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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Someone thought that apes couldn't control their breathing well enough to vocalize? Really? All mammals have pretty advanced control over their airways, otherwise we would be constantly inhaling nasty things. Carnivores need control to sniff (see wolves) and herbivores need to hold their breath to be quiet enough to hear the wolves (see deer).

I'm about ready to say that all animal and human science from the 30s through the 50s should be tossed. From all birds mating for life, belly-dragging dinos, to apes that cannot hold their breath ... were they just making stuff up?

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>All mammals have pretty advanced control over their airways

once, to decide the issue for myself, i started Audacity and loaded in various animal recordings as well as human. The animal phrases (at least in the recordings what i had) were generally shorter, yet they pretty much consisted of the same modulations. The animals do have the tools of speech and they do have speech:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/catch-the...

"He discovered that this species' communication system is so advanced, not only do they have different warning calls depending on the type of predator - coyote, domestic dog, human, hawk - they also construct sentences describing what a particular predator looks like. So, "a medium, rectangle-shaped dog with yellow fur (we call them German shepherds) is approaching”, or “Here comes a tall human being wearing a green t-shirt who is also fat.” (I’m teasing, prairie dogs, I’m sure your sentences sound much more elegant.)

By showing captive prairie dogs a number of simple silhouetted shapes such as triangles, circles and squares, Slobodchikoff also determined that they can come up with new calls to communicate to each other about things they’ve never seen before."

Science from the 30s through the 50s should be tossed... ... were they just making stuff up?

I've come to realize that science is always wrong, when viewed with a long enough lens. It does the best it can at the time - i.e. let's spray everyone with DDT, or let's put lead into paint and gasoline, or let's introduce species x to control species y then x becomes a problem, etc.

Then years later science figures out those were terrible ideas, but shockingly everyone just says "NOW we know better, forget about before, trust us THIS time".

Does anyone else not realize it's exactly the same thing, and ~50 years from now science will know that lots of what we're doing today is a really bad thing to be doing? In 2050 someone will say "Science from the 1990's - 2020s should be tossed, they were just making stuff up"

I agree 100%. I think lots of people realize it, but what can you do? Like you said, it's the best we can do now. In 50 years they'll probably think we were complete barbarians for how we medicate psychological disorders but right now the patients need to live the best lives they can live and brute force is all that we have to work with.

What alternative do we have?

I think we should start making decisions based around the understanding that we probably don't understand the full implications of what we're doing.

i.e. We don't really know for certain what will happen if we seed clouds with nitrogen to alter the weather - so let's not (in reality we are doing this)

and

We don't know for sure if these hormones we're injecting into livestock have down-the-line health consequences for the people eating them, so we shouldn't do that.

We should stop messing with stuff we really don't understand, and actually don't even need to be messing with - leave well enough alone.

Well, the EU has institutionalized that approach to regulatory decision-making under the rubric of the precautionary principle. Likewise, environmental review is increasingly common in planning/permitting contexts. But we have to have some sort of medium - an overabundance of caution ends with paralysis as we might avoid doing anything new due to the difficulty of adequately predicting the outcome.

If we did that, we'd still be riding horses. Mistakes are inherent to progress; we aren't going to ban progress because we don't know, you acquire knowledge by doing and making mistakes.

I agree with you, and I want to see us continue to make progress, though I don't think we need to be injecting nitrogen into clouds so people can have better skiing.

That's not progress, that's excess.

> That's not progress, that's excess.

Says you, those wanting to ski have a different opinion, who are you to prevent other people from deciding what they consider progress? You sound like a Luddite from old England railing against technology.

> who are you to prevent other people from deciding what they consider progress?

Obviously it's not up to me personally, but I'm someone that cares about the future, and not messing with things we don't understand.

>* You sound like a Luddite from old England railing against technology.*

That's an interesting thing to say, as I'm a Software Engineer, and one of the most "techie" people I know.

> That's an interesting thing to say, as I'm a Software Engineer, and one of the most "techie" people I know.

