The chimp who thought he was a boy

[nomo]

You done got owned, son.

Pffft. Talk to my trunk monkey, bub.

[compared2what?]

Okay,

Seriously, the most nuanced and complete piece of writing I know of on how these forces form an intricate and difficult to detect pattern that favors power is this. The man's no fool. I guess I should repeat that I mean that seriously. Because I do.

Then

This video is not available in your country.

Can somebody please tell me what I'm missing out on here?

Working on it. Be right back.

Try this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

ON EDIT: or, for another YouTube option:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_XEiV-l ... re=related

Tho none of these allow the nuanced commentary to be studied with the maximum enjoyment as the link I first posted does, on my computer, anyway. Because it's the kind of nuanced commentary that's most enjoyably studied at whatever link is way loudest, imo.

[Penguin]

c2w: true.. Any group can be used for sinister ends. I personally wont join any kind of group that I dont personally know. No Greenpeace for me, thank you. I only act in groups that are familiar to me, that have friends working etc. I dont want to get co-opted for some ulterior purposes. And I also consider us human animals animals like the rest of us. And Im equally worried about insects and other very not cute things, you know? But thats not general I guess - I happen to be a mire ecologist...

[compared2what?]

And Im equally worried about insects and other very not cute things, you know? But thats not general I guess - I happen to be a mire ecologist...

I wish mire ecology would happen to me. That would be mad telmatological! Because I'm never going to have the skills to make it happen thru my own efforts.

This one's cute. Even elegant, in a Lisa-Fonssagrives-Penn-except-insect-y sort of a way.

[Endomorph]

I think I had that book, "Nim," when I was a child. The whole article breaks my heart.

BTW, I'm not sure about this, but I suspect that the relationship of the Nim researchers to Chomsky is kind of complex.

At least for a long time, the major camps on the issue of psychology and language were the Chomskians and the Behavioralists. Neither one of these groups was particularly respectful towards animals.

Chomskians thought, more or less, that:

"People are different from animals in that we have this ability to think in abstract, recursive ways which are necessary for language -- specifically, language as a context-free deep-structure grammar plus a set of transformations to surface structure. Animals don't and can't think that way, and don't and can't have language in the human sense of the term."

Behaviorists thought, more or less, that:

"Animals are basically machines. Humans are basically machines too. So anything we can do, an animal is likely to be able to do, if it's trained correctly. We don't really have feelings or thoughts, we're just programmed to act as if we do. If you are under the impression you have feelings or thoughts, get over it. You are at all times behaving exactly as you are trained to behave, and saying in your head and with your mouth exactly what you are trained to say. There is no ghost in the machine."

The option that humans *and* animals might have thoughts and feelings wasn't really on the table, for a big part of the 20th century, at least not in respectable scientific circles.

We've come a long way since the 70s. But those were the two bleak options back in the day, and honestly, Chomsky's was slightly less bleak.

I don't know for sure but I suspect the researchers who were responsible for the Nim experiment were behavioralists. Proving that a chimp could become effectively human would be interpreted by a proper behavioralist, not as proving that animals were really persons, but as proving that humans were *not*.

BTW, hi everybody. I registered just so I could post this.

[compared2what?]

Hi, Endomorph. And welcome. I salute your eloquent post.

From a which-monkeys-run-the-zoo perspective, the distinction between being a human animal and having personhood is kind of essential. Now that you mention it.

[Penguin]

Thanks for the input, and welcome, Endomorph.

[Penguin]

Behavioralists seem to be describing a real part of human behaviour..Most of what we do in day to day life is indeed automatic learned responses to different situations. I think it would even be possible to live your whole life on automatic almost completely. Our society sure does encourage this these days - perhpas its a necessary thing for "civilization" - to exist at all.

But then theres this other part of you...That you arent supposed to know of...The real you.

[Penguin]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.j ... xml&page=1

"Evidence has emerged that humans learned the medicinal properties of soil and plants from fellow primates. Roger Highfield reports"

"Egyptian doctors treated wounds with honey, resins and metals which are now known to have antimicrobial action.

For constipation, they used laxatives of castor oil, colocynth (a bitter fruit), figs and bran. For indigestion, they prescribed an antacid of powdered limestone (calcium carbonate), while we take magnesium carbonate. Cumin and coriander were used to relieve flatulence, celery and saffron for rheumatism, and pomegranate to eradicate tapeworms.

