Why Can’t Apes Talk?

https://www.sapiens.org/language/primate-speech/

by anthrocurious • 8 years ago

75 63 8 years ago

pravda• 8 years ago

Chomsky gives some clues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2-nLuUrdJQ

devoply• 8 years ago

Who is to say the other non-sapient apes won't be able to talk in the next few hundred thousand to a million years if they don't go extinct?

amriksohata2• 8 years ago

Hindus believes apes did talk at some point, or atleast one species existed that did talk. They were called Vanara. They no longer exist but this literature might point to some species that are now extinct, no fossilised evidence though would be hard to guage from fossils.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanara

wafflesindeed• 8 years ago

It's also equally hard to trust give it's based on Hindu scripture, and the Wikipedia article itself states that they're considered mythical creatures.

codr43• 8 years ago

So how is trusting authority working out for you so far? It's a piece of the puzzle, these stories come from somewhere. The general idea is to use your brain to put the pieces together.

geuis• 8 years ago

Hmm. I am interested in this. Perhaps the modern forms have experienced enough predation that makes it difficult to follow this up. But we do such analysis often. Basically I would like to see if local ape populations continue to use our terms after a few isolated years.

codr43• 8 years ago

Many occult texts claim that the monkeys of today are a result of back crossing human DNA into monkey species long, long ago; and that they have been in regression ever since, turning less human with time.

zaarn• 8 years ago

I would find that unlikely considering how rarely cross-species reproduction is and we're not talking a different species, it's an entirely different family. Monkeys are largely not compatible enough to produce viable offspring, the last time that I am aware humans cross-bred with non-humans was with Neanderthals.

And that's not even mentioning the even remoter chance that the offspring is viable and can reproduce.

adrianN• 8 years ago

There have been unsuccessful experiments to interbreed humans and apes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee

So getting human DNA back into apes doesn't seem possible.

krapp• 8 years ago

I'm not aware of any occult texts which claim this, much less of "many." Can you specify?

srean6• 8 years ago

Under the aegis of, Narendra "Ganesha is proof Hindus knew plastic surgery in vedic times" Modi, many self appointed spokesperson of what Hindu's believe in, have come out of the woodwork.

They are the western analogue of humans riding on flying dinosaurs. Its the same phenomena. Now, we have our own Ku Klux Klan -- the cow rakshak's who are on a murderous spree with an implicit promise from the government that they will be insulated from justice.

Here's a partial list for HN's entertainment.

https://www.altnews.in/bjp-science-ganeshas-plastic-surgery-... a collection of youtube videos of the Prime Minister of India making such claims and videos of some other assorted jokers who are running the country.

murukesh_s3• 8 years ago

Please don't drag politics into HN.. I know you can link anything to a ideology or government and start bashing it. let's not do that.

eklavya4• 8 years ago

Those people saying the same things were always there. They just get more news time nowadays.

As long as the scientific progress is not hampered, I don't really care what the PM or some enthusiasts believe in. I think it's as harmless as people believing/not believing in God.

neel8986• 8 years ago

It seems around the world being unscientific and plain stupid is a great asset for winning democratic elections. We will be horrified if a well know professional speaks such rubbish but somehow okay with the facts that such people can handle countries with multi-trillion dollar economy

M_Bakhtiari• 8 years ago

WE WUZ ELAPHANTS!!1!

Maybe that Yakub was a foreign exchange student to IIT back in the day.

random3143• 8 years ago

Are we all going to pretend that an ancient mythological fairy tale text is the evidence of talking apes?

star-techate• 8 years ago

Nobody really is, or they'd be worrying about the evidence for talking snakes.

This is some kind of "the grass is greener on the other side" stuff. Local myths are absurd, but foreign myths are evidence.

pcx• 8 years ago

Us Hindus also believe that one of those monkeys could fly, namely Hanuman. That doesn't mean it can be possible. A lot of Hindu mythology is pure myth. Do not even try to link it to science.

Supporting myth and superstition with pseudo-science has become popular these days in India, thanks to our PM and the rest of the ruling party indulging in such practice.

amriksohata2• 8 years ago

You didn't read what I wrote.

murukesh_s3• 8 years ago

OMG, seriously, I am a Hindu and I don't believe apes did talk or we were flying around in pushpak vimanas. Anything that is described in mythology is mythology. Please enjoy reading it and read it to our kids, but tell them that it's a story. On the other hand if you want to do some solid work on bringing credibility to these mythical stuff mentioned in the stories, please do scientific research and try to back it with solid proof. Otherwise we will become a laughing stock in front of the scientific community.

p.s. There is a dark side version to the Vanara mythology, it was once told by my father and I have come to accept it as one possibility of how the name would have sticked. Here is one version: Vanara in sanskrit means Va-Nara? (question). It's like asking "Are you human"? So when Rama who was from north and when in excile came to contact with people in the south, he is said to have asked are you human? Va-Nara?

And don't forget all the gods then were Kings, which was so convenient isn't it? Rama was king but also is a god. Krishna is a king but also is a god, but oh wait Krishna is dark skinned, as he captured power from Kamsa and not of royal lineage, but in the story it was given a twist (even though he belonged to Yadav caste) that he was indeed of the royal lineage and of Brahmanical descent. Krishna wouldn't have minded that story himself.. So in all possibilities there were wars between two kingdoms (Sinhala and India) and the story is used to build the mythical story that we read now. Just enjoy reading it, but don't take it was written history or anything without solid backing.

p.p.s A comparable mythological story is Epic of Gilgamesh. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh). There are several elements in that story that is said to have inspired the Old Testament.

close044• 8 years ago

Otherwise we will become a laughing stock in front of the scientific community

All peoples have mythology and legends. Very rarely does this create the expectation that those stories are fact. Religion in general being one of those major exceptions. And regular people believe all kinds of "unbelievable" stuff anyway. So I wouldn't worry too much about it as long as scientists don't start claiming (all?) mythology is science.

Greek mythology had a huge influence on many things in every field you can imagine but nobody really thinks it has more than maybe a grain of truth. Certainly not a basis for science.

random3143• 8 years ago

From what I have heard Rama is not a god in the original ramayana by valmiki. He is only a maryada purshottam - a man of best dignity and character. He became a god several thousand years later.

lost_snake• 8 years ago

That's not a Hindu belief, and is an overly modern reading of Hindu mythology.

Just like Hindu/Indo-European notions of asparas/wood-nymphs doesn't imply the existence of and rationalization of a tribe of forest women, this isn't really a belief among Hindus about a former state of monkeyhood.

Ancient people simply believed in literally supernatural/estoeric things - they weren't "secretly" technologically advanced with a strange vocabulary we now read as religious.

MichaelMoser1233• 8 years ago

I wonder if multiple talking species can possibly coexist, or if one of them inevitably ends up destroying it's competitors.

Ar-Curunir• 8 years ago

Multiple human species existed at the same time, but got assimilated into Homo sapiens sapiens of today.

MichaelMoser1233• 8 years ago

Wikipedia says that there is no consensus if they assimilated or not https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_humans

amelius• 8 years ago

Given the problems between human races, I'd say the latter.

blattimwind• 8 years ago

Humans aren't divided into races.

vbuwivbiu• 8 years ago

races are a mythical artifact from Victorian times

MichaelMoser1233• 8 years ago

Some say that bonobo apes are layed back and less aggressive than chimps, but others say that in captivity they behave very differently than in the wild. Go figure ...

wasd8843• 8 years ago

I read this book not long ago:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Next-Kin-Conversations-Chimpanzees-...

And in it the author (who spent decades working with and teaching chimps) concludes that chimps have the intelligence to talk but not the vocal chords. They can understand humans talking (in the same way that a dog can understand verbal commands) but they cannot do much besides grunt or hoot back.

However when you change the conversation method to something else (such as sign languge) chimps can talk back exceedingly well. In the book mentioned above the author has video proof that the chimps can talk to humans (and each other) at the level of a two to four year old child.

This is the main chimp in the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoe_(chimpanzee)

This doesn't seem to just apply to chimps either. Gorillas (and other large apes) can do the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)

oftenwrong• 8 years ago

The article suggests, based on some more-recent work, that primates can have "speech ready" anatomy. The article seems to be saying that both the intelligence for language and the anatomy for speech may be present, but not the necessary level of coordination between the two.

YeGoblynQueenne4• 8 years ago

That kind of work was very poor methodologically and its results are best explained as the Clever Hans effect, as the animals generating random strings unconnected to a current context, or simply as over-zealous efforts to assign meaning to the animals' signing, by their handlers.

See for example this article regarding the work of Francine Patterson with Koko:

On the Evidence for Linguistic Abilities in Signing Apes

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0093934X79...

From which I quote (since it's Elsevier-walled):

