"Critics also allege that the abilities of apes like Koko and Kanzi are overstated by their loving caregivers. Readers with pets may recognize this temptation; we can’t help but attribute intelligence to creatures we know so well."

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

We see all the time that even with humans, as intelligent as we are, we judge people for how they are constant. I'm sure we ask have encountered people in our lives that as the more we talked to them we realized that our assumptions of them the first we times you meet were wrong. Some people you think are really smart and then it turns out the opposite and vice versa.

I would even argue that the opposite is true. Those who do not spend time with these animals and those that do not have pets, often tend to assume the animals aren't very smart because they don't have languages and technology.

When there is no shared common language, you must gather knowledge of how smart these animals are by studying their mannerisms, and that is something that can only be done by spending time with these animals. Maybe that's why "the abilities of apes like Koko and Kanzi are overstated by their loving caregivers". The abilities aren't overstated, but understood. Everyone else undrained the abilities because they are not present enough.

https://youtu.be/SIOQgY1tqrU?t=1h28m1s

He completely dismisses Koko but considers Kanzi to be more credible.

I have to say I'm very thankful to have found HN. I grew up in a decent, moderately sized city (300k) going to a private religious school with children whose parents were similarly strongly interested in the intellectual development of their children.

I had access to all the sports teams. I played soccer through Varsity, played with the golf team [but note I was not on the golf team, hehe], and basketball in middle school. I played piano for 8 years. I attended one of the top 5 schools of my field in the nation, and graduated into a small company with other graduates from my school, MIT, etc. From 'good places'.

Because of this, education was always something I always took for granted. I always valued it, but always took it for granted. My education, however, took humans for granted. Your value to society was sometimes considered limited by what you could produce. Additionally, many of those I highschooled and undergraduated with held little reservation filtering people out of their life based on, I'll call it, 'being dumb'.

This always bothered me. I believed in the intrinsic value of the human, so I always sought to correct for it. Because I always tried my hardest, it never occurred to me how people could willfully and knowingly not aspire themselves to something greater than what required minimal effort. Everyone I grew up with did, I did, and my parents did, so naturally I assumed everyone else did, too. As such, I was regularly perplexed at the value judgements certain colleagues would place on other members of humanity.

So I left that company, and struck out on my own. I have since discovered what a rare breed my background nurtured, and now understand the wisdom in filtering those you spend time with. Instead of a prideful superiority [which I certainly observed], I exercise with a cautious respect for, and in protection of, talent and time. I exercise without placing value judgements on the people I come in contact with, but I do judge the values of the people I spend time with. In this way I safely continue to respect their humanity, and avoid pride.

It's only since I moved and became aware of my need to protect that I became aware of how hard it is to find knowledge seekers. And so, when I come across someone from a different field but similar excellence, who carries with them persuasive content helpful for advancement, I am thankful.

And so I am thankful to have found HackerNews, and specifically this lecture material that I can't wait to watch.

It's very important to surround yourself with excellence. You'll become the ones you're around, and believe their idiocy, if you're not careful.

Be careful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Worth a read. Doesn't mean to say animals can't be intelligent, and in fact it shows they can be, but in unexpected ways.

(tl;dr - horse that people thought could count but was actually looking for its handler to smile when it hit the right number)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication

I have a very strong suspicion that our idea of intelligence basically boils down to "can you communicate with it easily?"

Barely? Humans have an incredibly unique ability to constantly create new sentences, infinitely many of which can express the same idea. That is a unique facet of the human brain.

Being snide about humans doesn't make apes any more intelligent. They simply don't have the same linguistic capabilities.

Which has nothing to do with them being intelligent or not.

It would be awesome to see aliens land here with blatantly superior technology, but they have no linguistics at all. Finally everyone would stop thinking you can't have intelligence without linguistics.

Edit: Individuals may be smart with or without language. I believe that to be an open question. But technology is the domain of culture, and communication between individuals (diffusion and reuse of ideas, especially) becomes a lot more important.

