We are frequently told that humans, mentally, are continuous with the apes. But it has always been an axiom, devoid of facts. Contrary evidence continues to grow. The latest case for a sharp division between us and the animal world was made by Alison Gopnik in her "Mind and Matter" column in the Wall Street Journal ("Adventures in Experimenting on Toddlers").
She illustrated it by posing this "small IQ test" for newspaper readers:
Suppose you see an experimenter put two orange blocks on a machine, and it lights up. She then puts a green one and a blue one on the same machine, but nothing happens. Two red ones work, a black and white combination doesn't. Now you have to make the machine light up yourself. You can choose two purple blocks or a yellow one and a brown one.
You figured it out, right? It's not any particular block that does the trick. Both have to be the same color.
"This simple problem actually requires some very abstract thinking," Gopnik adds. Toddlers as young as 18-to-24-months old "got it right, with just two examples." But other animals had "a very hard time" understanding it. "Chimpanzees can get hundreds of examples and still not get it, even with delicious bananas as a treat." (Chimps do have color vision, in case you were wondering.)
Conventional wisdom has been that toddlers can't learn this kind of abstract logical principle. Child psychologists such as Jean Piaget "believed that young children's thinking was concrete and superficial." Gopnik and her assistant now correct that, saying you have to watch what they do, instead of relying on what they say. Gopnik's article has now been published by the journal Psychological Science. Ever since Darwin, the idea that there is nothing exceptional about humans has been an axiom of evolutionist thought.
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The main evidence for an unbridgeable mental gulf between humans and animals comes from language. Children of a certain age (not too old!) can learn a new language practically overnight if they are moved to a foreign country. No one knows how it happens.
Numerous attempts to get young chimps to learn the language that small children easily learn have all failed. A detailed account could read like a comedy, but it would be irreverent -- to Darwinians -- so I shall refrain.
One chimp, Washoe, supposedly learned American Sign Language, but it may have been "confirmation bias." The feat could not be replicated by Nim Chimpsky. Watch the movie Project Nim, about the newborn chimp raised with humans. Nim Chimpsky was defiantly named after Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor who concluded that only humans have the ability to learn languages. Nim couldn't. David Berlinski once heard Noam Chomsky say:
Every native speaker of a natural language is capable of producing and understanding infinitely many sentences that he has never heard or spoken before.
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The claim of evolutionary continuity, made by Darwin, Gould and others -- based on our alleged vanity -- is not so much an argument as an accusation. In fact it is an assault on reason, for all along there has been strong evidence that humans are separated from animals not by a mutation but by a chasm. Alison Gopnik's fascinating experiment only reinforces that.
- See more at: evolutionnews.org |
