These bonobos can even invent metaphors...The secret, at least according to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, head scientist at the Great Ape Trust near Des Moines, is to expose primates to language when they are still infants. Of course, this isn't the first time talking chimps have threatened to dethrown Chomsky and his Innate Grammar Machine, but these poetic bonobos are pretty persuasive.
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Sounds like the kids I used to babysit:
Panbanisha the bonobo is up to her tricks again.
For the second time in as many months, the ape triggered a fire alarm at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa research center.
The trouble started Wednesday morning, when Panbanisha wanted to go outside but the staff…
In this TED Talk Susan Savage-Rumbaugh discusses bonobos housed in a bispecies environment that have been taught to communicate using pictographs. In the talk she suggests that biology isn't what made humans unique from nonhuman apes, but rather argues that it was cultural developments and…
Hollywood cavemen typically communicate with grunts and snorts, reflecting a belief that human language originated like this and slowly evolved into the rich and sophisticated tongues we use today. But researchers from Emory University, Atlanta have found evidence that the origins of human…
Edward Feser has posted a reply to my previous post about original sin. I shall reply in two posts, but that will be it from my side. If Feser wants to reply to these posts then he can have the last word.
The problem is this: Several lines of evidence tell us that there was never a time when the…
Here we go again: Another bold claim that great apes can be taught language. It took years to dispell the myth that chimpanzees like Washoe and Nim Chimsky showed signs of generative grammar. According the Stephen Pinker in "How the Mind Works", some of researchers associated with "Chimps can learn to sign" were a tad bit aggressive with the data massaging, and for years refused to allow primatologists access to the data. Threats of lawsuits against those who questioned the data is not the sign of a reliable researcher.
It is not written in stone that Noam Chomsky is right, but there are other ways to scientifically falsify his theory if that's one's interest.
I was scrolling through your archives and came across an interesting spelling error in the last sentence of this post. I'm assuming you knew that the word is spelled "dethrone," but instead the homophone "dethrown" was activated when you were writing this. I often do the same thing with "write" and "right," typing one when I meant the other. Even though I clearly understand the difference between the two, apparently I think about these two words aurally rather than semantically.