Godless Dave

Whether Koko, the signing chimps, and the chimp who used a symbolic keyboard were actually using something like language was hotly debated within the linguistics community. The absence of double-blind tests made it extremely difficult to determine. However it's hard to design rigorous tests that don't put the primates in awkward, unnatural social isolation. Besides being cruel to the primates, language is primarily a social phenomenon, so not allowing the animals to socialize kind of jinxes the whole thing.

Most linguists rejected it as anything like language. But you have to wonder how much of that was Chomsky-school bias. They see language as an innate ability of humans qualitatively different from other animal communication behavior. The Greenberg school sees it as animal communication behavior qunatitatively much more complex than that of other animals.

My own feeling (keep in mind I only have a BA, and didn't study this issue all that much) is that Koko et. al. learned to associate arbitrary symbols with concepts. This in itelf isn't really earth-shattering. Lots of family dogs have been trained to sit up when they want food, and dogs as we know can associate human vocalizations with concepts. I think the primates went beyond this, to the point of two-way communication that approached what we would call language, including arranging signs in a certain order to change the meaning. But Koko's signing ability plateaued at about the level of a 2-year-old human child (IIRC), whereas human children learning language increase their vocabularies and grammatical knowledge exponentially after that point.

I don't buy that. Koko and Michael were taken out of the wild at a pretty young age, so how would they have learned the signing system of those wild gorillas? If it's not learned, if it's more like the visual communication techniques of wolves, for example, then it isn't language. Language consists of learned arbitrary symbols.

There's no question that primates use vocalizations, posture, and facial expressions to communicate with each other. But that in itself is a far cry from language.

When hominids started to use language is a damned interesting question, but it's probably unanswerable.

Non-praying Mantis

I think that everyone on this thread is concentrating on the ape-human relationship (or in Vander's case the lack thereof). That itself is not surprising, but my subject in this thread suggested much more than that. We have many, many, non-ape ancestors, and only relatively few ape ones.

I don't think that we are going off topic concerning our ape ancestors, but I would also like to discuss why we should (or should not, as I have opined) regret having fish or worms or single cells as ancestors?

NPM

pz

We should not be embarrassed at having such ancestors, but some people obviously are. I don't know why, it's just irrational.

There's a related issue, too: people (many of them even scientists!) got very defensive and doubtful when the HGP results showed that there are "only" on the order of 30000 genes in the human genome. Furthermore, they got even more upset at the idea that the vast majority of the genome is junk -- and you find even now that many people are desperately trying to attach some function to that DNA.

I've tried flat out asking people who struggle to find significance in junk DNA why they think it necessary that it have some utility. Nobody has ever given me an answer.

Vanderzyden

Yes, that is a point that I have made several times: phylogenetic trees are virtually worthless. "Senseless" is the word you are using. The only real data comes from living things, and the arrangement of that data is heavily dependent on which controversial classification scheme you employ in your particular tree. We could go on to talk about problem with homology assumptions, etc, etc.

And yet you spent so much energy focusing on whether I've committed libel in relation to references I cited in support of the very thing you are saying here. Please never make such disrespectful and outrageous insinuations again.

Vanderzyden

Vanderzyden

OK, show me some convincing studies demonstrating that apes can learn a language. I am not talking about a sophisticated form of dog-training, where certain stimuli evoke a patterned-response. No, I am talking about language. Language entails understanding the meaning of words. Language is the tool of writing and conversations.


I am not talking about involuntary "biological" functions. The example I used concerning infants was spontaneous emulation. Who taught my son to laugh? There was no way to tell him "OK, Austin, now, in response to something funny, make this facial expression and make repetitive ha-ha sounds." Do you see the difficulty? First, nobody was able to tell him what "funny" means. Second, nobody could tell him about the facial and oral response that corresponds to things that are funny.

The apes don't have such capacities. Laughing is perhaps the simplest of the many, many differences.

It seems as though you brush the question aside. You display such confidence about lineage all the way back to "self-replicating RNA molecules", but you balk at the critical early steps. So, I'll ask you again, directly:

What do you think is the first biological event, and how did it come about?

Please do me the favor of responding with something different than "We don't know".

Vanderzyden

[ September 11, 2002: Message edited by: Vanderzyden ]</p>

The Lone Ranger

Vanderzyden:

I mean no offense, but I think you've misinterpreted Doubting Didymus' point.

Reconstructions of organisms' phylogenetic relationships are far from worthless -- they're very valuable indeed. And they're anything but arbitrary. Of course, as new data become available, we have to revise our phylogenies, but that's what science does. We continually refine our understanding of how things work, and how they're related to each other.

[The key word here is "refine." It's no more likely that we'll decide that we're wrong about the relationship between humans and (other) apes and reclassify humans as close relatives of rodents (for example) than it is that we'll decide that the Earth isn't round at all, but shaped like a doughnut. That doesn't mean we're certain of the details yet, however.]

What is arbitrary (and of dubious worth) is our habit of classifying organisms into orders, families, genera, and even species. Nature does not work in such neat categories.

Cheers,

Michael

The Lone Ranger

Why? Sometimes, the only honest answer to a question is "We don't know."

There's no shame in this. The only shameful thing would be to pretend to knowledge that we don't, in fact, possess.

Cheers,

Michael

Blinn

I noticed that also. Vanderzyden seems to do a lot of misinterpreting. Here's a
<a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/05/1/l_051_01.html" target="_blank">primer</a> on phylogeny, v.

Trekkie With a Phaser

Here's an <a href="http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwlrc/biographies/lana.html" target="_blank">example</a> of a chimp that was taught language, learned to combine sentences, learned to read, to identify colors when she was shown them, and learned to do math. On top of that, on page 107 of the book "Philosophy: A Text With Readings Eight Edition" written by Manuel Velasquez, it states that this same chimp, Lana, was able to tell when a human being was lying. One of the research team members lied to her about putting food in the machine and she was able to tell that he was lying. She reasoned it out. I believe that should be sufficient to, at the very least, suggest that other primates are capable of learning language and that they contain at least some form of reasoning skills.

[ September 11, 2002: Message edited by: Trekkie With a Phaser ]</p>

theyeti

I think you're misunderstanding his point. All levels of phylogenetic classification above that of species are arbitrary, meaning that where you choose to draw a circle around one group and give it a name doesn't really matter. For example, all placental mammals could be called a "class", or all of the mammals that give live birth can be called a "class", or all of the mammals including the monotremes can be called a "class". It doesn't matter where you choose to draw the line, nor does it matter what name you give them. You could just as easliy call them kingdoms if you wanted.

However, whether or not a grouping is considered a "natural group" is not arbitrary. Phylogenetic groups must be monophyletic, which means that they contain a common ancestor and all of its descendents (and only its decendents). This is why any of the three mammalian clades above would be a legitimate phylogenetic grouping. But it would not make for a legitimate grouping if we included the monotremes but excluded the marsupials. Or for a simpler example, if we made a group which contained some of the mammals but not all of them, and also contained some birds, would be an incorrect group (in this case, it would be called polyphyletic).

So no, phylogenetic classification is not "senseless", though it does contain a measure of arbitration. But calling phylogenetic trees "virtually worthless" is a jaw-droppingly ignorant statement. Being a creationist, you may think they're worthless because you're precommited to the idea that they can't be describing reality. But nearly every field of biology uses them extensively as research tools.

Perhaps you should go on, because "homology assumptions", with rare exception, are not considered problematic or controversial among biologists. Organisms are classified according to heritable similarities, especially morphological and molecular structure or sequence. These different kinds of data tend strongly to converge on the same trees, otherwise phylogenetic trees really would be "worthless" and biologists would quit constructing them.

theyeti