Alan Alda joins researchers studying human children and chimpanzees to discover why we share some skills with our closest living relatives, but have far surpassed them in our most uniquely human capabilities. Though we both descend from a common ancestor and are genetically so similar, why are we worlds apart in our behaviors and abilities?
45 Responses to “Video: Full Episode”
Other programs about Neanthertal and Modern man have stated they merely intermarried and were absorbed into our society. This program acerts that they died out. Who’s correct here?
Also, American Indians have been here for almost 10,000 yers but changed little until the White man intervened. Why didn’t they progress?
The Native Americans did progress, Jim. Math, science, arts, architecture, construction, social constructs, and more. It sounds like you just aren’t aware of the sort of progress and development that went in during that time. Your statement that they did not progress is based on a lack of knowledge as opposed to the reality of the situation.
“Why didn’t they progress?”
The answer to this depends on one’s definition of progress.
PS:
Dr. Shea is the man.
SBU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So….the difference between humans and chimps is that humans understand pointing is a cooperative act, but chimps don’t. And so dogs, who understand the pointing gesture, are human? That must be why we keep them (and not chimps) as pets — at least for the most part…
I like the program, I don’t like Alda. His biases get in the way of the message. Some examples are:
1. Dogs understand what is meant when humans point at something. This is glaringly misleading. Most dogs are clueless and stare at your finger instead of the intended target unless trained otherwise. 2. Monkeys understand that they are dealing with other MINDS when you turn your back on food. They do not understand anything of the sort. What they do is see an opportunity to get away with stealing unguarded food. This behavior is exhibited in many species, including fish. It is more likely explained as hard-wired instinct. 3. Chimpanzees do not understand the concept of heavy and light objects. When asked to speculate on this, Alda’s knee-jerk reaction was to anthropomorphose chimpanzee thinking to attribute it to a God. Alda’s attempt to ridicule the concept of God was shot down immediately because God is a complex abstract concept that animals are incapable of understanding. (Frankly, I was surprised that this was not edited from the final product.) Einstein said that “God does not play dice with the universe.” If given the choice, I’ll go with Einstein.
This episode was dedicated to demonstrating the differences between human thinking and animal thinking. Virtually every exhibition and experiment demonstrated that the human mind is capable of processing complex abstract concepts, whereas animal minds are not.
I was asked once “What is more powerful, the human brain or a computer?” My reply was; Computers are number crunchers, humans are idea crunchers. A human can build a computer, a computer cannot build a human.
I like the program a lot, but it got me to wondering if they did the heavy/light box test with dogs. That would be a far better test to see if the dogs are picking up on cues from people. Other thoughts: chimps that have been taught sign language have been shown to be able to think in very human ways like simple metaphors and adapting their signs to try to convey new situations. For more details see http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/language/chimpanzee.html Something like this should clearly have been put in the video.
Quote from Lucas Clay: “chimps that have been taught sign language have been shown to be able to think in very human ways like simple metaphors and adapting their signs to try to convey new situations”
Adult chimpanzees do not think in very human ways. They are not able to process complex abstract concepts such as posting an opinion on a forum. Or even harnessing fire as a tool. They are able to communicate wants and needs and simple emotions. They are capable of communicating as a very young human child and never advance beyond that.
I agree, I wasn’t trying to say they are our equals, but trying to show that they have a glimmer of our type of intelligence. If they were our equals, or even close, they would be inventing things and using abstract thought patterns. They are probably comparable to humans around a million years ago (just a guess and not even an educated one). I’m not sure if you read the article I suggested, it’s not very long, but if so what do you make of the chimp calling radishes “cry hurt fruit”? This seems to me to be a very simple metaphor, even though it is far from adult human levels, and what is a metaphor if not a combining of abstract thoughts? (By the way, I did look up both metaphor and abstract in the dictionary to make sure I was using them correctly, and while neither says anything about the other they seem to me to be linked, though I’m having trouble putting into words exactly how.)
You go Cro! — I would point out, however, that even young human children are communicating about things (concepts) that are far beyond the ken of apes.
