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Could we let other apes and animals evolve over millions of years under our supervision and eye? If so, could a more advance species have done the same with us and is now observing us from a distance?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The name "orangutan" (also written orang-utan, orang utan, orangutang, and ourang-outang) is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning "person" and hutan meaning "forest",[10] thus "person of the forest".[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan
That's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures. I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature. There are so many prejudices and world views embded in our languages. We call ourselves hackers, but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The name "orangutan" (also written orang-utan, orang utan, orangutang, and ourang-outang) is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning "person" and hutan meaning "forest",[10] thus "person of the forest".[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan
That's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures. I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature. There are so many prejudices and world views embded in our languages. We call ourselves hackers, but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures. I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature. There are so many prejudices and world views embded in our languages. We call ourselves hackers, but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?
what usage of "it" are you referring to?
Could we let other apes and animals evolve over millions of years under our supervision and eye? If so, could a more advance species have done the same with us and is now observing us from a distance?
isn't that the main loop hole of who was born first? chicken or the egg?
Could we let other apes and animals evolve over millions of years under our supervision and eye? If so, could a more advance species have done the same with us and is now observing us from a distance?
I think we must assume we cannot. There hasn't been any major civilization that has been around for more than a few hundred or thousands of years.
If we construct such a project in a way that it has a 0.01% chance to crumble in a single year (which is why lower than anything our society can achieve right now), there's about a 10% chance it fails within 10k years, a 63% chance it fails in 100k years, and a 99.995% chance it fails within a million years.
The article is making a claim that can be summarized as...
the cognitive capacity to share with conspecifics something learned more than 120 seconds ago, is unique to humans and orangutans
They also inform you that bees have this capacity. That should be enough to make anyone skeptical. It seems like they identified a particular behavior unique among apes to Orangutans - suppressing vocalization in response to threat - ran an experiment to confirm their bias, and are spinning it as a story about the ability to talk about the past (rather than simply that Orangutans have evolved to deal with perceived threat by keeping quiet while the threat is present, and then going bananas after it's gone).
Conveying info about the past is something bees can do; yet it escapes Chimps and Bonobos. Yeah, ok.
