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Highbrow Highjinks Come to an End
nickynicky9doors writes "The Sidney Morning Herald has an article debunking the long standing theory of our specie's dominance based on a proportionally greater development of the frontal lobe.
MRI scanning suggest... 'proportionately, there is no major difference in the relative size of the frontal cortex among humans and their closest relatives.'"
Actually, the experiments with teaching sign language to chimpanzees and gorillas demonstrated that human language acqusition and use are different from other primates. People are specialized to learn language; a child will learn spoken language barring severe neurological damage or neglect. (Interestingly, deaf babies have been observed babble-signing with their hands.) Further, children not only acquire pronunciation and vocabulary, but are able to fit them into syntactical grammatical frameworks of arbitrary complexity. Chimpanzees can sign "give drink fruit," but cannot tell a story. "Smarter," though, is a different issue. Chimpanzees and bonobos are brilliant at being chimpanzees and bonobos. Assuming that we don't end life on our planet, we might just be brilliant at being us.
-- "Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep voting? Do you think you're voting for something?"
I was just trying to find this paper in Nature Neuroscience (as referenced in the article) and all that's returned is...
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It's not in Nature either. The newest paper I can find is: Am J Phys Anthropol 2001 Mar;114(3):224-41 which is only area 10 and is hardly new enough to be "news for nerds". Anybody have the correct cite?
--everytime you learn something a piece of your brain is replaced by something that someone else said