5 ms·

Referring to your baby ability remark, it is in fact true of most mammals and most birds. You can check out the works of Stanislas Dehaene on the subject.

• liberte82 9y ago
  That's interesting. I wonder how far back in evolution this goes and where is the common ancestor that first came with basic math abilities programmed in. And what sort of advantage it creates in the natural environment.
• lawpoop 9y ago
  I'll be honest, I'm not going to look up the work. Do those experiments show definitively that babies and animals understand that 1 + 1 = exactly 2 and nothing else? Or do they understand that 1-ish + 1-ish is more than 1 -- because this isn't that much different from what anumeric groups understand. Less and more are different from discrete arithmetic, strictly speaking. For instance, 1 fish + 1 fish might be > 3 fish, if the first two fish we're talking about are 20 and 40 lbs respectively, and then the second set of three fish are ten pounders each. In the "real world", hunter-gatherers deal with continuous mass problems at least as often as they deal with standardized, discrete units. Did these babies and animals understand that 1 + 1 = 2 and only 2, and not 2.5? Or 3? The abstract idea of arithmetic is something on the scale of reasoning about an idealized circle, say, which doesn't exist in nature on a day-to-day basis.
  • bwang29 9y ago
    The experiment involved putting teddy bears behind a blue screen. Two bears enter the screen and when the screen is lifted with one bear or three bears, the baby will express a lot more anxiety than seeing two bears
    • ChristianGeek 9y ago
      That just shows that they understand different or more than/less than.