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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."
Chimps will always be chimps.
Lucky bastards.
there's more than one way to do me.
I'd like to see another experiment done. Suppose, hypothetically, that a chimp showed a human child how to solve a puzzle, inserting unnecessary steps. Would the human skip steps more often if taught by a chimp than by another human? If so, it would show that what matters is if the species of the teacher and student are the same, not the what species the student belongs to.
Simon's Rock College
Human babies have a prolonged childhood. Whereas a chimpanzee may be considered an adult by age three, humans may not even reach (emotional) adulthood until well into their 30s. So it seems a little disingenuous to compare chimpanzees to human babies when the rates of growth and maturity are so different.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I believe this study.
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
Right. Really good point.
I had a discussion with a friend of mine about religion. She was raised religious, and while an athiest now, she was happy to have been raised religiously. I asked why; she responded that the religious foundation answered questions she would have had (albeit falsely) about God, death, universe, etc. and thus eased her mind about them until she was mature enough to decide that it was mythology to her. In other words, she did exactly as you suggested, emulated a successful culture dynamic too complex for her to understand fully.
We all do it as humans. It's what religion is. Do this because I(tm) said so.
Good point.
un burrito me trampeó.
...I read the article title as "Chimpanzees Beat Children in Reasoning Test".
I didn't know what sort of a reasoning test involved children and simians to engage in fisticuffs, but I was all for it.
hi mom!
$ook = new Banana.GiveMeBanana();
my $stomach = _FULL_;
my $sound = loudContentedScreech();
throwFeces();
?>
I am scientifically inaccurate.
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.
Hrm. Do I go for the:
+1 Funny: Because it's hot. Hot <anything> burns. It doesn't have to be pizza.
Or the:
+1 Informative/Boring: The roof of your mouth is particularly sensitive; it's part of the body's temperature monitors. It's this sensor that triggers brain freeze when you eat something cold. The sensor thinks you're far too cold, and your brain tells blood to rush to your head. The amount of blood is higher than the veins and capillaries can take, and bottlenecks. And it hurts.
Tough call...
I know that that sounds entroniant, perhaps even bleavisome, but it had to be said.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana