Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
3people
2009–2025years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- There has been a LOT of research on this. A popsci book I've read on the topic is Adam's Tongue. It details the features that separate what's called Animal Communication Systems from human language.
https://www.amazon.com/Adams-Tongue-Humans-Made-Language-ebo...
Obviously pets are quite capable of making their wishes known to us, especially if we facilitate it. It's unclear whether they're actually achieving language. I'm tempted to think they are, especially when I see dogs using push buttons to talk to us on Instagram. But I can't be totally sure.
And even if they were, it would be language we taught them. Not independently developed in the wild.
- The book Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans makes a cogent argument for my position. It examines carefully the difference between Animal Communication Systems and our own, in all the variety primitive humanity could devise.
https://www.amazon.com/Adams-Tongue-Humans-Made-Language-ebo...
- > no one knows what exactly property of language makes it unique.
The book Adam's Tongue delves into this. The author distinguishes "Animal Communication Systems" from languages by their linguistics. There are several things that you can isolate in human languages that you never see in animals, though some animals, like bees, come close.
Finally, he presents a hypothesis of how language might have evolved in humans in the context of savannah scavenging. The thinking goes that scavenging an elephant after it dies requires extremely rapid cooperation, because the window of opportunity is a few days at most.
My feeling is that you're never going to be able to find one thing that separates us from animals, that looking for that one thing is bound to fail.
http://www.amazon.com/Adams-Tongue-Humans-Made-Language/dp/0...
- The book Adam's Tongue by Derek Bickerton chronicles one view of how language evolved in humans and in doing so, evolved humans along with it. It's pretty fascinating.
The book explains how our brains wouldn't really have the "thoughts" you speak of without having had language in the first place. I'm not sure precisely how this fits in to children who can't speak and who were never taught to sign, but my guess is it would introduce considerable mental stumbling blocks.
- Usually we have to wait awhile to see the errors of our fortune-tellers. Luckily this fellow is wrong right out of the starting gate:
We know that communications overload reduces your IQ: http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/sep2007/ca20070...
Of course, that's just e-mail at work. But the "dumbing-down" of IT, education and work in general is unlikely to increase our IQ.
Derek Bickerton, sometime co-author of the article's referenced William Calvin, believes that we may already be going the other way. In his book "Adam's Tongue" he points out how, over time, humans are becoming eerily similar to ants or termites, He also notes that it takes about 40 generations for a wolf to become a domesticated dog-like animal and that the caste system in India, which has probably been in place longer, may have left a permanent trace upon it's members.
