The Human Animal (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, August 06, 2009, 19:29 (5587 days ago) @ dhw

Alison Gopnik asks: "Where does our distinctively human intelligence come from?" She says that "comparisons across species usually underpin evolutionary arguments, yet there is only one species that does what we do." But in the very next paragraph she says: "However, the fundamental link between childhood and intelligence can be found across a striking variety of species."
> 
> I don't want to attack the article, but am interested in the inferences. The fact is that everything she tells us about the human baby is equally applicable to (other) animals, apart from our taking longer to mature than they do. She says human babies don't have to do "the work of [...] mating, fighting and fleeing, they can discover how the world works and explore the possibilities it offers." No babies, human or animal, are in a position to mate, fight and flee, and just like human babies, young animals discover how their world works by play, observation and imitation. The same accidental parallels run right through the article. Alison Gopnik simply takes it for granted that we are different.
> - The fact that you make that argument pretty much means that reading the first half of Adler's book is unnecessary for you. While setting up his argument he constantly refers back to the behavioral and evolutionary psychologists that do exactly this sort of contradictory thing. (I too, was among that group.) - Of interest is this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090805144114.htm - A good chunk of the evolutionary argument is the question of "critical threshhold," above which we get human intelligence, below which, we do not. Much of this hinges on brain mass, and that article quite rapidly shows why the brain mass argument fails, as well as underlining that the Crows only solve problems when they are immediately in front of them. (Perceptual.) - To Adler, all the evidence at present suggests man is different in kind. A man without a mind wouldn't be a man. We can solve perceptual as well as purely mental problems. We can also store such problems for future solving. Few animals in the animal kingdom do anything similar. - Adler stresses throughout the book that it is not necessary to break phylogenetic continuity in order to assert a difference in kind, but that both materialists and immaterialists stress that it is so. - In my own case, I would agree that the present evidence indicates a difference in kind, but only by a hair.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"