Another difference bites the dust
People have been trying to prove for a long time that humans are fundamentally different from animals instead of simply being higher on a continuum. First it was tool use, then self-awareness, culture, and language, but animals have been shown to have all the same faculties, albeit less developed of course. Each time those claiming a divide are proven wrong, they retreat to a higher ability, and when animals are shown to have that too, they go up another step.
Now there's a new study to blow Noam Chomsky's "language organ" theory out of the water. woofiegrrl sent me an article about a new study that showed that songbirds can learn basic grammar. According to Chomsky's theory, sentences that contain an explanatory clause are something that humans can recognize, but not animals. But a San Diego researcher was able to teach starlings to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling. Nine of his eleven birds learned to pick out the bird song with inserted warbling or rattling bird phrases about 90 percent of the time. What the experiment shows is that language and animal cognition is a lot more complicated than scientists once thought and that there is no "single magic bullet" that separates man from beast, said Jeffrey Elman, a professor of cognitive science at UCSD, who was not part of the Gentner research team.
Marc Hauser, director of Harvard University's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, ... said Gentner's study was important and exciting, showing that "some of the cognitive sources that we deploy may be shared with other animals."
Hauser, who wrote a paper with Chomsky in 2002, said that although the starlings are grasping a basic grammar, they don't have the necessary semantics to have the language ability that he and Chomsky wrote about. That's one more step of retreat.
There's no question that, on this planet at least, humans have the most brain development. But I don't believe there's a fundamental divide between humans and animals, only a matter of degree.
Now there's a new study to blow Noam Chomsky's "language organ" theory out of the water. woofiegrrl sent me an article about a new study that showed that songbirds can learn basic grammar. According to Chomsky's theory, sentences that contain an explanatory clause are something that humans can recognize, but not animals. But a San Diego researcher was able to teach starlings to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling. Nine of his eleven birds learned to pick out the bird song with inserted warbling or rattling bird phrases about 90 percent of the time. What the experiment shows is that language and animal cognition is a lot more complicated than scientists once thought and that there is no "single magic bullet" that separates man from beast, said Jeffrey Elman, a professor of cognitive science at UCSD, who was not part of the Gentner research team.
Marc Hauser, director of Harvard University's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, ... said Gentner's study was important and exciting, showing that "some of the cognitive sources that we deploy may be shared with other animals."
Hauser, who wrote a paper with Chomsky in 2002, said that although the starlings are grasping a basic grammar, they don't have the necessary semantics to have the language ability that he and Chomsky wrote about. That's one more step of retreat.
There's no question that, on this planet at least, humans have the most brain development. But I don't believe there's a fundamental divide between humans and animals, only a matter of degree.