Here’s a good one:
Humans and monkeys may not speak the same lingo, but our ways of thinking are a lot more similar than previously thought, according to new research from UC Berkeley, Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University.
In experiments on 100 study participants across age groups, cultures and species, researchers found that indigenous Tsimane’ people in Bolivia’s Amazon rainforest, American adults and preschoolers and macaque monkeys all show, to varying degrees, a knack for “recursion,” a cognitive process of arranging words, phrases or symbols in a way that helps convey complex commands, sentiments and ideas.
The findings, published today (Friday, June 26) in the journal Science Advances, shed new light on our understanding of the evolution of language, researchers said.
University of California-Berkeley, “Humans and monkeys show similar thinking patterns” at ScienceDaily
Paper. (open access)
But aren’t these claims a bit ridiculous? When was the last time a monkey conveyed a complex idea?
By the way, this stuff isn’t particularly good for monkeys. They aren’t better monkeys due to claims that they think like people, nor are their habitats better protected — which is what really matters to them.
So I’m reading through this and I’m seeing these symbols they are using to test them and other such lovely things and all I can think of is that there anthropomorphizing the crap out of the monkeys and in the first experiment the monkeys completely failed
Oh I am seeing them making some mighty long stretches to connect the dots here
To be terribly honest with you at this point in the game if we have not found massive amounts of cognitive capability from the monkeys were not gonna find any now
You’ve known for quite some time that they are capable of pattern matching quite well
And they are still significantly beneath us
Maybe if we design an even better test like train a monkey for 20 years to see if I can speak oh wait we already did that and it didn’t work
From the sciencedaily article we find,,:
What is their supposedly ‘strong empirical evidence”?
And from the abstract of the paper we find,
So humans ‘spontaneously’ got the correct sequence of the four symbols whilst monkeys, with additional positive feedback of snacks or juice, eventually got the correct sequence of the four symbols.
If this supposedly ‘strong empirical evidence’ proves anything, all that it proves just how gullible, and blind, researchers can be to their own inherent biases.
What is truly interesting about this study is not that monkey’s, with prodding from juice and snacks, can eventually get the sequence of four symbols correct, but is that Children (3 to 5 years old), and a Bolivian indigenous group, with no previous exposure to what the symbols might mean, ‘spontaneously’ got the correct sequence.
This finding is similar to these following findings,
Likewise, and also contrary to Darwinian presuppositions, toddlers also display a highly developed sense of ‘moral justice’ from very early on:
The main failing of the researchers in the OP who erroneously believed that monkeys, (via prodding from snacks and juice), somehow display “a knack for “recursion” is their failure to realize that recursion, like mathematics, simply is not reducible to the materialistic explanations of Darwinists.
i.e., Recursion, since it is essentially a immaterial logical and/or mathematical function, is simply forever beyond the scope of the materialistic explanations of Darwinists:
Similar to the immaterial principle of ‘recursion’, the following paper holds that since words themselves are, in many cases, irreducibly complex in their logical structure, then language cannot have been acquired gradually but must have ’emerged’ abruptly:
In short, human language is profoundly immaterial in its basic essence and logical structure and therefore, by definition, can never have a materialistic explanation as Darwinists presuppose.
As Michael Egnor noted,
It is such ‘immaterial power’ that we have with language, mathematics, etc.. that profoundly separates us from monkeys. And it is such immaterial powers that we have in language, mathematics, etc.., and as Dr. Egnor noted elsewhere, that provides ‘strong empirical proof’ that “We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses.”
Indeed it is such ‘immaterial power’ that we have with language, mathematics, etc. that provides us with ‘strong empirical evidence’ that we must possess a soul: