From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Apr 29 2002 - 14:33:16 MDT
"Dickey, Michael F" wrote:
>
> Really? I have read accounts of Chimps creating new words (calling other
> chimps the symbol for feces and combining it with 'bad') and politely asking
> researches to leave the rooms when they figured out that the researches were
> interfereing in there candy/treat winning excersize (these were relayed in
> Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden) Its hard to believe that no chimps have ever
> even achieved rudimentary language skills, considering how similiar they are
> to us physiologically. Humans in thier first 80,000 years probably resorted
> to a few basic syllaballes of grunts and shouts, and not much more.
For a grounding in the real science on this issue, I recommend Terrence
Deacon, "The Symbolic Species".
Most of what is propagated about chimps' amazing language faculties is bunk.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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