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Chimpanzees Beat out Children in Reasoning Test
caffeinemessiah writes "The New York Times has a story on how chimpanzees seem to exhibit a better understanding of cause and effect than human children. While training chimps to perform a routine task with redundant steps, the chimps were able to figure out and eliminate the redundant steps, while the human children routinely performed them despite their evident uselessness. It says something about the way we learn compared to chimps and should be interesting to cognitive scientists and those interested in computational learning theory, at the least."
Why didn't they compare cats and humans? At 10 weeks kittens can already jump up on tables and wreck things - the kid is just slobbering on the floor. Does this teach us interesting things about how things learn?
No, it teaches us that there are some real morons at the university level wasting money that could be going to a WORTHY project.
This reminds me of the study a few years back when the attempted to discover why hot pizza burns the roof of your mouth.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Yea, yea... "tough love", "save the rod, spoil the child.."
You guys that are saying that, you don't have the side of research on you. It may be one thing to say, "I'd beat my kid until they'd learn to be quiet," but that practice just DOESNT work. It causes a whole host of problems within the child including insecure attachment, mental scarring, and the justification of the use of aggression to solve problems. Here's a little riddle for you: Two kids are on the playground, and one of them is running around, pushing people over, hitting, kicking, etc. The other is playing in the sand with a smaller group of kids, interacting, using social skills such as sharing. Which one of these kids is the one which gets hit with a belt whenever he misbehaves? From that angle it is completely different, right?
Not to say that the mother was acting appropriately. Parenting lesson #1, use the minimal level of force needed to immediately stop misbehavior, whether this threatening time out or physically restraining the child. That does not include physical abuse. The reason this works is because of a wonderful little thing called cognitive dissonance. When you stop behavior, the child then has time to analyze what he has done and will come to the point where his opinion of himself as good contrasts with his bad actions, causing discomfort. He therefor has to relieve this. If you use violence on the child, he relieves this by a process called overjustification, and ends up devaluing the consequences of his behavior, and will continue doing it once you walk away. If you stop the behavior mildly, then the child will be forced to reevaluate his own internal mindset, and behaviorally change will result. Some of you are already saying "That will not work on a 5 year old," but it does. Children learn these things incredibly early on.
Anyway, guys, please stop this whole beating the child thing. It's not cute, it's not macho, and it's not good parental advice. There are so many ills within our society already that we don't need people going around and blatently advocating the advancement of another one.
Yes,unfortunately the most likely answer is, whatever our brains have that promoted verbal communication, their brains lack. They can understand verbal communication, and are able to communicate with us by sign language (and if you claim that isn't reason of intelligence, then I've got some deaf and mute people for you to meet). The only difference between humans and chimps, is that we created the methods of communicating, they do need some help to create language (but are able to do "create words" by merging two seperate ideas in order to make up for what they may lack in their vocabulary).
I find it interesting that continuously we prove to ourselves that while apes can't reason, think or act on a human adult level, they are able to do so on a level above or equal the human child/mentally handicaped adult. And yet, we continue to deny them equal rights to children/retards. It says a lot about our society on the whole I think.