Now, the textbooks may have to be rewritten again - because evidence is emerging that medicine is not a human invention at all. In fact, we ape animals.

An example is the deliberate ingestion of soil, known as "geophagy". In people, it is thought to signal mental health problems. But according to a study of chimpanzees in the Kibale National Park in Uganda, it turns out to be a remedy.

Consuming a particular kind of soil, as Sabrina Krief and her colleagues at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris reported recently in the journal Naturwissenschaften, increases the potency of ingested plants, such as the leaves of trichilia rubescens, which have anti-malarial properties.

Her team collected earth eaten by chimpanzees, as well as leaves from young T. rubescens trees in the same area. All the soil was rich in the clay mineral kaolinite, the principal component of many anti-diarrhoea medicines.

Clays can bind mycotoxins (fungal toxins), endotoxins (internal toxins secreted by pathogens), man-made toxic chemicals, bacteria and viruses. They also act as an antacid and absorb excess fluids.

The scientists replicated the effects of mastication, gastric and intestinal digestion in the laboratory and were surprised. Before being mixed with the soil, the digested leaves had no significant effects.

However, when the leaves and soil were digested together, the mixture developed clear anti-malarial properties. "This overlapping use by humans and apes is interesting from both evolutionary and conservation perspectives," says Krief. "Saving apes and their forests is also important for human health."

more pages at link... Good read.

[orz]

Okay,

Seriously, the most nuanced and complete piece of writing I know of on how these forces form an intricate and difficult to detect pattern that favors power is this. The man's no fool. I guess I should repeat that I mean that seriously. Because I do.

Then

This video is not available in your country.

Can somebody please tell me what I'm missing out on here?

Rickroll maybe?

[compared2what?]

Penguin, they seem to be saying that Pica is actually good for you. That's not what they're saying, is it? Because in human children, it might take the form of eating Johnson and Johnson cotton puffs, or what have you. It is sometimes dirt, but generally just a childhood syndrome involving the eating of stuff that isn't food. The example I chose is not one I've literally seen. And I've only ever literally seen one case. But it was roughly along those lines, and not leading to good health.

Fancy that. I mean that Pica might be a now-erratic, once-self-preserving genetically activated syndrome. Wonders. They never cease.

Also, to be on the safe side, since I can't tell:

Orz, if you're mocking me, quit it. Ow! That hurts! No really. I am not faking. Am not. [... ..] Am not. [... ..] Am etcetcetcetc.

[smiths]

chomskys point of veiw,

While nonhumans may communicate with one another, the MIT linguist said, they are fundamentally incapable of language.

he never said i challenge you to get a monkey, try it out and if it fails get rid of it cruelly,

if you are going to slag him off which so many seem intent on doing, at least get something substantive with which to use as your weapon,
cos this attempt was inaccurate and pissweak

excepting endomorph who pointed out the obvious

[Avalon]

The Telegraph article resolutely avoids discussing the credit many indigenous shamanic traditions give to the plants themselves, saying that the plant spirits tell us how to use them. If that is the case, it may be that the plants share that knowledge with other animals as well.

[slomo]

I'm entering this discussion rather late, but I thought I'd weigh in on an issue that is near and dear to my heart. The thoughtlessness with which we treat animals always hits me hard, so much so that I chose not to read the entire article in the OP. It is one of those states-of-consciousness things: either you're there, or you're not. There's no language that can bridge the gap between those who understand that animals are "like us", and those who do not. I say this as meat-eater aware of the importance of the predator niche, and as a scientist who is ashamed of the torture done to animals in the name of science.

One random statement I wanted to respond to, on whether dolphins and whales were capable of poetry. If they were, could you count on your ability to recognize it for what it was? Keeping in mind, after all, that elephants can paint.

On the subject of 4thBase's profanity, it does not bother me, and I understand the passion with which he is defending the nonhuman animal world. (But I'll also admit to being fond of 4B in general, so I might be biased.)

[nomo]

if you are going to slag him off which so many seem intent on doing, at least get something substantive with which to use as your weapon,
cos this attempt was inaccurate and pissweak

Some people here hate Chomsky because he's a 9/11 "truth" skeptic. Of course, that has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but we all know that "truthers" tend to be slightly myopic.