The claim he made is that people think intelligence requires linguistics - he then goes on to say that aliens may be communicating in some different way that doesn't require linguistics.

At any rate, a number of the arguments made in this thread are absolutely absurd. Of course intelligence doesn't require linguistics - linguistics is merely one of the markers of intelligence.

And of course creatures can communicate without language - it happens in nature every day.

Edit: it occurs to me that DNA/RNA are made of natural symbols, which is a pretty good argument for symbols being important.

A good reason to use symbols in communication is for reliability (which is needed in the DNA). With a discrete set of symbols you have most likely no degradation (instead some recovery occurs -- like when you interpret a poorly written letter), and with a small chance you understand a completely different symbol. This stops error propagation.

Moreover, symbols allow for easy combination, which expands indefinitely the vocabulary with a fixed cost.

It doesn't seem like chimps are able to acquire that the same as humans are, given things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky

The signs end up being things like "Grape eat Nim" or "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."

You might think that things like this might reinforce the idea that language capacity is innate in humans, and that it differs in qualitative (and not merely quantitative) ways from communication in other species, but people are still wrapped up in some combination of strict behaviourism and the tabula rasa on the one hand and cultural constructionism on the other hand that they can't seem to see the data sitting in front of them. I don't think we'll get very far until we accept that the communicative aspect of language is merely a lossy format for serializing and transmitting internal data structures that may or may not have any correspondence with physical realities (apart from neuronal state). "A language" is just an agreed-upon format, like JSON, XML, or Gerry Sussman's "everything is a Lisp" notation(s), but without that config file, the general-purpose serializer/deserializer library is just unreachable code.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

>They simply don't have the same linguistic capabilities.

They are really not very different from us in terms of linguistic abilities. Our linguistic abilities are mostly a matter of socialization of history.

Feral humans won't be much smarter than an ape.

I mean that no other species has the ability to do the same.

> And what is the value in expressing the same thing in so many different ways? I don't see how you can argue that saying the same things over and over is intelligent.

Saying the same thing over and over again is not "intelligent." But being able to produce an infinite set of linguistic expressions which express the same idea is atomically indicative of a higher order of linguistic creativity than anything any other species is capable of. I'd say that qualifies as intelligence.

> They are really not very different from us in terms of linguistic abilities. Our linguistic abilities are mostly a matter of socialization of history.

I'm going to have to disagree in a major way with this. Humans have an innate, generative grammar that allows for a completely different system of communication and thought than that of animals. Animals, at best, may have something like words. But they do not have grammar. That's huge.

> Feral humans won't be much smarter than an ape. Difficult to judge which would be "smarter." Secondly, not sure what argument you're making. You're saying that our linguistic abilities are not very different than apes, because they are socializations. But you also claim that humans without language are roughly as intelligent as apes. So, if language does not correspond to intelligence, does that imply that feral humans are just as intelligent as normal humans?

Feral humans lack language because the brief period of time in which the human brain greatly expands its linguistic learning capabilities (infancy and young toddler-hood) is spent in isolation -- critical linguistic facets of the brain are never exercised. That period of development does not come back. Their brains are simply underdeveloped, in a fundamental way. I'd say that qualifies as less intelligent.

I'd recommend picking up "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.

Dolphins likely can. They're capable of inventing novel tricks, and then communicating the behavior with a different dolphin, proven by them doing the same new trick in synchrony without either having seen it before. They are also capable of communicating abstract concepts to dolphins in a separate partition of the tank who they can "hear" but not see. We don't know if their language has an equivalent of "sentences", I guess, so you may be technically correct, but I find it hard to imagine a method in which the complex and abstract concepts Dolphins have been shown to communicate only have a single or small finite number of representations.

