James Flynn

A little while ago I wrote a post about whether another species could evolve to be like us.

And while I was asking the question in a kind of past tense, I have read something recently in a great book by Carl Sagan (see below) that makes me look at this question in a different way.

We all know that we are very similar to chimpanzees and that we both share a common ancestor. But I am sure we would all agree that we have a superior level of intelligence.

One of the big evolutionary leaps of our species was the invention of language and speech. And this it could be argued, is what gave our intelligence an evolutionary "push".

An interesting experiment was done to test whether chimps have the mental capacity for language in the same way that we have.

Sometime in the seventies a baby chimp was brought into a household with a new born baby. For three years the chimp and the baby were raised in the same way. Two cribs, two potties two high chairs etc....

After three years the chimp was way ahead of the baby in terms of manual dexterity, meaning it was climbing, running and leaping about the place with ease while the baby was nowhere near being able to do this. But while the baby was babbling away, the chimp could only say (with apparently great difficulty) the words "mama", "papa" and "cup".

I personally think this is quite impressive that the chimp could speak at all, but two psychologists Beatrice and Robert Gardner, at the university of Nevada realized that the larynx and the pharynx of the chimp are not suited for human speech.

So they came up with a brilliant idea to test the intelligence of chimps......

Teach them american sign language.

Good thinking I say. And it worked, very well.

The most impressive thing for me with this experiment is that not only did the chimps learn sign language with vocabularies of 100-200 words, but they were also very inventive when it came to forming words and phrases of their own.

For example, the first time one of the chimps saw a duck land in a pond, it gestured the phrase "water bird", something it had not been taught. The chimp had made this up for the occasion.

Another chimp who had never seen a spherical fruit before other than an apple, but knowing sign language for principle colours, saw a technician eating an orange and gestured "orange apple".

Very impressive wouldn't you say?

There are more examples too, but what this tells us is that chimps have the mental capacity and the intelligence for speech, but do not have the vocal equipment to deliver it vocally.

So, perhaps we are not as superior as we like to make out. Maybe we owe a great deal on our structural makeup. Apart from our opposable thumbs adding to our success, maybe we should be thanking our excellent vocal chords aswell.

Another important thing to mention that I read about is that certain cultural differences are present among chimps living in some areas. Meaning some chimps have have actually got different accents to other chimps, reflecting yet another similarity to our way of living (although their accents are heard in their screams and cries instead of sophisticated speech of course).

This got me thinking about whether we are as superior as we like to think.

I am starting to consider the fact that a lot of animals are capable of quite deep intelligent thought but are just unable to express it as well as we can.

In fact, just last night I heard on the news that domestic dogs are a lot more intelligent than people give them credit for, and tend to "steal" food around the house at night because they are aware that our night vision is not as good as theirs.

What are your thoughts on this?

Do you think we are the only highly intelligent animal on this planet?

I will leave you with an interesting video of chimps outdoing us on certain memory tests.......enjoy.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1xvIkh/www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3nr5uSJRuM