I was not surprised at the conclusion of this program: that chimps have a very watered down version of the human mind. It’s the easy way out. It’s what most people want to hear. No one wants to hear that chimps are as smart as us because that’s threatening (not to mention prima facie silly). But no one wants to hear that they’re not like us at all, either. So the natural, dumbing down instinct is to run to the comfort of “they’re minds are just like ours except they are weaker, smaller, duller, etc.” Reminds me of the new BUD LIGHT advertising campaign. What an insult to the chimps! The idea that chimps (and other animals) are mentally both radically similar to us AND radically different is an idea that the media folks just can’t seem to get their minds around. Do they think the public is too dense to understand this possibility? I don’t think so. Humans and chimps come from a common ancestor 5-6 million years ago. Psychologically, the human line changed A LOT — the line leading to chimps hasn’t. Some of the changes involved new ways of representing/thinking about the world that chimps — no matter how or where you raise them — have never and will never achieve (despite the fact that scientists like myself have been trying for a century now). That doesn’t mean we’re superior to them — except in terms of the intellectual abilities we possess that are the very subject of that The Human Sparkateers (Alda, Chedd and company) are so eagerly exploring.
Great show! Keep up the good work!
One thing I was surprised about were the factual errors. Just to name one: allowing Frans de Waal to show Alan Alda an old film of chimpanzees cooperating to pull in a heavy box as proof that they understand what they are doing. Good grief! Crawford (who conducted these studies in the late 30s (published a bit later) would roll over in his grave at de Waal’s narration. Crawford Stressed how hard it was to TRAIN them to do this (months of dozens and dozens of sessions) and how little they seemed to grasp the symbolic underpinning of the task. This contra De Waal’s commentary… (BTW, Danielle O’Neill and I repeated Crawford’s studies with a twist a number of years back. After we trained the chimps to cooperate with each other, we then paired the “experts” with nubbies. There was not a single instance — in any of the trials with any of the expert-novice pairs — of an expert trying to direct the attention of the novice to the task or trying to show them what to do. Hmmm…so much for this task measuring reasoning about each other’s unobservable intentions… And this doesn’t mean chimps (and many, many other species don’t exhibit natural behaviors where they “cooperate.” But if you want to suggest they cooperate with an understanding of the minds of each other the way humans do, you better have better evidence than this!
Again, congratulations to the Human Spark team! You certainly sparked something in me… ;-)
I would like to refer to Prof. Aie Katz Hub-pages, where she describes her efforts in the field of animal communication, and her achievements with her Chimp Bow-Keshet, who understands two human languages. At this stage he points at letters upon a glass wall. One can surf to one of her Hub-pages and continue from there: http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Dog-Temple
–Assi Degani
Some people strangely have adopted the dogma that consciousness or even thinking is all-or-nothing, so that other animals do not have any level of consciousness or thinking ability, no matter what the evidence. This egotism extends even to scientists and hampers our understanding of what truly makes us human.
Lucas Clay suggested that I visit the link that he posted.
I found this quote.
“Chimps employ a rich variety of gestures and facial expressions to keep in touch with each other, and more importantly, there is intelligence behind the exchanges that makes for a level of understanding unseen elsewhere in the animal world. This sort of communication ability is what makes chimps appear far more socially advanced than any other animal.”
Perhaps we should elect them to Congress.
>>Daniel Povinelli wrote: “One thing I was surprised about were the factual errors. Just to name one: allowing Frans de Waal to show Alan Alda an old film of chimpanzees cooperating to pull in a heavy box as proof that they understand what they are doing …”<<
Actually, Daniel, you need to review the episode. Neither of the commentators propose that the chimpanzees, as you put it, "understand what they are doing," but rather that the chimpanzees' capacity for coordinated actions is evolved to the extent that made them capable of learning to cooperate in accomplishing a simple task in unison (if only after an extensive training). And further conclusion was made that while the primates can learn some behaviors by observing and repeating, they don't deliberately transmit what they learned to the unlearned.
