I am fascinated with this and terrified at the same time. Thoughts?
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I dont think there is anything to be terrified about this. We are applying our abilities and intelligence to train them and help them associate auditory patterns (words) to objects, etc. If chimps could communicate better without our help, they would have done that already. Many pet animals respond to speech and commands. This particular experiment stretches it a bit further though. The whole point is to learn more about ourselves by understanding our evolutionary ancestors.
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I agree with you entirely and me being a Sci-Fi nerd I see the potential in a couple of hundred years if natural selection of the traits in question goes viral if you will, I see a great potential of understanding earth like we haven't been able
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I have heard arguments that we are going against evolution and natural selection because if the primates were "Meant" to have it they would have developed it already. Personally I think this reeks of the Human Specialty Syndrome. Thoughts?
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Chimps do communicate among themselves using their own memes and gestures. They already recognize objects and can communicate such information to their peers. All we did was to train them to understand our form of communication to a small extent to enable communication between us and the chimp in question. We dint confer any survival advantage to that particular chimp through this process and were merely experimenting to understand their level of intelligence and dexterity. Contd..
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So I dont think the question of messing up with evolution and natural selection arises here. By the way, what's this 'Human Specialty Syndrome' all about? I've never heard of it?
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Well ppl think we as a race were divinely chosen for things like speech and so are somehow more special than anything else
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Many animals communicate through sound and we being at the pinnacle of evolution, are able to use the same ability in a much more sophisticated manner. Creationist theory, just like geocentric theory of the universe, is a reminiscent of our past understanding of the world and nothing more in my opinion.
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yet it enshrouds my generation like a drunken stupor
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Im curious as to the knowledge exchange on both sides, we could pass to them technologies that they could use and in return information about the earth that they themselves are more intune with and so more readily connected with the earth itself. The question is what tech for what info?
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Your thought of knowledge transfer between primates and us makes me wonder too. What information do they have that we can use and what can a trained primate when re-incorporated back into its native group carry to its peers that will eventually become part of their culture? Primates have been around humans for some time now; have they learned anything from us? contd..
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Animals while having poor reasoning capabilities sometimes have specialized senses and instincts (some birds for example can predict weather and move away, dogs have far better hearing capabilities, etc.). Early human civilizations did use cues from animals to understand weather and predict predator movements. Is there any information that we can gain from communicating with primates which can't be learnt from observing them? Interesting!
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Exactly! I'm excited but at the same time I don't think that this current society could responsibly handle something like that. If all of the sudden we got a gorilla that can speak a coherent language and reason based off of this and people start saying "Oh its an animal, it doesn't have rights" contd...
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That thing is gonna be throwin' cars around like it was going out of style. Then if we put it down, that is gonna cause a freaking riot and rightly so, and we as humans wouldn't be able to take them. Planet of the Apes just walking off the screen. That is if we mess it up.
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