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I had no idea laughter had previously been believed as confined to so few species.



> I had no idea laughter had previously been believed as confined to so few species.

What humans believe about other species tells us a lot about humans, and nothing about other species.


Reminds me of

[My father] taught me “See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird–you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way,” and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on. Richard Feynman, “What Is Science?“, presented in 1966


I think it is more that it is now demonstrated to be a feature of at least this many species.




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