And yet your default opinion is don't touch things we don't understand, which prevents us from ever understanding them; you must see how illogical that is.

As anigbrowl implied, the name for what you describe is the "precautionary principle", which has its criticisms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle#Critic...

We absolutely should use the best theories we have to try to predict outcomes of our actions, and apply them incrementally instead of globally where possible. But sometimes more damage is caused by avoiding risk (time wasted planning, lives lost that could have been saved, etc.) than would be lost if the experiment in question goes wrong.

Often the only way to "know for sure" is to do something and see what happens.

You're focused on science learning what science previously got wrong, but I think there is a deeper conflict at work when it comes to animal capabilities.

Before science started correcting itself, it was correcting perceptions based on religion and culture. For example, the germ theory of disease ran headlong into the older idea (not based on science) that doctors couldn't have dirty hands because they were gentlemen.

The belief that animals do not share capabilities with man arises from culture, specifically Western Christian culture. God made man in his own image and gave man dominion over the dumb beasts of the world. Man ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which set him apart from animals.

This still dominates theoretical thinking of animal behavior. If scientists went purely off of observations, most questions would have this answer: we don't know yet. Instead observations are climbing uphill against preconceived notions.

Studies of consciousness run into the same thing. The distinction between brain and mind goes back to the body/soul distinction from thousands of years of religion and culture. There is no evidence at all to suggest that minds exist apart from brains. Yet the question of "where consciousness comes from" is still asked seriously by people who think of themselves as serious scientists.

Religion also affects the study of climate change. There are many evangelical Protestants who believe that is blasphemous to imply that anything that humans could do could change the weather in any way, because God created the weather and runs it as He sees fit.

>evangelical Protestants who believe that is blasphemous to imply that anything that humans could do could change the weather in any way //

As someone who you might fit in to the category "evangelical Protestant" I find it hard to believe there are "many" relative to the whole set. Any sources?

Cloud seeding is pretty widely known; most people seem to be convinced that there is a human element to current climate change.

The concept of "stewardship of creation" is pretty widespread amongst evangelical Christians, that God handed over the world in to our care and that we've largely screwed it up. One of the largest Protestant communities, the Church of England, for example have altered their investment policy to avoid companies who are involved in activities that they see as contributing to unwanted climate change. (eg https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2015/07/ur...)

Often I hear that it's "loony USA evangelicals" but at least the USA National Association of Evangelicals [which seems to be a large and influential body] accepts some climate change has human origins and that we should act to reduce our negative impact whilst simultaneously acting to aid the poor who are disproportionally affected by current changes in climate (eg http://nae.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Loving-the-Least-o...).

One of the fundamental tenants of science is to strive to constantly prove itself wrong. It's fundamental.

Of course we'll make mistakes along the way. That's how you learn. Some will in fact be disastrous. Such is the cost of scientific progression. Best we can do is hope to mitigate the negative affects as much as possible.

As a counter example, despite all the negative things we read about, life expectancy and quality of life continues to go up. The system appears to be working.

> I've come to realize that science is always wrong, when viewed with a long enough lens.

I fundamentally disagree. An enormous amount of science has been right, and has lasted essentially unchanged since the time of discovery. No one is refuting the germ theory of infection, information theory, or classical mechanics any time soon.

A lot of belief has been asserted and sustained by people who stand to gain from that belief being widely held. This is always happening, whether it is the Pope or Dow Chemical, and this is most of the science that gets discovered wrong after the fact. Most of it would have been proved wrong immediately if results hadn't been faked or attempted verifications hadn't been prevented or suppressed.

I'm excluding theories that are first approximations that are further refined later from 'made up' science, of course.

Hey DDT saved countless people from malaria.

And none of those things are science per se. They are technology and just mistakes in general.

Also see Isaic Asimov's The relativity of wrong: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

Holding breath and avoiding inhaling dust and flies possibly doesn't require as fine motor control as necessary for speech. In that light, the first paragraph of your comment can't refute the hypothesis without referencing some empirical results, so the second paragraph is absurdly confident.