Actually, Daniel, you need to review the episode. Neither of the commentators propose that the chimpanzees, as you put it, “understand what they are doing,” but rather that the chimpanzees’ capacity for coordinated actions is evolved to the extent that made them capable of learning to cooperate in accomplishing a simple task in unison (if only after an extensive training). And further conclusion was made that while the primates can learn some behaviors by observing and repeating, they don’t deliberately transmit what they learned to the unlearned.
Beautiful, thank you.
In my opinion the point of the Crawford film, and its great importance, is not whether the chimps were trained on the cooperative task or reasoned about each others intentions. It is the spontaneous occurrence of the gestures, and their forms, which in Crawford’s written account are plentiful, varied and elaborate. Another significant point is that in this replication and also in a more recent one by Melis & Hare, the age, living situations, and relationships of the chimpanzees are quite different from the Crawford chimps. Anyone with a real interest in this issue should go back and very carefully read the original Crawford. It is an extremely rich account. And a last note- the tone of insult at showing an “old film” is not warranted. Someday all our studies are going to be “old,” folks. And so are we. That shouldn’t have anything to do with intrinsic value.
Great show. Thanks to Hawkeye and the crew for putting this together — we need more of this kind of accessible & engaging science available!
The bit about dogs raised a question for me… Has anyone ever tried breeding chimps for “human” characteristics? How long (how many generations) would it take to get chimps to respond to pointing? What might that lead to? Could we select for the human spark?
One more idea: whenever I observe animals, it is always remarkable how embodied their thought is, which does not reduce such a phenomenon to instinct, but rather calls us to extend our consideration of what might define “thought.” We might yield to consider thought which exceeds our strict, thought-as-rationality definition; for, other forms of thought are not as easily codified as abstract thought, which is mapped, tracked, and represented. How might we more richly ponder and investigate the domain of non-representational existence, and begin to understand the deep intelligence at play?
Thank you for a perceptive comment, James G. The study of gesture in apes (and I am not referring to taught sign language) is a very active field now, and I believe this is the answer to your question. Gesture and action are a continuum; hopefully study of forms of gesture in animals other than the great apes will get on the radar also.
Darwin argued forcefully that we frequently underestimate the cognitive powers of animals, and while there are profound differences between humans and other primates (and ways in which humans are clearly superior); we consistently measure their complexity– in its cognitive and social forms– by our own measuring stick, and on our terms. This is not unlike the way dominant, Western notions of intelligence were historically employed to assess as inferior and ultimately dismiss the value of traditional cultures and their knowledge structures. Only over the past fifty years has this stance started to change on a broad scale (and there remains much work to be done). Moreover, we still lack knowledge for truly assessing animal intelligence; our understanding is in its infancy and we should proceed with methodological sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and imagination. A more “on their own terms” approach might wrestle with the difficult epistemological questions regarding how conventional notions of intelligence might be thought of differently, which would oppose the self-congratulatory tendencies of human exceptionalism (particularly those that position Western notions of abstract thought as supreme).
…. and the winners write history!
Is it at all possible that the reason that chimps lack understanding of concepts about heavy weight and light weight ( as we perceive them), because of their own strength? They posses so much power in their arms and they really seem to have very little use for the thing that we may deem delicate or light weight, that they can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that somthing so far out of the realm of what THEY are use to. I don’t know much about chimps at all but just in just watching the film it seemed to be a possibility. If you know about these things I would be interested in your input.
An important point this segment makes is how humans are able to grasp -concepts- much quicker than primates. For example, the primates after 400-800 trials are able to distinguish between heavy and light whereas for the humans it took not more than a few times. The key is perhaps that the humans are actually forming a concept whereas the primates are habituating themselves to a pattern.
Additionally, humans are more inclined to teach rather than, like primates, allow themselves to be observed. This points out that humans are more cooperative than primates, in general helping for the sake of helping and being able to help in more complex ways like opening the door for the man carrying the newspapers.
Lastly, humans are much more capable of strictly following directions whereas primates, if they don’t have to, will not follow instructions. This again ties into the more cooperative nature of human beings.