Captive Dolphins can also understand syntax in human sentences. They understand the difference between "get the hoop and then the ball", and "get the ball and then the hoop". And they can generalize this to different concepts and numbers of clauses, and tend to act confused if the sentence is egregiously ungrammatical. They also understand future and past tense, and the difference between a statement and a question. Is it likely that they would understand our language so well if they didn't have something fairly similar of their own, if they hadn't developed language capabilities at a young age? They seemingly have a better ability to understand human language than feral children.

Finally, there is evidence that the Shannon entropy of dolphin language is at least 3-4. Human languages are around 8-9, but not enough data has been collected to know that the Dolphin language isn't more complex, and captive Dolphins may have less sophisticated communication than wild ones. In any case, I think even if their language is effectively determined by only 3-4 letter sequences (their "alphabet" is about the same size as English - ~27 whistles) rather than 8-9, that's still complex enough for me to doubt your claim that language capabilities are unique to humans.

You mean wild children? They're brain-damaged by lack of key stimulation in critical developmental periods. They're not healthy members of the species, so the species can't be judged by how they behave.

Normal humans grow up with other humans, and learn language from those humans. Normal humans are socialized.

That's just the main way we are able to recognize intelligence. At least thus far we have had a devil of a time figuring out how to identify intelligence in the absence of communication.

The eyes might be windows to the soul, but communication is the best window to the brain that I know of.

You heard a human recently?!? All I've been getting for the past couple of years are incoherent emails and text messages with all sorts of weird smiley faces.

Every time I go out I see lots of humans but they're all staring at these strange devices that you used to be able to talk into.

edgy/10

(The book I'm reading: http://www.amazon.com/WWW-Trilogy-Robert-J-Sawyer/dp/0441018...)

I'm about ready to say that all animal and human science from the 30s through the 50s should be tossed. From all birds mating for life, belly-dragging dinos, to apes that cannot hold their breath ... were they just making stuff up?

once, to decide the issue for myself, i started Audacity and loaded in various animal recordings as well as human. The animal phrases (at least in the recordings what i had) were generally shorter, yet they pretty much consisted of the same modulations. The animals do have the tools of speech and they do have speech:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/catch-the...

"He discovered that this species' communication system is so advanced, not only do they have different warning calls depending on the type of predator - coyote, domestic dog, human, hawk - they also construct sentences describing what a particular predator looks like. So, "a medium, rectangle-shaped dog with yellow fur (we call them German shepherds) is approaching”, or “Here comes a tall human being wearing a green t-shirt who is also fat.” (I’m teasing, prairie dogs, I’m sure your sentences sound much more elegant.)

By showing captive prairie dogs a number of simple silhouetted shapes such as triangles, circles and squares, Slobodchikoff also determined that they can come up with new calls to communicate to each other about things they’ve never seen before."

I've come to realize that science is always wrong, when viewed with a long enough lens. It does the best it can at the time - i.e. let's spray everyone with DDT, or let's put lead into paint and gasoline, or let's introduce species x to control species y then x becomes a problem, etc.

Then years later science figures out those were terrible ideas, but shockingly everyone just says "NOW we know better, forget about before, trust us THIS time".

Does anyone else not realize it's exactly the same thing, and ~50 years from now science will know that lots of what we're doing today is a really bad thing to be doing? In 2050 someone will say "Science from the 1990's - 2020s should be tossed, they were just making stuff up"

Before science started correcting itself, it was correcting perceptions based on religion and culture. For example, the germ theory of disease ran headlong into the older idea (not based on science) that doctors couldn't have dirty hands because they were gentlemen.

The belief that animals do not share capabilities with man arises from culture, specifically Western Christian culture. God made man in his own image and gave man dominion over the dumb beasts of the world. Man ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which set him apart from animals.

This still dominates theoretical thinking of animal behavior. If scientists went purely off of observations, most questions would have this answer: we don't know yet. Instead observations are climbing uphill against preconceived notions.

Studies of consciousness run into the same thing. The distinction between brain and mind goes back to the body/soul distinction from thousands of years of religion and culture. There is no evidence at all to suggest that minds exist apart from brains. Yet the question of "where consciousness comes from" is still asked seriously by people who think of themselves as serious scientists.