I would argue that keeping things out of our airways is a little more advanced than just holding one's breath. Coughing up junk or dealing with water/swimming are common to mammals. Even swallowing requires coordination of the various parts beyond simply not breathing. I read a few years ago about a machine to allow paralyzed/comatose people to cough properly as this hugely reduces throat infections.

Yeah, people tend to underestimate how complex the respiratory tract is. Cough assist is basically just a machine that holds an insufflation pressure and an exsufflation pressure for specific times to emulate a cough. Independently of the servo programming they're less complicated than speech.

Dead on. There is very likely some very specialized neural motor control circuitry that humans use for speech that is missing from other primates. If you consider, for example, dexterous finger movements, there is a strong correlation between the number of direct corticospinal [1] projections and degree of finger dexterity that the species exhibits. Rodents and many other mammals have no projections at all. Monkeys have some; humans have many [2, see fig 1].

So which primates have corticospinal projections for their vocal cords? Okay, that's actually a trick question because the vocal cords are innervated via cranial nerves emanating from the medulla [3], rather than via spinal cord. However, in humans, there are direct monosynaptic projections from cortex to these medullary motor neurons. These projections do not exist in macaques (and presumably not in other monkeys) or in chimpanzees [4, see fig 2]. I'm not sure if it's known whether gorillas or orangutans have them.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramidal_tracts#Corticospinal_tract
  2. http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n5/full/nm1595.html
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_ambiguus
  4. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943881400107X

I feel the same about all the intelligence-language ideas which I find pretentious most of the time. 'Look at how incredible we are'. Most of the time these kind of ideas are plain ignorance turned into flattery.

Computers history taught me that high resolution is not needed to achieve complex forms of communications (for instance ascii had 3 level deep structure separator, pretty much ignored). I feel like an 4K version of a fish, sure I may have finer and more complex communication scheme, but that doesn't mean they don't communicate the same idea between each others through different and simpler means.

About voice control, most people don't even understand what they do with it. Ask someone to modulate vowels to match a foreign accent. Or sing. The variations between airflow, tone, timbre, etc... Then you start to understand a bit more about what your vocal apparatus can do.

> I feel the same about all the intelligence-language ideas which I find pretentious most of the time.

When a dog is leashed to a tree, and runs around it until there's no more slack, I have yet to see one that figures out it needs to run around the other way.

When it comes to animal intelligence discussions, I find any form of domesticated animal to be a terrible model: They've been bred (and often inbred) for traits that are NOT indicative of intelligence.

That said, your central (and valid) point actually agrees with the above poster: To use criteria to determine "intelligence" is good science; to declare animals can't have intelligence or anything related to intelligence because they aren't humans is empty.

Then you have crows www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXQAgzfwuNQ

Nature is weird.

My dog can do this. Sadly he was tied to a tree for years before I got him, which is probably how he figured it out. I'll walk him and on extremely rare occasions he will accidentally wrap around a pole or something, and when he realizes he doesn't have any slack, he immediately unwraps himself. I also say "on extremely rare occasions" because somehow he figured out that if there's a tree/pole ahead, he should stay between myself and the tree/pole to avoid ever wrapping around it to begin with. The only times he will go on the wrong side is if he's preoccupied with a smell or something, and even then, he never actually fully wraps around it, as he almost always realizes he should immediately go the other way.

He was never formally trained to do this. :)

Maybe some species are faster than other in realizing it, or psychologically more prone to take action rather than wait for help passively.

Quite often 'intelligence' is linked in desire to try things. Mice can get stuck when deprived of some confidence inducing hormones while the confident group will keep trying.

It's at least an interesting idea. Here's why; apes are ridiculously stronger than humans. A lot of that has to do with muscle attachment. Ape muscles are attached further from the joint, increasing leverage. Human muscles are attached closer to the joint. That makes us weaker- but it also gives us much better dexterity than apes of similar size.

Same system, different trade-offs.

So there's precedent, after a fashion.

How about a dog that barks on command?

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