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New Great Ape Discovered?
DrLudicrous writes "CNN is running a story about sightings of an ape in central Africa that doesn't seem to fit the description of known apes. Pictures of the animal are rare, but it seems slightly taller than most gorillas, with a flatter face. One woman even reported seeing it walk upright on two legs. It has been hypothesized that the ape might be a new species, a subspecies, or perhaps a hybrid between two other species."
Where was Steve Ballmer when these ape videos were shot?
Those are not a new type of ape, they where SCO executives all along! P.S. No offense to the ape family.
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
"It appears that a small difference in cognitive ability can make a huge difference when its results are allowed to accumulate over the millenia."
Look up the work of Wernicke and Broca. Both are involved with the study of speech centers in humans. Broca studied the motor abilities and Wernicke studied sensory abilities. As a neurologic nurse I have seen the effects of damage done to these areas of the brain. When a patient has damage done to Broca area the are unable to generate speech due to the inability to form phonems. They ability to comprehend spoken and written language is unimpaired. They often resort to using pen and paper to communicate - but spoken words are unintelligible for the most part. However, as the patient recovers some degree of ability it is often observable that syntax is undisturbed and intact.
Wernicke's aphasia is more debilitating. This is the area for literal comprehension. Damage to this area results in to aspect of the same phenomenon. Patients can neither generate sentence in a coherent manner, though speech generations, phonems and words are unchanges. It is in the area of syntax that the patient is unable to communicate. Their sentences come out as a dissociated mix of complete words. Sentences like "the car is with bananas green, be large dog apples and far away cups". Each word is complete and well generated, but the patient is unable to make any sensical statements. The same holds true in auditory stimulii. The patients generally become very very frustrated because they can neither understand spoken or written language. It has been reported by those that recover that in the same manner in which they themselves spoken non-sensical statements and sentences that what they heard was as the same - people seemed to talk gibberish at them.
There are many degrees to these pathologies with varying and quite interesting results. Like the inability to speak sensical references to people, but to construct perfectly (or near perfectly) sentences about inanimated objects or circumstances, or vice verse.
So, what does this have to do with primates? Think about other studies that have been done with communications in Kentucky (IIRC) with chimps and abstract symbols for communicating desires, wants, needs, states of being, and memories. Or at Berkeley with gorillas with sign language in the same basic manner. It has been shown that these primates do possess the ability to communicate in very limited but congent manner. They have been able to express emotion - fear, happiness, anger, affections, confusion, as well as memories of such things as dreams and past incidences and experiences in a contextual manner.
What put the human being in a adventatious position was the ability to both speek and write. To relate thoughts and experiences via observations and memories to one another. By being able to construct a form of coherent communication via abstract symbolism and sounds the human species can retain, pass on, and hence build a knowledge base. In this fashion each generation can more fully benifit the experiences and knowledge of the previous. The "lower" primates have this ability but only in a very very limited fashion and only in non-verbal/language context - such as observation and mimickary as in the case of using a grass reed to extract ants from a hole or to build a bed of leaves.
The subtle but dramatic development of a group of neurons on the (generally) left side of the brain has been the difference from being just another relatively smart ape or a human. If it were not for speech and language we would most likely have been killed off by more phyiscially endowed competitors.