Parrots are smarter. QED
If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
131–140 of 221 posts
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#132A very interesting read, which describes how for ~50 years the community was lead astray by a seemingly simple oversight: studying dead animals instead of living ones! >Charles Darwin theorized that monkeys had the vocal anatomy needed for speech, but lacked the necessary neural mechanisms. >This was the most popular hypothesis until 1969 [when] Lieberman studied the vocal anatomy of a monkey corpse and concluded tha…
Fun, irrelevant fact: William Tecumseh Fitch is a direct descendant of General William Tecumseh Sherman of the US Civil War.
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#133Strange that this article doesn't mention any of the current research into what the cause is . [Erich Jarvis]( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Jarvis ) has done research into the neurological mechanisms and seems to have discovered that animals capable of complex speech patterns have some mutations that permit a neural connection to grow from the motor cortex to the larynx (or syrinx in birds) by way of the bra…
Yet people can make perfectly intelligible speech without using the larynx at all - whispering. People can also speak using a vibrator pressed against the throat.
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#134It's interesting to compare this "sound-talk" that parrots can easily accomplish with the obviously greater intelligence of apes, who can't reproduce human sounds, with the debate over whether chatGPT is intelligent or not. Note that Koko was obviously a greater communicator than any parrot ever was. Is mimicking human behaviour a necessary, or even sufficient, criteria for demonstrating cognition and intelligence?
Koko's language skills were misrepresented in a pretty extreme way. Very few recordings of Koko communicating anything more than short phrases were ever released, and those that were never demonstrated much more than word association. I've met dogs and pigs that were able to go fetch the "carrot" versus the "bunny" stuffed animals based on verbal commands, but I'm not going to claim that constitutes mastery of langua…
Language has also been called the "operating system" of the brain. When we think about things, we think in terms of words and language.
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#135I recall that the origin of the word "barbarian" comes from the ancient Greeks, who interpreted foreign languages as simply "bar bar bar". So, other animals may be communicating vocally, it's just that all we hear is "woof woof woof".
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#136Well we are the apes/monkeys that could?
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#137We've been building tech to translate dog barks to something meaningful for us to understand.
A few things we observed: 1. Dogs are more communicative once they believe you are correctly responsive to their vocalizations 2. Their barks are more differentiated over time and they start to introduce new types of vocalizations or sequences of vocalizations 3. Dogs don't have a structured vocal language as it starts of slightly differentiated and mostly to get people's attention
This isn't true for other animals (based on our reading of academic papers) and a commonality we've seen in the papers: as animals have more individuals they interact with across their life especially not directly related, their vocalizations are more structured. Within family units they tend to rely more on touch, body language, and some intermittent vocalizations. Though marine mammals are very vocal given they operate within acoustic environments in the ocean and it gets dark around 100m - 200m.
Basically, as number of sustained individuals in a group goes up and the number of non-related individuals increases, vocalizations get more diverse. We see cows, pigs, goats, and other herd animals are also very vocal which is how scientists have been decoding their speech recently similar to prairie dogs.
Much of what I've written here is a super simplification but happy to get deeper into the weeds.
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#138A very interesting read, which describes how for ~50 years the community was lead astray by a seemingly simple oversight: studying dead animals instead of living ones! >Charles Darwin theorized that monkeys had the vocal anatomy needed for speech, but lacked the necessary neural mechanisms. >This was the most popular hypothesis until 1969 [when] Lieberman studied the vocal anatomy of a monkey corpse and concluded tha…
Now do dogs. Are they missing any anatomy for speech or is that also neural?
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Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#139[flagged]
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Koko's language skills were misrepresented in a pretty extreme way. Very few recordings of Koko communicating anything more than short phrases were ever released, and those that were never demonstrated much more than word association. I've met dogs and pigs that were able to go fetch the "carrot" versus the "bunny" stuffed animals based on verbal commands, but I'm not going to claim that constitutes mastery of langua…
Language has also been called the "operating system" of the brain. When we think about things, we think in terms of words and language.
> When we think about things, we think in terms of words and language.
This is commonly believed for no reason that I'm aware of. It is obviously not true.