| | Daniel:
Nathan:
>It's a mistake to conclude that those cognitive structures evolved only in modern humans. The evidence is pointing clearly in the other direction, for MUCH earlier evolution among MANY species of social animals, not just primates.
I'm perfectly happy about that. The groupings I was suggesting were only rough - as I said to Laj, human babies and animals could be considered roughly equivalent.
Actually, many animals are born with abilities superior to human babies. Witness grazing animals which are standing and running, staying with their mothers and avoiding rocks and trees and the like, within minutes or hours of their births. I'm not attributing that to higher rationality, but clearly they have cognitive abilities, i.e, awareness and judgment vis-a-vis their environment.
Primates have roughly the same developmental patterns as humans, helpless babies and slow maturation. With proper nurturing, some primates show roughly the same abilities at (very) roughly the same ages, until humans begin to surpass them at ages three to four or so.
What's amazing isn't that humans have more potential--that's obvious. It's that animals, given proper training and nurturing, as afforded to a human child, exhibit so MUCH.
That's one problem with animal anecdotes from 40 years ago. They were comparing zoo chimps with enculturated and nurtured humans, an obviously unscientific comparison. When researchers like Boysen began wondering if nurture would make the difference, and tested that idea, that's when we began to discover that if other primates were given the same advantages as human infants, they would exhibit far greater mental abilities than we expected.
Put another way, how well would human children do raised in the wild then kept in cages, bereft of attention, training and nurturing? Humans, subjected to those conditions, have tended to show very poor development.
Nobody is claiming that nonhuman primates have all the potential of humans. But the science is showing that rationality, by any reasonable measurement, is not an exclusive human domain.
Ed:
>Language, which is necessary for integrative, abstract thought, is a tool of cognition--and not primarily one of communication, as Rand so eloquently discovered.
Of course I agree with this too, although Rand was hardly the first to discover this. This is the familiar experience of having written something down, re-read it, then finding it is clearer in your own head as a result. Or perhaps having discussed it with someone. In either process, your knowledge becomes *placed outside of you* - so it can then be thought about *objectively*.
Language is NOT necessary for abstract, integrative thought. Deaf, nonverbal humans exhibit rationality, as do monkeys who do not use highly developed language. Some monkeys have been found to exhibit rather amazing problem-solving abilities, feats which exhibit both abstract and integrative cognition.
Language is obviously a tool which enables higher levels of abstraction, but NOT abstraction itself. This is just a philosophical old wive's tale, and it should be laid to rest.
Nathan Hawking
|
|
