Doubting Didymus

You can hardly consider the matter 'cleared up'. There is no golden tome where the best phylogeny is written.Every second biology textbook you consult will do phylogeny slightly dirrerent. This is because, as others have pointed out, we are trying to put big circles around a whole lot of grey, saying 'this is dark grey, and this is darker grey'. Really its all grey, but phylogeny is neccesary to be able to understend it all.

Non-praying Mantis

Yeah, I know that. Systematics was a fun course in graduate school, but I always had differences of opinion from the "experts" in the field! Plus, insect orders would change from year to year as well as all other aspects of systematics of insects.

I think that it was me that pointed out the shades of grey in nature!

NPM

lpetrich

This is the merger of two earlier-recognized families, Hominidae (our species and closely-related ones over the last few million years) and Pongidae (the great apes).

I've seen this merger called Pongidae instead of Hominidae in some places, however.

But I think I'll let the biological-nomenclature lawyers fight this out.

lpetrich

According to cladistics, that is certainly correct -- "ape" is a paraphyletic taxon, and therefore illegitimate. For those not familiar with taxonomic jargon, paraphyletic means having descendants outside the taxon.

However, paraphyletic taxa are often used as a matter of convenience; these include apes, reptiles, lizards, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, gymnosperms, dicots, algae, protists, prokaryotes, etc.

lpetrich

I agree. VZ is not telling us what he means by mind and reason and so forth. And I wonder what stereotypes he has of ape behavior, especially of chimpanzee behavior.

Where did you find that out? I've never seen any evidence that apes have all those capabilities. For example, though chimps can learn upwards of 100 sign-language signs, there is not much evidence that they can combine them to form coherent sentences.

However, they do have some impressive mental capabilities, like tool construction and localized cultural traditions -- chimps in different areas have different tastes in tools that they make. They also have some capability of planning solutions in their minds, something called "insight learning". Thus, a chimp confronted with an out-of-reach banana and some crates may pause for awhile and stack the crates to reach that banana.

And they can recognize themselves in mirrors, an ability shared with a few other creatures, like gorillas, orangutans, dolphins, and elephants. However, in chimps this ability appears in adolescence, while in human children, this ability appears between the ages of 1 and 2.

But in most species, this ability is entirely absent, which can lead to absurdities like territorial birds attacking their mirror images.

[ September 10, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

KeithHarwood

A gorilla named Koko had been taught to communicate using, IIRC, shapes placed on a board. She could construct novel meaningful sentences (so can signing chimps) and engage in conversations with her minders. She had a pet kitten which she often played with. When it died she remarked that she was sad. Some time later she was given another kitten and after getting to know it remarked that she was happy. There's a book about the whole business.

Amen-Moses

Koko (and Michael who has since passed away) used standard sign language, Koko uses around 1000 signs and has even invented a few of her own by putting other signs together. Michael had a pet dog and painted pictures of it (very good they are too, much better than all that rubbish at the Tate modern), Koko's cat got run over by a car and she was grief stricken.

Kanzi is the Bonobo that uses an electronic symbol board, the last I heard Kanzi was teaching some younger chimps to use the board (Kanzi picked up the use of the symbols by watching his mother but they want to ascertain if older chimps can be taught by chimps rather than humans).

There are others but those two are the most famous ones.

The most compelling evidence of intelligent reasoning I have seen from Koko is that she signs in the same way as a human, i.e she uses extremely small hand movements when conversing with another signer (one of the reasons that her "trainer" keeps being ridiculed) which are so subtle that unless you are proficient in sign you could miss them but when she is asked to "talk" with someone who doesn't sign she uses large exaggerated movements and almost mimes rather than signs (a bit like the Western tourists who speak English louder and slower to the natives).

It is also worth noting that when they reintroduced Michael and Koko to untrained Gorilla's they both started telling their trainers what the other gorilla's were "saying", when they reran the video tapes they realised that wild Gorilla's have their own extremely subtle sign language which at present is a complete mystery (I believe far more work needs to be done on teaching US to understand them than trying to get THEM to understand us, we are the supposedly intelligent ones after all!), all we can see so far is that when the "wild" Gorilla's use particular finger movements combined with facial expressions (i.e middle finger extended with a small grin ) Koko always then signs the same thing to her trainer, things like "A is unhappy" or B "wants water" etc. She even does this when watching videos of wild Gorilla's.

(Oh and just to clarify the Gorilla signs do not match human ones)

Amen-Moses

Baloo

The only unsettling aspect of all of these studies is the utter absense of double-blind studies. For instance, Koko is exposed to one of 10 complex stimuli, and must communicate to the trainer WHICH of the ten complex stimuli she witnessed. The trainer, unaware of which of the actual stimuli was used, would then attempt to deduce it from communication with Koko. A few repetitions of this experiment would make a much, much stronger impression on me than "Koko's cat died, and look, she moved her hands in a "Cat" motion, and a "sad" motion, so she must be mourning her cat...".

Have such studies been done? If so, where are they, and if not, why not?

Blinn

I'm curious as to how this information was communicated to her. Did they just go in one day and tell her that her cat was dead, and she understood that, as opposed to understanding that it was just gone? Or did they actually take the flattened carcass to her so she could see it for herself, demonstrating the difference between "gone" and "dead"?

nogods4me

Say it loud:
I'm an APE and I'm PROUD!!!!!!!