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Evidence of Chimp Developing "Spoken" Language
testcase writes "The New Scientist has an article describing a bonobo who appears to have developed a simple vocabulary. Researchers who have analyzed recordings of the chimp have been able to identify four sounds he makes in different contexts indicating 'banana, grapes, juice and yes.'"
(And no, evolutionary biology doesn't count, because the creationists are operating outside the scientific community, not within it -- however much the "intelligent design" people might like to believe otherwise.)
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The most interesting thing about this is that the bonobo in question learned this stuff on his own. We've all heard about sign language, chimps pointing to symbols on keyboards or screens or whatever... all that stuff. The skeptics have always said, "ok, fine-- but you must intensively train animals to use even very rudimentary symbolic communication; you wouldn't be able to stop a human from learning all that and much, much more. How much can all this signing mean?" This bonobo was not intensively trained. He wasn't trained to speak at all. In fact, he wasn't taught any of this, to begin with.
Human children soak up new languages like sponges. Adults are notoriously bad at learning new languages. Virtually all language research done on non-human primates to date has been intensively training adult animals to use abstract symbols (like ASL or glyphs or whatever) to make a one-to-one correspondence to an object or action.
Kanzi grew up around humans, since his mother was being intensively trained to use a keyboard and he was too young to leave her side. He was not trained. He didn't even seem interested. Then, one day, Kanzi's mother was taken away-- and he began using everything she'd been taught (quite a bit more, in fact, than she ever learned) and very accurately. He learned because he was around that type of communication when he was young, and he just "picked it up."
Now, that was when his mother was being specifically trained to use a keyboard. She wasn't being specifically trained to speak. So he picked up, on his own, that human speech has something to do with communication, and how it works, and is able to use words across contexts, and was never explicitly taught to do so. I'd call that pretty damn revealing about the inherent linguistic abilities of bonobos.
Since they're our closest relatives, I'd say it's pretty revealing about the evolutionary history of our own linguistic abilities.
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The point is humans are not the only game in town. As far as better, I'll take a chimp or a dolphin over half of the people on this planet any day. It's not a question of will they be "equal" or "better", but rather than assuming that it's just a dumb animal (organic automation), and is repeatedly being proven that animals can think, learn, problem solve, count, have emotions, have language, play, and intentially kill over territory, group, race and species. To lift a quote from an animal research program (Love discovery/animal planet/history channel) "It's becoming apparent that intelligence whether animal or human is a question of degree rather than type." . Hope I didn't butcher that to badly. The above commenter seems to hold onto the human arrogance that we are the only ones that can do what we do. They also miss the fact that that the "Bar" does get moved, as it always has in the past, when ever something new comes along that might contradict long held beliefs in science, religion, or social norms.