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This project, and others like it, strike me as an extraordinary waste of time. Think of how remarkable it would be if Chimpanzees in captivity began to speak.
by incadenza 8y ago
This project, and others like it, strike me as an extraordinary waste of time.
Think of how remarkable it would be if Chimpanzees in captivity began to speak. This would mean chimpanzees have the language capacity but, in every observed chimp, it simply never occurred to them to use it?
It’s about as likely as finding a flightless bird somewhere and teaching it to fly.
- jobigoud 8y agoIt's believed that anatomically modern humans did not speak for many thousands of years.
- Simon_says 8y agoWho believes that? It beggars belief that there would be evolutionary pressure to develop the machinery for speech if intermediate steps were not being put to progressively better uses.
- lucideer 8y agoThis depends on your definition of speech I guess. Many animals have vocal capabilities to create complex enough sounds that they could conceivably construct perceptible human phonetics (not least parrots), but they don't do so naturally in the wild. They do however all communicate with each other in some form, much of it vocal; does that constitute "speech"?