language
It never dies: Apes can’t talk yet they can explain language?
The secret to good science writing today is never to ask the obvious questions …
When Bedtime for Bonzo was not a comedy
And didn’t star Ronald Reagan opposite a chimp.
On July 8, a documentary on the fate of Nim opens in U.S. theatres (trailer). In “Project Nim: A chimp raised like a human” (New Scientist 4 July 2011), Rowan Hooper tackles the question of why:
What on earth were they thinking of? Nim was put in diapers and dressed in clothes. He was breastfed by his human surrogate mother, Stephanie Lafarge. “It seemed natural,” she says.Lafarge’s daughter, Jenny Lee, has a better explanation: “It was the seventies”. Jenny was 10-years-old when Nim came to live with her family. Read More ›
Information: Can humans find meaning in dolphin sounds?
Here’s a project to test that: Read More ›
Urgent: This engineer needs thought engineering
In the University of Houston alumni mag Parameters (Spring 2011) , vision researcher Haluk Ogmen says: Computers beat the brain in many tasks, like large number multiplication and database searches,” he said. “But there are other tasks that no computer even comes close to what we can do. In the area of navigation, the most powerful supercomputers cannot even match insects. So what’s missing are the engineering design principles that capture the fundamentals of biological information processing. That’s my goal as an engineer, to reverse–engineer vision, memory, and cognition and see how our brains and minds work. Design principles in vision? See “Biologist goes to war against language” for the correct Darwinspeak protocols currently in force.
A new “Darwinian” way of processing information?
In “Chimp, Bonobo Study Sheds Light on the Social Brain”, ScienceDaily reports (Apr. 5, 2011) It’s been a puzzle why our two closest living primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, have widely different social traits, despite belonging to the same genus. Now, a comparative analysis of their brains shows neuroanatomical differences that may be responsible for these behaviors, from the aggression more typical of chimpanzees to the social tolerance of bonobos.”What’s remarkable is that the data appears to match what we know about the human brain and behavior,” says Emory anthropologist James Rilling, who led the analysis. “The neural circuitry that mediates anxiety, empathy and the inhibition of aggression in humans is better developed in bonobos than in chimpanzees.” [ … Read More ›