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This is awful news, though I can't help but to feel she really did it all the right way. Happy she was a part of my timeline.
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I suspect Koko's capabilities were completely over sold.
I was fascinated by Koko's abilities and took them at face value until I saw her famous climate change speech: > I am gorilla. I am flowers, animals. I am nature. Man Koko love. Earth Koko love. But Man stupid. Stupid! Koko sorry. Koko cry. Time hurry! Fix Earth! Help Earth! Hurry! Protect Earth. Nature see you. Thank you. I saw that and felt like I was in crazy land. That's supposedly the kind of talking Koko's been…
> Some viewers took the video a little too literally, however, and were surprised at Koko's pithy and timely exhortation to heed the perils of global warming. But nothing about the video indicates that Koko can actually entertain, much less communicate to humans, thoughts about environmentalism.
Personally I never took it literally. I saw the video and knew right away it was just a marketing stunt, but that didn't mean I suddenly thought research into ape intelligence and language should stop. I do wish they had made it more clear that it was just a stunt because I'm sure people like you felt mislead.
I am still fascinated with Koko and the brains of great apes! Also fascinating that they've never asked a question but at least one grey parrot has. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)#cite_note-jordan...
RIP Jane Goodall
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I was fascinated by Koko's abilities and took them at face value until I saw her famous climate change speech: > I am gorilla. I am flowers, animals. I am nature. Man Koko love. Earth Koko love. But Man stupid. Stupid! Koko sorry. Koko cry. Time hurry! Fix Earth! Help Earth! Hurry! Protect Earth. Nature see you. Thank you. I saw that and felt like I was in crazy land. That's supposedly the kind of talking Koko's been…
From the Snopes: > Some viewers took the video a little too literally, however, and were surprised at Koko's pithy and timely exhortation to heed the perils of global warming. But nothing about the video indicates that Koko can actually entertain, much less communicate to humans, thoughts about environmentalism. Personally I never took it literally. I saw the video and knew right away it was just a marketing stunt, b…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language#Criticism_a...
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Regarding:
> I do wish they had made it more clear that it was just a stunt because I'm sure people like you felt mislead.
People like me felt like "what the hell was that?", maybe :D
The more you look into Penny Patterson's claims, the more you go "what the hell?"
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to advocate for the death of 8 billion people is a hell of a stance. there's pro genocide and then there's... I guess this is just hating the whole species.
I think she advocating for fewer births. The 8 billion deaths would eventually happen by themselves, most of them of old age.
That's sad news. She completely changed the way we thought about primate intelligence. Fun fact: she really liked the Far Side cartoon about her. https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/...
The full saga is humourous. from wiki. Gary Larson cartoon incident One of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons shows two chimpanzees grooming. One finds a blonde human hair on the other and inquires, "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?"[114] Goodall herself was in Africa at the time. The Jane Goodall Institute thought the cartoon was in bad taste and had its lawyers draft a letter to Larson…
I like the strip that shows a scientist who has invented an animal translator learning that what dogs are really saying is "Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!"
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Yeah I've seen this before, we could all drive V12s and eat only beef but it's not a very meaningful insight. We're going to stabilize around 10 billion by 2080 according to projections and then decline, hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point. We came from the caves, we didn't know any better we just multiplied like a cancer. More population also brings more benefits, more geniuses more invent…
We have improved a lot on eliminating wars front. Inequality not so much but much progress has been made in eliminating abject poverty.
Have we? After the nightmare of The War to End All Wars, did anyone in the mainstream honestly expect Europe to turn into an even bigger charnel house (~30-50 million dead) two decades later?
It's been 80 years since then, and we've not had a 'large' industrialized war since then. But we have all been living under an atomic sword of Damocles.
Do you think we're going to get to 200 years without that sword falling? What odds do you give on that (We've had many close calls since then)? How many people would die if it does fall? If in 2145, half a billion[1] people will die in nuclear fire, will we retroactively consider the brief stretch of history we live in to just be a brief ceasefire?
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[1] That would be a best case outcome for a nuclear war - a limited one, that wouldn't rise to the level of a global catastrophe.
If you find Jane Goodall inspirational, you may be delighted to learn about Anne Innis Dagg [0], whose studies of wild giraffe predates Goodall's study of chimps. The documentary "The Woman Who Loves Giraffes" [1] is fantastic and has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. The reason you might not know Dagg's name is essentially that she was denied tenure for being a woman. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Innis_Dagg [1] htt…