h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Wrong. the reason the chinp hasn't started talking is because it lacks the thinking equipment. ALL of the research that I haveseen points to there being a problem with chimps understanding more than a simple "want banana" or "want toy" or "mugwump here". Even when taught to use sign language, they don't progress any further than that. That is a significant difference, and shows up befor 3 years old.

Are you implying then that chimps could speak if they had the intellectual capacity and the will - that their vocal equipment would be adequate if only their brain was up to the job?

A small but significant bit of good news this lunchtime. MEPs have proposed that cosmetics that have been tested on animals should be banned from sale in all EU countries.

I am saying that chimps don't need to be able to hear and talk any more than deaf people do. using sign language, they have been proven incapable of comunicating with anything more than simple sentences.
Good news about the ban, the rest of europe is now on a level playing field with britain.

I am saying that chimps don't need to be able to hear and talk any more than deaf people do. using sign language, they have been proven incapable of comunicating with anything more than simple sentences.
Good news about the ban, the rest of europe is now on a level playing field with britain.

Honestly! Natural selection is rubbish isn't it? Fancy those silly chimps evolving those huge great ears when they don't even need to hear. Deaf people will be relieved to discover that they don't need to be able to hear and talk. That might have been worrying them.
I think even though cosmetics are not tested on animals in Britain, ones that have been can be sold here. Same as the rest of Europe. I think the ban will apply to all of us so the playing field will be no more or less even than it was before.

Talk about taking something out of context. They don't need to be able to hear and talk to communicate. Obviously, it helps in lots of other circumstances, and it did get rid of the "no speech equipment" point. Still, lets hope that the work on predicting the chemical properties and interactions of new molecules goes fast, and then many new compounds will not have to be tested until they have passed all of the other stages, and some will be spotted as harmful before being tested at all.

Sorry xyroth. I couldn't resist.
I agree with you there. Anything that removes the excuse to harm and distress animals will be good news.

I remember reading about a chimp called Washo years ago who learned quite a lot of language. As far as I remember some of it was considerably more complex than just "want banana" etc. More recently there was a documentary about a chimp called (spelling may be wrong) Panpanisha. She had a large sort of 'word board' and she was able to understand some pretty complicated and potentially confusing stuff like "Panpanisha, give the dog a piece of your hot dog". At first, she refused to give the dog a piece of her hot dog. Not because she didn't understand the command, but because she didn't want to. Then when her trainer said "Please Panpanisha, give the dog a piece of your hot dog", she broke off a piece of the hot dog she was eating and fed it to the dog. Then there was another chimp who played computer games using a joystick. She was better at (I believe) pacman than any of her carers/trainers. Playing and winning the computer games involve a range of skills that chimps were not thought to possess.

Is this your area of expertise, xyroth? Is your source of information recent or is it a few years old?

I was going to mention taht. As someone who studies Psychology and got particualrly good marks in animal behaviour. A good chunk of teh evidence does point to chimps having teh mental capacity for speech, just lacking teh vocal equipment for human language. As for teh 3 year old child, chimps can express concepts (Using lexograms, I think thats teh name for teh word boards) equal to a 3 year old child. Ultimately, half teh problem is taht we don't understand chimp. Do we consider dilphins less intelligent because we don't understand their language. Do i consider all swahili speakers less intelligent because it all sounds like gobldygook to me. No.

I know about washo an panpenisha (but not the spellings ). Washo was thought to understand complex sentances, but when that data was analysed, it was found that keyword recognition was being used, ignoring the rest of what was being said. And then only two or three words per sentance. panpenisha is a different story, as she has been educated using an entirely different set of linguistic protocols. In her case it is more of an iconic language like chinese than the more english-like american sign language that washo was taught. Due to this, the limits on what she can say come in at different places in the language.
NOTE: when analysing linguistic ability in creatures of all types (including us) it is essential to analyse the production vocabulary, so as to not get fooled by the keyword recognition problem mentioned above.
As to what my area of expertise is, I am trying to do research into nexialism and inter-disciplinary science (but not formally), so my area tends to be everything that I encounter. This includes genetics, linguistics, computer science, sci-fi (a good source of under developed technology ideas), and many other areas.

I'll agree with that. All the research I've seen agrees. It was all to do with the way the chimps were taught, and all the stuff you didn't see behind the cameras. There was no sentance structure.

wide

This is an interesting side issue really. Even if chimps were really thick, which I don't think they are, it wouldn't justify keeping them in little cages, taking away any opportunity to follow their natural instincts, terrifying them, carrying out painful and distressing experiments on them and then killing them.

Still, on with the discussion. Xyroth, you say keyword recognition was being used by Washo and she was ignoring the rest of the sentence. That sounds a bit like speed reading, doesn't it? That works for humans and we don't think of fast readers as imbeciles. If the chimp was able to fool it's human handlers into thinking it was understanding more than it actually was, that was quite clever really. I think a lot of school kids get through school using a similar ploy.

It seems that training and study techniques had moved on considerably by Panpanisha's time and the chimp with the talent for computer games. That's what happens though, isn't it? Things move on and yesterday's conclusions are invalidated by today's which will, in turn, be invalidated by tomorrow's. As we were discussing elsewhere, science is an ongoing project and at any given time you can't say "This is it! This is the answer to live the universe and everything!" because it's all just work in progress - and it always will be.

I think the main reason that testing on animals should be replaced by alternatives, is that it causes an enormous amount of suffering. I would make no distinction between harming an idiot or a genius, if intelligence is the criterion by which you want to judge whether it's ok to abuse some creature that has the capacity to suffer.

I know you think humans suffer in a different way to other animals but I come back to the evolution of pain. There is no survival gain for humans feeling pain more acutely than other animals. It might even turn humans into an evolutionary dead end. Why do women have more than one child? By all accounts, child birth is excruciatingly painful. It does awful things to the human female and yet she "forgets" to the extent that she'll put herself through that nightmare, perhaps several times in order to reproduce.

I nipped off to find out what nexialism is. Very interesting. You seem to have everything pretty well covered. Impressive.

Where did you find everything, as I have been looking for online links for a guide entry, and was having trouble finding them. If you pop over to my user page, and pop the links in an email, I would appreciate it.

Xyroth, I emailed a bunch of urls to you when your request message appeared here. Can't tell whether you received them or not so I've added them to the Guide Entry on my page that I've set up for urls. The entry's called, naturally enough, "A page for links". So if you didn't get the emailed info, you can find the addresses here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A530263

Google was the search engine that found most of them.

Thank you, I did get them, but have had a very busy week, with little time to reply. I found them very usefull, especially the one for the institute of nexialism.

Lovely. That's ok then

I agree with you on the aspect of not approving to test cosmetics on animals but I disgree in the aspect of heath related testing. I believe that killing animals is not a solution to finding cures for cancer or will this "valid" information help us in any way shape or form. If you give Penicillin to a dog they immediatly die, does that mean we should not use this drug becauase it showed certain affects on animals. What I am trying to say is that obviously these drugs have different affects on animals and humans.

since when is biology not a study of death?

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I think wether a being is intelligent or not, can talk or not, is not relevant here.
The question is: 'Is this animal able to suffer?"
If the answer is yes, all torture has to be forbidden. Everything else is racism.