Chimps'r' not us: t hey do not use speech or language (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, July 19, 2019, 23:00 (1955 days ago) @ David Turell

They have been taught a tiny amount of sign language they use to ask for things:

https://mindmatters.ai/2019/07/researchers-apes-are-just-like-us/

"Not only did signing apes never become common, the number of research programs studying ape signing has gone from a few to even fewer. At its peak in the 1970s, the field of teaching apes to communicate with humans never had more active research programs than you could count on your fingers and toes; today, there is not even a single program anywhere in the world making publishable claims. Backwards is not where promising directions in research tend to go. In every field of science, when we see researchers abandoning projects, the reason nearly always tends to be that the project was a dead end.

"The apes were using their symbol knowledge really only as a type of begging, when they wanted to play, eat, drink, or be tickled — little different than a dog pushing its bowl over to you with its nose when it is hungry. Any claims grander than this — for example, of sentence structure or evidence of emotions or how the ape was feeling — were likely nothing more than self-deception on the part of researchers who would prompt their apes and over-interpret their responses.

"One writer understands the story as the recurring fairy tale of the Animals That Can Talk:

“'But like all fairy tales, the one about talking apes is partly make-believe. No matter how much we wish to project ourselves onto them, they are still apes—albeit very intelligent ones. They deserve our respect, and, at the very least, proper care. Our original plan for these apes—to study their capacity for language—has more or less been achieved, and it’s unclear how much more we can learn, as apes like Koko and Kanzi are reaching old age. Through these projects, we’ve learned about the ability of nonhuman apes to associate symbols or signs with objects in the world and to use this knowledge to communicate with humans. We’ve learned about the uniqueness of human language. But we may also have learned something about how strange, stubborn, and fanciful we can be.”

"Later in the article, we are informed that a researcher has compiled a list of 60 to 80 gestures that she believes to be “ape language phonics.” We are told, “Distilling the meaning of those various sounds and gestures when put together, however, will be a much more challenging and drawn-out task.”

"Indeed, and it’s a task no ape would think to do. But we are expected to avoid considering the significance of that fact. And, to preserve the truthiness of the fairy tale, most readers gladly comply."

Comment: We may look somewhat alike in body shape and form, but we are vastly different, despite all the attempts to try to make us seem much less different than we are. Our difference strongly suggests there is a God.