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the biggest mystery is not why we humans developed language, but why nobody else didTHE BEE LANGUAGETwo thousand years ago the Poet Virgil wrote a book about bees and the joys of bee-keeping; in classic Latin but largely childish fables. Although the insect has been studied for ages, the whole story and the true story of its wonderful ways is not yet half told. In 1901, Count Maeterlinck's famous "The Life of the Bee", proclaimed honeybees to be so human-like and intelligent that they had a language -- an idea ridiculed by John Burroughs, the naturalist, and other scientists.
Experiments by a professor at the University of Munich, Karl von Frisch, have proven that the facts about bees are more amazing than any of the many romantic poems and melodramatic fables. For instance, a worker bee which has discovered a new supply of food can, after her return to the inside of the hive, in total darkness, give other workers precise information about it and its location!
Only a bare outline can be given here but the many marvels of bee language are told in fascinating detail by von Frisch in a little book published by Cornell University
Press.http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/natbltn/300-399/nb337.htmUCR Entomologists Report Bee-Dancing Brings More Food To Honeybee ColoniesSource: University Of California - Riverside Date: 2002-12-16 "The dance language is the most complex example of symbolic communication in any animal other than primates," said Visscher. "Our study is the first test of the adaptive value of the dance language. It provides insights that may be of use in manipulating foraging behavior of honeybees for pollination of crops."
There has been a long-simmering controversy over whether the direction and distance information in the dance is actually decoded by the recruits which follow the dances, or whether recruitment is based on the recruits learning only the odor food source from the dancer, and subsequently searching out the food based on odor alone. Several experiments have been published that have convinced most scientists that the bees can decode the direction and distance information, but the relative role of odor and location information has remained in question.To test the effect of the information in the dance, Sherman and Visscher turned the normally vertical beehive on its side. With the combs horizontal, there was no upward reference for the dancer to use in orienting her waggle runs, and it performed disoriented dances, in which the waggle runs pointed in all directions. To experimentally restore dance information, the experimenters provided a directional light source, which the bees interpreted as the sun. The bees proceeded to do well-oriented dances at the angle relative to the light.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/12/021216071100.htm
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Does anyone remember the name of a book that came out a few years ago (exerpt in Readers Digest, I lost the scrap I wrote the title on) that looked at animal intelligence in terms of their ability to problem solve in order to achieve their own needs. He didn't attempt a scientific approach but used information from trainers, keepers, etc.
Includes anecdotes like the orangutan who sound a piece of wire and not only learned to pick the simple padlock of his cage but kept the wire hidden, often in his cheek, for a few weeks. Left the keepers mystified as to how he and the other orangs kept getting out of their night cages.
The most amazing story to me was of the orca, unused to swimming with trainers, which without instruction held position in its pool while a trainer climbed on its head to free the sling which had jammed holding its calf a few feet above the water. It made me reassess my ideas about animal's ability to think in terms of future possible and to conceive solutions.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Jackie's quote says it for me:
The link also offers this interesting comment, mav, which I think speaks more to what you were saying--or to the discussion you were trying to engender?--although it does not refer to language:
Often we define intelligence with respect to human qualities. Thus, as we tend to consider ourselves as the most intelligent species, we compare other species to ourselves. Yet, is this really possible? One scientist suggests that humans tend to ignore any intelligence that is somewhat different than our own: "We willingly accept the idea of intelligence in a lifeform only if the intelligence displayed is on the same evolutionary wavelength as our own. Technology automicatically indicates intelligence. An absence of technology translates into an absence of intelligence."
we think we are so damn superior...
and evolution ain't done yet....
formerly known as etaoin...
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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So has anyone read anything on the Aquatic Ape stuff?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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well, I got 65,000 googlits (AllTheWebs, actually...) which ranged from total support, to Wikipedia, to measured dissent, to bunk. and more, which after a couple of glasses of wine, aren't really going to sink in (haha, sink in...), so I'll google again tomorrow... oh, and a Grauniad article, too! 
formerly known as etaoin...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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The silver disks don't really change this communication -- if it is one -- in any essential way.
I beg to differ. You can't eat a silver disk. The monkey recognized the symbolic nature of the silver disk. The grape all by itself doesn't have symbolic value; it's food.
In the other article the author seems to be suggesting that there are forms of animal communication that don't have a mode of communication. Ummm …, huh?
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Joined: Dec 2000
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Dec 2000
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> So why the difference between our species and others?
An unpopular theory:
The North African jungles receded toward the end of the most recent ice age, giving way to grasslands, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the branches and took up a life out in the open - following around herds of ungulates, nibbling what they could along the way.
Among the new items in their diet were mushrooms growing in the dung of these ungulate herds. The changes caused by the introduction of this diet containing psilocybin created the synesthesia which led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.
About 12,000 years ago, further climate changes removed the mushroom from the human diet, resulting in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to pre-mushroomed and frankly brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.
All primates - and we certainly are primates - have what are called 'male dominance hierarchies'. This means that the meanest monkey in a tribe takes control of the group resources, the females, the weaker males, and this character runs the show, and this is pretty much how we do it today.
In the manure of the ungulate animals that evolved with the primates on the grasslands of Africa, was the mushroom which acted as a force for directing the evolution of human beings away from that of the rest of the anthropoid apes and toward the unique adaptation that we see as special to human beings today.
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Carpal Tunnel
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formerly known as etaoin...
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old hand
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old hand
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> dood, that's kewl.
Yeah, right on man.
I think it's the only, repeat, only compelling theory there is unless you just go for the, 'well it was bound to happen' or 'there were many reasons' option or assume that there are simply massive holes in our understanding of human movements and development (i.e. that we didn't come from Northern Africa, etc.)
I mean, thick skinned dead elephants... it's pretty wafer thin.
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