Most significant is that chimps don't argue with me.
How do you know they are same species?
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30,000 feet of water?????
- Thread starter Curious#1
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TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Most significant is that chimps don't argue with me.
The dodge is noted. And telling.
You just shot yourself in the foot here and have shown to us all that you argue in bad faith.
The same way we know when we find the fossilized remains of a homo sapiens, a dog, or any other species.
Morphology, comparative anatomy, osteometry, etc.
Argentbear
Well-Known Member
Science. Try it sometime
Dodge? I think the biggest difference is in the abilities. Do you disagree with that?
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Yes, dodge.
We were talking about morphology and you dodged it and started about behavior and cognitive abilities (which are a direct result of larger cranial capacity, which you even tried to downplay as "mere difference in size").
Also, at its base, the difference in ability is actually a lot smaller then you might think.
Humans and chimps are both tool builders and planners. The main difference is that human tools and plans are just more sophisticated.
Not to mention that this difference also exists between australopethicus and homo sapiens, but you didn't consider that to be significant it seems.
So, any time you wish to actually answer the question instead of trying to dodge it...
Agreed.
And I'm sure that you'd agree that the reason for that is that humans have acquired symbolic thought - language - that allows them to teach one another, cooperate, and build a growing fund of knowledge over generations. One can make much more sophisticated tools and plans as a collective than as separate individuals that can only learn from one another by observing.
Here's the age-old problem of trying to distinguish unknowing and malice, the difference being the degree of understanding and the intent. It's possible that he isn't aware of doing what you pointed out to him that he did, but it is also possible that he was and made a bad-faith comment (trolling). In most cases, it's impossible to distinguish between them.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Indeed. I once saw an interesting documentary about this. Dealing with the difference between human learning and chimp learning.
Rather ironically, the conclusion could be phrased as "we humans are a lot smarter because we tend to be dumber"
The explanation was that we humans tend to blindly learn everything we are being taught, while chimps tend to only learn, or retain, things that yield immediate results while skipping / ignoring things that don't.
There was this interesting experiment with a black box. Children of both species were shown a series of manipulations to be done with the box to trigger a mechanism to make the box spit out a piece of candy. Both species carefully repeated all the shown steps to get the candy.
Then the box was replaced with an exact copy, except this time the box is transparent instead of black. Now the mechanism inside was visible and it became immediately clear that half of the steps to trigger the mechanism did absolutely nothing to contribute to triggering the candy spitting.
The humans nevertheless continued to carry out all the shown steps, including the useless ones, while the chimps automatically and immediately skipped every single useless step.
Next to that, we humans also actively "teach" our young to do things. While with chimps, the learning process is more in the other direction, where the young observe the adults doing what they do and learn by copying them.
Chimps nevertheless are very intelligent animals, with a great capacity of reasoning and planning. They are also very creative in finding solutions to problems, showing the are very capable of abstract and conceptual thinking. But there is this big focus on "immediate results". Intelligence wise, they would certainly be capable of coming up with things that build upon other things to yield cool tool results a generation later. It's just that they don't bother with it unless it yields immediate results and solves a problem TODAY rather then next month.