@Cro
Einstein was an agnostic
Thank you so much for making this available to people in the UK,
I cannot say the same for the NOVA website who have blocked there programs to people in the UK
Thanks again : -)
One thing to think about is that not everybody is heading to like or accept us in existence even if we like them. The comment that has upset you sounds like she doesn’t like you and is just trying to upset you – I wouldn’t believe about it as criticism but just an insult. The other thing that comes to mind is always individuals say nasty points for all kinds of causes and issues – maybe she is jealous of you, or does not like herself, or sees you being a threat, or wants to become top dog – all kinds of motives and really it just does not matter because who and that which you are is your business and it’s important that you like you.
I’ve been exploring for a little bit for any high quality articles or blog posts on this sort of area . Exploring in Yahoo I at last stumbled upon this site. Reading this information So i’m happy to convey that I have a very good uncanny feeling I discovered just what I needed. I most certainly will make certain to don’t forget this website and give it a glance regularly.
F*ckin’ tremendous things here. I am very glad to see your article. Thanks a lot and i’m looking forward to contact you. Will you please drop me a mail?
Thanks a lot for sharing this with all of us you really know what you are talking about! Bookmarked. Please also visit my website =). We could have a link exchange arrangement between us!
Great program. For those looking for additional information on this topic, Jared Diamond’s books deal with the same question, and although they don’t present an ultimate truth, they do suggest some well researched and thorough theories on “the spark” and why certain peoples developed more or faster then others.
Hello,
I was watching your program, the one about how the chimps cannot understand the difference of heavy and light like us. When i was watching I realized that its not that they don’t understand the difference its that they don’t understand what they have to do. The thing about this is that i don’t believe there is a way for you to explain that, so before you should say that they do not understand and that it takes hundreds of times, remember these things, because they most likely don’t understand what is going on.
Thank you,
Vyctoria Smith
I’m still learning from you, as I’m making my way to the top as well. I absolutely enjoy reading all that is written on your blog.Keep the aarticles coming. I enjoyed it!
Hi! I just wanted to ask if you ever have any issues with hackers? My last blog (wordpress) was hacked and I ended up losing months of hard work due to no back up. Do you have any solutions to prevent hackers?
Nice website here! Also your web site loads up fast! What web host are you using? Can I get your affiliate link to your host? (send it please to al_samet2007@yahoo.com) I wish my site loaded up as quickly as yours lol… wine delivery brooklyn
Excellent blog site here! Also your web site loads up very fast! What host are you using? Can I get your affiliate link to your host? (send it please to aasam7240192@yahoo.com) I wish my web site loaded up as quickly as yours lol… buy wine new york
My wife and i ended up being now more than happy when Ervin managed to round up his inquiry through the precious recommendations he gained from your site. It is now and again perplexing to simply be making a gift of secrets and techniques the others might have been selling. And we also do know we need the website owner to be grateful to because of that. Most of the illustrations you have made, the easy website navigation, the friendships your site give support to create – it is everything remarkable, and it’s helping our son and the family reckon that the subject is enjoyable, which is exceptionally fundamental. Thank you for all!
Thanks for spending some time to discuss this, I really feel strongly about it and love learning extra on this topic. If attainable, as you achieve experience, would you thoughts updating your site with additional data? It is extremely useful for me.
Greetings! This is my first comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and tell you I genuinely enjoy perusing through your blog posts. Could you recommend any other blogs/websites/forums that deal with the same topics? Thanks so much!
Cheers for taking the time to discuss this, I really feel can discover any information in write-up and discus forum
Thanks for the various tips discussed on this weblog. I have realized that many insurance agencies offer shoppers generous deals if they choose to insure a few cars with them. A significant number of households possess several cars these days, in particular those with mature teenage children still living at home, along with the savings upon policies could soon increase. So it is a good idea to look for a bargain.
I like this post, liked this one appreciate it for putting up.
Wow, incredible blog layout! How lengthy have you been blogging for? you created blogging search uncomplicated. The general search of the web page is magnificent, and also the content material!
I ought to have invest hrs perusing you, continue the truly excellent work!
Thanks, that is actually pretty interesting and I’m glad I found this info here.