Undercurrent

I don't know, but most babies are born with neither and eventually develop both.

m.

Vorkosigan

Vander:

I have responded to you with two posts
<a href="http://iidb.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=001229&p=1" target="_blank">here</a>] and another this morning:

• This topic is old hat around these parts. Reasoning powers are known in many different kinds of animals that cannot talk, so the answer is obvious. It has nothing to do with gods, and everything to do with evolution. For an explanation of how logic evolved in humans -- usefulness for social cognition -- see <a href="http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html" target="_blank">Website with Primer on Evolutionary Psychology</a>. The book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198524196/internetinfidelsA/" target="_blank">The Descent of Mind : Psychological Perspectives on Hominid Evolution</a> has a useful review article at the beginning, and the ultimate guide would be <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195101073/internetinfidelsA/" target="_blank">The Adapted Mind : Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture</a>. There is no need for gods to explain any of these things; evolution does an excellent job of accounting for cognition.
  
  Vanderzyden, starting new threads here while you have unanswered threads elsewhere is tantamount to trolling. For topical reasons I am moving this into philosophy.

I do not see anything foul, disrespectful or acidic there. My first reply to you consisted of a discussion of a quote from Darwin in the first post referenced above. Your response included the following:

• A slightly different interpretation renders these apes, not men. In fact, some of these are shams, such as Peking Man. Many of the specimens are bone fragments, from which fantastic tales have been developed. With widespread refusal to be critical of Darwinism, one can imagine how much other "evidence" has been procured in similar fashion to the Piltdown Man fabrication

This farrago of accusations of bad faith, fraud, and incompetence was given the short shrift it deserved; and not just by me either. Comments like "the popular Darwinist priesthood..." or "Unlike most proper scientific endeavor, evolutionary hypothesis and “research” contribute nothing positive to the human experience" or <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=001247&p=1" target="_blank">"For example, one immensely disturbing problem with Darwin’s dangerous idea is genocide"</a> will not earn you a great deal of respect on a board populated by people with backgrounds in geology, biology and physics, as well as the history, philosophy and sociology of science. We are profoundly aware of the great advances in biology and other fields due to Darwin's ideas, and know perfectly well that evolution and genocide have nothing to do with each other.

You seem to be following the typical troll career path, beginning with random, scattershot attacks on a theory that you do not understand, evolving to posts in various forums while leaving numerous threads unanswered, then attacking people individually (and sending them emails you think are threatening), and finally complaining to the admins about they way you are treated.

Troll of the Year, however, is a kewpie doll you don't have to win. There is another route you could take. You could respond seriously to scigirl's challenge. You could actually spend some time reading that <a href="http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html" target="_blank">Primer on Evolutionary Psychology</a> I gave you so that you could talk intelligently about the evolution of reasoning abilities in humans. In the email you accused me of being insufficiently schooled in the cognitive sciences. Document this, please, don't just throw out accusations.

As for your accusation (in the email) that I am "afraid to face the tough questions" I'll make you the same offer I've made many others in this and other forums: I'll take you on any time, on any topic, in the internet discussion forum of your choice.

Vorkosigan

[ August 29, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]

[ August 29, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>

-RRH-

<a href="http://www.nature.com/nsu/020805/020805-9.html" target="_blank">Crows form tools.</a>

<a href="http://www.crows.net/language.html" target="_blank">Is there a crow language?</a>

Tool use, I think, is a good example of reasoning and deduction, especially when they form a tool as in the above example. I can't find many examples of animals that use tools but do not have even a crude communication ability, (with the possible exception of octopi) but I don't really see how language would be necessary for reasoning.

But if the tool making animals are also the ones with the most complex languages, then maybe the two go together. And we can see that a crow is better in both categories than is a mouse, while not matching the abilities of us humans. So I don't see it as much of a stretch to picture both reasoning ability and complexity of language having developed in conjunction with one another.

Jack the Bodiless

...Refutation?

What is there to refute?

Daggah

Have you started indoctrinating the poor guy into your false religion yet?

lpetrich

They can learn sizable vocabularies of signs, but their ability to put together full-scale sentences is much weaker.

But chimps can construct nontrival tools, such as stacks of crates to get to out-of-reach bananas. They are known to exhibit "insight learning", in which they pause and then implement a solution, as if they were thinking about a problem -- which is what Koehler's crate-stacking chimps had done.

So one may reasonably conclude that chimps have true reasoning abilities, instead of only acting on instinct or conditioned learning.

Vibr8gKiwi

Actually he's not only soundly refuted you, he also exposed you. It's now rather transparent when you make weak excuses to not respond to those that refuted your arguments.

Nobody expects you to be an expert on all topics who can respond to literally dozens of posts and topics from professionals across many fields. Certainly nobody expects that you actually have discovered the information that reverses the present course of nearly every scientific field. However most of us do expect honest replies and an honest assessment of the situation from you. It's also worth noting that a simple acknowledgement that you're in over your head (if that's the case) would end all the cries of troll, dishonesty, plagiarism, and such.