As someone who you might fit in to the category "evangelical Protestant" I find it hard to believe there are "many" relative to the whole set. Any sources?

Cloud seeding is pretty widely known; most people seem to be convinced that there is a human element to current climate change.

The concept of "stewardship of creation" is pretty widespread amongst evangelical Christians, that God handed over the world in to our care and that we've largely screwed it up. One of the largest Protestant communities, the Church of England, for example have altered their investment policy to avoid companies who are involved in activities that they see as contributing to unwanted climate change. (eg https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2015/07/ur...)

Often I hear that it's "loony USA evangelicals" but at least the USA National Association of Evangelicals [which seems to be a large and influential body] accepts some climate change has human origins and that we should act to reduce our negative impact whilst simultaneously acting to aid the poor who are disproportionally affected by current changes in climate (eg http://nae.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Loving-the-Least-o...).

Of course we'll make mistakes along the way. That's how you learn. Some will in fact be disastrous. Such is the cost of scientific progression. Best we can do is hope to mitigate the negative affects as much as possible.

As a counter example, despite all the negative things we read about, life expectancy and quality of life continues to go up. The system appears to be working.

I fundamentally disagree. An enormous amount of science has been right, and has lasted essentially unchanged since the time of discovery. No one is refuting the germ theory of infection, information theory, or classical mechanics any time soon.

A lot of belief has been asserted and sustained by people who stand to gain from that belief being widely held. This is always happening, whether it is the Pope or Dow Chemical, and this is most of the science that gets discovered wrong after the fact. Most of it would have been proved wrong immediately if results hadn't been faked or attempted verifications hadn't been prevented or suppressed.

I'm excluding theories that are first approximations that are further refined later from 'made up' science, of course.

And none of those things are science per se. They are technology and just mistakes in general.

Also see Isaic Asimov's The relativity of wrong: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

i.e. We don't really know for certain what will happen if we seed clouds with nitrogen to alter the weather - so let's not (in reality we are doing this)

and

We don't know for sure if these hormones we're injecting into livestock have down-the-line health consequences for the people eating them, so we shouldn't do that.

We should stop messing with stuff we really don't understand, and actually don't even need to be messing with - leave well enough alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle#Critic...

We absolutely should use the best theories we have to try to predict outcomes of our actions, and apply them incrementally instead of globally where possible. But sometimes more damage is caused by avoiding risk (time wasted planning, lives lost that could have been saved, etc.) than would be lost if the experiment in question goes wrong.

Often the only way to "know for sure" is to do something and see what happens.

That's not progress, that's excess.

Says you, those wanting to ski have a different opinion, who are you to prevent other people from deciding what they consider progress? You sound like a Luddite from old England railing against technology.

Obviously it's not up to me personally, but I'm someone that cares about the future, and not messing with things we don't understand.

>* You sound like a Luddite from old England railing against technology.*

That's an interesting thing to say, as I'm a Software Engineer, and one of the most "techie" people I know.

And yet your default opinion is don't touch things we don't understand, which prevents us from ever understanding them; you must see how illogical that is.

So which primates have corticospinal projections for their vocal cords? Okay, that's actually a trick question because the vocal cords are innervated via cranial nerves emanating from the medulla [3], rather than via spinal cord. However, in humans, there are direct monosynaptic projections from cortex to these medullary motor neurons. These projections do not exist in macaques (and presumably not in other monkeys) or in chimpanzees [4, see fig 2]. I'm not sure if it's known whether gorillas or orangutans have them.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramidal_tracts#Corticospinal_tract
  2. http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n5/full/nm1595.html
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_ambiguus
  4. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943881400107X

Computers history taught me that high resolution is not needed to achieve complex forms of communications (for instance ascii had 3 level deep structure separator, pretty much ignored). I feel like an 4K version of a fish, sure I may have finer and more complex communication scheme, but that doesn't mean they don't communicate the same idea between each others through different and simpler means.