> One of the major problems with Patterson's study is that it presents very little data. While several large corpora of the utterances of children have been published (e.g. Bloom, 1973), there is as yet no corpus of any ape's signing behavior. That is, Patterson fails to provide a substantial number of transcribed utterances. Rather, she relies upon individual examples to support her interpretations. In the absence of a corpus of utterances, however, these examples are impossible to interpret. One cannot determine whether they have the functions wich Patterson attributes to them, or whether they resulted from the ape acting as a "random sign generator" which happened to emit sequences that could be selectively chosen to illustrate particular points. This sampling problem vitiates Patterson's claim that certain combinations demonstrated that Koko possessed the ability to creatively combine signs into novel utterances. Those who assert that apes have shown linguistic abilities have invariably relied upon examples such as Washoe's signing water bird for duck. In the absence of a large corpus, however, these examples are subject to multiple interpretations. Patterson's claim that cookie rock was a creative description of a stale sweet roll loses much of its force if Koko also produced utterances such as cookie tickle, cookie hat, and toothbrush cookie in similar contexts. The largest corpus of utterances from any signing ape, that of Terrace, Pettito and Bever (1967a,b) shows that their subject, a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky, did in fact combine each vocabulary sign with a large number of other signs. Although each of the resulting combinations could be interpreted metaphorically, a simpler interpretation is that he merely combined signs randomly. The correct interpretation depends on other information--an accounting of the frequencies with which signs occurred in combination with one another, the contexts in which combinations occurred, the content of the teachers' signing--which Patterson fails to provide. Without this information, the importance of her examples cannot be ascertained.
> Patterson's discussion of her cookie rock example provides some measure of this problem. She states, "Although Koko has produced uninterpretable strings (as do some children), most of her utterances are appropriate to the situation and some are strikingly apt" (p. 88). She then cites some "interpretable" examples, including cookie rock; the "uninterpretable" strings are not described. It is the case that only "interpretable" sequences are ever documented in the reports on ape signing. Only by presenting an unedited corpus of responses, however, could Patterson's assertion be validated.

Note also that one of the two authors in the quoted paper is Laura A. Pettito, one of the researchers that worked with Nim Chimpsky.

wasd8843• 8 years ago

That kind of work was very poor methodologically and its results are best explained as the Clever Hans effect

I think you might be overreaching here! Roger Fouts was (and still is) an expert and I fear you may just be regurgitating information from a study that is nearly forty years old.

The book I mentioned earlier was written twenty years after the linked article and explicitly mentions the bias he experienced in an entire chapter alone. It counters and logically explains away a lot of the conclusions that they falsely arrived at. If I remember correctly one of the main reasons that studies in the 70s and 80s liked to play down the intelligence of chimps is that it allowed the "for profit" chimp research centers to continue operating. A lot of these studies were published and financed by people who would lose out if they had to provide better (and therefore more costly) conditions for their "dumb testing subjects".

As for the clever hans effect, Roger was extremely careful to not to selectively extract words and interpret them during his research. He even invited officials from the ASL institute to verify his findings first hand.

The clever hans effect also cannot explain away why chimps started signing to each other (when no humans were present and the chimps were being monitored by video) or why sometimes the chimps would sign to themselves (much in the same way that humans occasionally mumble to themselves).

I implore you (if you have the time) to read Roger's book. It really is an eye opener and very well written!

morganvachon• 8 years ago

From the tagline: A recent study suggests they’ve got the voice but not the brains.

As pointed out early in the article, I had always read it was the other way around; their brains are advanced enough for rudimentary speech, but they lacked the vocal "hardware" that humans developed over time.

The fact that they can learn to sign and show true understanding of a non-verbal language seems to contradict the article's gist.

gxx• 8 years ago

The article says that apes can't talk because of limitations in the part of the brain that controls the muscles of the mouth. Their ability to sign shows they do have the mental capacity to learn to communicate but with their hands. This may not extend to speech specifically for the reasons discussed in the article.

jobigoud3• 8 years ago

because of limitations in the part of the brain that controls the muscles of the mouth

That makes it sound like it might be feasible to "fix" this. Maybe by implanting electrodes to stimulate these specific muscles and have the electrodes controlled by unrelated moto-neurons (or maybe capture the sign language and apply the correct stimulus).

How far are we from this, are there any research team working on this? Is it ethical to do it? Is it ethical not to do it if we have the means?

mannykannot• 8 years ago

The experiments on teaching sign language to chimpanzees actually suggests the opposite, because it shows that, even if you take the physical inability issue off the table, the chimpanzees do not make much use of their language skills - they do not enter into extended conversations with their handlers or one another. The evidence that they 'truly' (perhaps we should ask 'how deeply') understand language is controversial, especially given the recent evidence as to the extent that computer programs can give the superficial impression of having more understanding than a more thorough study of their abilities reveals.

It is sometimes argued that we do not know enough about their motivations to make that call, but it is hard to imagine there being no situations in which they would find language useful, and even harder to imagine not being able to devise experimental situations in which a greater use of language would be the only way to achieve goals they manifestly desire. Ultimately, the argument about different motives is one about different mental capabilities, anyway.

Personally, I think it probable that species other than Homo Sapiens made good use of language, but we seem to be the only one around at the moment.

omrihaviv• 8 years ago

This makes me ponder the affects of a device such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink on other species. Will we be able to make animals smarter, not just humans?

jobigoud3• 8 years ago

This is usually called "uplift" in science fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_(science_fiction)

Obligatory video of a Chimpanzee playing in VR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yD4KQGZUs4

err4nt• 8 years ago

My theory -> they're too smart! Maybe they realize that if they ever started talking back to us humans, we'd put them to work (more than we already do)

Why Can’t Apes Talk?

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