: See response to Forrest, I obviously wasn't clear enough
: about other species needing to be taught complex
: symbolic language... my bad.
No, it's just that both Forrest and I consider the species-wide possession of a complex language to be irrelevant to this issue. Intelligence, self-awareness, linguistic skill, and all those lovely things are individual attributes, and it's individual performance which allows us to estimate them.
There are a host of factors that go into whether a species as a whole will pick up the use of a complex syntactical language. Whether they have the mental equipment to understand and use complex language is one factor, but there's also whether they have the physical features to allow for different language types (for instance, humans can produce a much wider range of vocal sounds than apes); whether various language types would be particularly useful in their environment; whether individuals who know the language are interested in teaching it to those who don't; and so forth. Trying to judge the abilities of individual members of a species by observing the current state of the species as a whole is like comparing national test scores and concluding that American children are naturally less intelligent than those of other countries. Which is true, but only because of the special type of radioactive fluoride with which the government treats the water and I try to tell the world but no one will listen to me NO ONE!
: No gdi! :) The Cahn and Wilson paper, a seminal paper
: regarding the use of genetic data to
: "coalesce" an origin date, is consistent
: with its own philosophy that modern humans and
: neanderthals are different species. This is one school
: of thought. The other, mostly composed of
: paleontologists, sees neanderthals and modern humans
: as members of the same species, with a much older date
: of origin. I'm absolutely positive that the consensus
: is a species origin of 200 tya at the *latest*. Bleh,
: not important. Also, just because a paper is 10 years
: old, doesn't mean it isn't cited with regularity.
: Though honestly, I just wanted to pass on to you an
: extreme limit for the species origin. I think the
: paper's crap because it doesn't account for
: population-level phenomena like bottlenecks. :)
It's cited with regularity--but a large number of the citations are of the form "An example of statistical error in an analysis of prehistoric genetic drift is..." :-) I'm not qualified to have a real opinion one way or the other, though.
: That isn't biological evolution. There's no doubt
: whatsoever that we've evolved over the last 2000
: years. What species doesn't? It's just that our
: evolution has generated something you can't see -- an
: incredible amount of genetic variation. That's the
: result of increased population size and medicines
: keeping crappy genes in the population.
What species doesn't? Well, most, except for bacteria, dogs and pepper moths. :-) Even punctuated equilibrium doesn't move *that* fast. And it's far from certain that our genetic variation is increasing overall. While modern medicine does remove some selective pressures, an increased span of reproductive viability increases others. Problems like cancer and heart disease, which earlier humans rarely lived to experience, now directly impact our ability to have children.
Of course, I can't deny that we've changed genetically in *some* manner since the year 0 (actually, it's probably more appropriate to date the "explosion" from 800 BC or so, when most of the Mediterranean civilizations really got going). Certainly some new mutations have been added, some trait frequencies have been altered, our wisdom teeth got a little smaller, that sort of thing. But there's no evidence that our brains have changed noticeably, that our babies don't think like Sumerian babies did (well, unless you believe Snow Crash), that you can point to a gene and say "This change is why we have the Internet now and we didn't 3 millennia ago."
: Oops. Back to point. Ultimately, it is environment that
: dictated the initial stages of selective evolution and
: made it possible for cultural evolution to speed up in
: Europe. And that, in and of itself, is not random. One
: depends on the other.
Oh, I agree. But my point was that the pressures here were environmental, and the evolution was cultural. It wasn't a biological quirk that made Greek culture (say) develop faster than Inuit culture (say). Nor did the Greeks *become* biologically different from Inuits as a result of their cultural development. It's clearly possible for a population to have the intellectual potential (given the right physical tools, including their own bodies, and the right environment) for writing, science, playing the nose-flute, and whatever they'll figure out how to do in the year 4,000, and for that population to nevertheless chug along for eons without actually realizing that potential.
: And I love the question, and the fact that people are
: spending time trying to answer it. I just question, as
: any good skeptic would, the meaning of such studies'
: findings.
Skepticism runs both ways, though. The baseline position before any facts are received ought to be that apes and dolphins and, hell, centipedes *might* be sentient, not that they aren't. What evidence is there to lean the skeptic towards the negative? (Don't even bother mentioning evidence against centipede intelligence. I've seen Naked Lunch; I know what they can do.)
: I think if you'll go back and read my posts, you'll find
: that I'm only questioning *you*, not agreeing with
: those who argue differently than you. ::launches SCUD
: at SD, misses, hits the Campanile:
Inasmuch as you're giving the species-wide use of a complex language as a necessary criterion for intelligence and self-awareness and sentience, I think you're following the "update criterion as necessary" methodology. Why focus on language at all? Are mentally retarded people, autistics, people with Broca's area damage, and stroke victims not self-aware or intelligent or sentient merely because they lack the mental software/physical organs/inclination to form complex sentences?
: I think the discussion has matured a great deal more than
: that. When naturalists were making the tool argument,
: a German guy postulated that the three human
: "races" each evolved from a different great
: ape. (Whites from chimps, blacks from gorillas, and
: asians from orangtuans.) I'd like to think we've come
: a long way since then. The argument is more subtle now
: -- it has to do with intellectual capacity. Which is
: right on, IMO, since that is something that comes in
: shades, rather than tool use which is a stupid
: absolute.
But an argument that's focused on language is just as restrictive as one focused on tool use. One has only to glance at a sample of humanity to see that skill with languages is a very small facet of the total intellectual spectrum. The ability to solve problems (in a very wide sense, of course) and to comprehend the emotional states of others and react appropriately is, IMO, a more reliable general indicat
or.
: Dolphins continue to astound me, too. What's more
: impressive about that report was that the dolphins, in
: many instances, didn't need more than one try to get
: it right.
Personally, I think that dolphins can probably process information and in general "think" faster and about more things at once than we can. But that's based on information for which "anecdotal" would be a euphemism, so I'll class this as my personal religion for now. :-)
: I think our species owns a diversity of attributes, some
: extremely positive, some extremely negative, some
: neither. We also seem to own the ability to make
: judgement decisions about our own attributes, which
: must be a requisite for overcoming what we do that's
: wrong. How long it takes us to figure *that* out,
: however, I have no idea. :(
I finished perfecting myself last week, actually. I get a prize for being the first, right?
--SiliconDream
