JM: Did sheep, cow and goat herders consciously shape their DNA so that as adults they could drink milk? You said that in a previous post that evolution stopped for humans. This is just simple nonsense.
And how do you know that chimpanzees don't create a 'mental picture' of how they want to change their environment before they do it? We know that chimpanzees have mirror neurons, because mirror neurons were first discovered in non-human primates (a macaque monkey, actually, but later chimpanzees.) This is evidence of forming 'mental pictures', though we really don't know what mental pictures actually are, in any complete sense.
So when a chimpanzee sharpens a stick to use as a tool, and that tool is used to kill food or fish for termites, they are not forming mental pictures of what they want to do? How do you know this?
Why is my assumption wrong that when chimpanzees perform actions very similar to humans they are also exhibiting behavior that is similar to humans? Why is the assumption wrong that our mental processes are the similar if not the same? Why is the evidence wrong that shows our brains display similar processes?
Obviously it is because of some kind of idea that you have that humans are "essentially" different from the species we are related to and also the species from which our species emerged. This is a pre-Darwinian assumption and either you think that evolution is correct or you take your position.
Jerry Monaco 'what ever concepts are they are probably implicit in our
> brain'. No. Then they would not be concepts, but instincts.
>
> "Yes, I mean mental structures, including the power to reason. Chimps
> reason."
>
> No. I think you mean Chimps do something that by a bad analogy zoologists
> call reason. And that is because the zoologists do not understand reason.
Well, that is exactly what Europeans used to say about 'primitive' human beings. And the analogy is the same here. You assume because chimpanzees and bonobos are are other than us, and we can't communicate with them in our human language that when they exhibit emotions, behaviors, mental processes similar to ours, it is for some other reason and must be defined differently.
Just because chimpanzees don't speak a language does not mean they don't have mental capacities that are very similar to ours. Every scientific indication from neurology to control experiments to observation in the wild indicate that for most tasks chimpanzees go through the same mental processes that humans go through. In humans we would call those mental processes "reasoning." If you wish to call those mental processes "X" for non-modern humans and other primates, without also calling those same mental processes "X" for humans, then I must conclude that your position is dogmatic.
' the ability to reason and make coalitions? Read de Waal's "Chimpanzee
> Politics".'
>
> Forgive me, but there just is not time.
Too bad you don't have the time to actually understand the subject. You have taken a dogmatic position. I know this because you tell me what you believe and then you tell me that you don't actually have the time to study the evidence. Apparently you can get around the evidence by semantic fiat.
So I agree there is not enough time to study all that we want to study. But then you shouldn't take positions dogmatic positions on the areas of life you haven't study. Too bad there is not enough time for you to really consider the possibility that you might be very, very wrong here.
Chimpanzees don't exhibit language but they do exhibit culture. They exhibit what we call empathy when a human exhibits it. They exhibit most of what we call 'politics' on a face-to-face level, and on a level that doesn't involve creating institutions. They exhibit reasoning in many of the same ways that humans exhibit reasoning and to some extent they exhibit symbolic communication.
Still, I am sure that the title is
> an analogy, and a bad one, Chimpanzees don't have politics (let's face it,
> neither did humans until the Athenian democracy).
>
> 'all the capacity for empathy and the ability to understand the trade offs
> of helpfulness, cooperation, competition. ... are exhibited by our closest
> relatives the bonobos and the chimpanzees'
>
> No, that is wrong. You are using the terms "trade offs, helpfulness,
> cooperation, competition, empathy" in a way that is trying to blur over
> the
> difference between Chimpanzee actions (I hesitate to say 'behaviour') and
> human behaviour. Whatever Chimps are doing, it is only "competition" by
> analogy to human behaviour. After all, competition did not really become a
> common human characteristic until some time in the eighteenth century.
So when a wolf cooperates in hunting it is by definition not cooperation? Maybe wolf cooperations does not have all of the long range implications of human cooperation. Again the main difference here is institutional. Wolves, for example, don't exhibit "cooperation" over vast social networks and this is (mostly) because they don't build those artificial ecological niches that we call 'institutions'. But for most of our existence as a species neither did we.
So when bonobos cooperate in gathering food, and in the wild cooperate in making primitive ladders, and such, to reach food, and then share it among themselves, this is not "cooperation"? When they share it among themselves in ways that shows some idea that there was a division of labor in reaching the food, even though maybe only one of the bonobos actually gathered the food initially, this is not cooperation? Why? Because they didn't speak about before hand, even though it is obvious through observation that they communicated? Is it because cooperation among bonobos is somehow essentially different than human cooperation.
I am not impressed.
I don't want to jump on you. I don't remember that we have exchanged posts before, and I don't want to make you mad, but you truly need to look at the evidence.
Jerry