the brain when recovering from disease or injury?

i use the word 'hard-wired' extremely glibly i'll admit--merely to indicate that we're bult with an innate bias toward aquiring sophisticated language including grammar, as opposed to built witha large, powerful but general-purpose CPU (blank slate theory).

capacity to acquire language appears to be hardwired in this sense, of a genetic predisposition. while different areas of the brain process different kinds of information, the brain is not all that compartmentalized physically. in cases of damage to the brain, language isn't the only function that may end up shifted to other areas of the brain. what's interesting is that now, between detailed imaging capabilities (we can really 'see' what parts of the brain are active when something is happening).

comes right down to it, there are a couple of things we can be fairly sure about:

1) we don't know all that much, and it's possible, even likely, that there are limits to what we are able to know.

2) homo sapiens are not nearly as special as homo sapiens like to think they are, and most of their specialness--complex cultural transmission for example--may be a matter of degree rather than kind.

[zeusbheld]

a link about dolphins.