About voice control, most people don't even understand what they do with it. Ask someone to modulate vowels to match a foreign accent. Or sing. The variations between airflow, tone, timbre, etc... Then you start to understand a bit more about what your vocal apparatus can do.

When a dog is leashed to a tree, and runs around it until there's no more slack, I have yet to see one that figures out it needs to run around the other way.

That said, your central (and valid) point actually agrees with the above poster: To use criteria to determine "intelligence" is good science; to declare animals can't have intelligence or anything related to intelligence because they aren't humans is empty.

He was never formally trained to do this. :)

Quite often 'intelligence' is linked in desire to try things. Mice can get stuck when deprived of some confidence inducing hormones while the confident group will keep trying.

Nature is weird.

Same system, different trade-offs.

So there's precedent, after a fashion.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814836/

1. That people thought chimps could use complex language. If they have the capability, why don't they use it in the wild? It'd be a huge advantage.

2. That no human was killed by Nim. Everyone managed to emerge alive (though not unscathed).

Gwern's review of Project Nim echoes my sentiments: http://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2015/03#filmtv

Also, even if a single smart chimp discovered complex language on its own, what good would it do? (S)he would also have to know another smarter-than-average chimp who was smart enough to pick it up, and then, the knowledge would have to spread to a larger group fairly soon in order to survive.

Chimps could be relatively close to the brink of learning complex language, needing only a relatively small push to get over it.

The idea that apes have this ability but none ever figured out how to use it in order to gain an advantage is akin to the idea that mice could fly to escape predators but just never got the "small push" to figure it out.

The idea at the time was "let's push them hard to see how far they can get". Was the answer a guaranteed yes? No, but neither was it a guaranteed no. After all, we know that the ape called Homo sapiens did learn the trick, and we also know how much of a difference pushing a human towards a goal can make (see for example the Polgar sisters or quite a few tennis players).

That's why I mentioned robins and blue tits. AFAIK, we don't know why robins discovered the bottle opening trick, but never managed to engrain it in their culture, while blue tits did.

Because it's long been a huge advantage for humans over every other animal on this planet?

If the last common ancestor of apes and humans was 4 million years ago, why haven't apes lost all their body hair and developed the ability to run on hind legs?

Because they don't live on the open Savannah, of course.

Speech & advanced tool making is more complicated, but we can surmise similar ideas apply.

For example, maybe human pack endurance hunting in the Savannah increased the value of social structure and sophisticated communication.

FWIW, apes do use simple tools.

Evolution is not about the future. It has no goal. It’s a thing that has happened.

http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-languag...

"Koko enjoys seeing human nipples and will request her female caregivers to show them to her on occasion."

But after some googling it appears to be true..

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)#Life

http://www.ibtimes.com/octopus-made-better-world-cup-predict...

  Handler: How about coughing?
  Ape: Sneezes.
  Handler: That was good!

  Handler: Koko, can you sneeze?
  Ape: Blows Nose.
  Handler: ...

Just because something (ape breath control) looks like something else (speech prerequisites), doesn't mean theyre the same thing...

We could go with a purely information theoretic notion of genetic complexity, but that's not ideal because genomes with a lot of random accumulated cruft would seem more complex than they really are.

Maybe with the benefit of hindsight, we could say an organism was more evolved if its lineage remained relatively stable over long periods of time or across different environments. By that measure, it's still too soon to say whether humans are more evolved than cyanobacteria or the crocodile, but at least we have a chance.

Evolved-ness refers to amount of time that something has been evolving.

Adaptability refers to the ability of an organism or a species to survive in a new environment.

Complexity, like you said, more or less corresponds to genome size.

Rice is actually genetically more complex than humans are, so assuming humans and rice have a common ancestor, we are equally evolved but not equally complex. It is debatable whether or not rice is more adaptable than humans.