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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The monkeys seem to have been doing a better job at parenting than the people here. Note how the text below one of the pictures says she's frightened of people and the picture right above it has a whole bunch of (all male cast) busybodies crowding into a little room with her in it.

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She has some access to hygiene, clean water and food, medical attention, etc. Her life expectancy is going to be much higher in human society, though she will likely have difficulty adopting to society and will be behind on language and other skill development.

Of course she is frightened of people as it's still a new experience for her, and of course there's a cast of busybodies crowding her room, especially during a photo/camera op. However, it's wrong to say that the monkeys are doing a better job at parenting. There is no noble Mowgli fairy tale going on here.

Will she be happier? I doubt it.

I don't mean to be rude but:

(1) who decided to bring the media in?

(2) who decided that she should have a whole pile of people crowding in on her other than those responsible for her immediate care?

(3) who decided that all this has to be forced on her in record time?

I can see so many things (besides the three listed above) that are wrong from just a common sense point of view that the humans are definitely not acting just in her best interest here. At least the monkeys did not turn her into some kind of media spectacle.

Yes, hygiene, clean water and food are all good as is - probably - medical attention. But none of those trump an immediate barrage like the one described and visualized in the article, that's not for her benefit but for the benefit of the others present.

So, this is not about there being a 'Mowgli fairy tale', this is about how fairly obviously this is not being done in a way that is calculated to be of the biggest benefit to her. Culture shock is real and this girl is currently forced into an extreme version of that.

> (1) who decided to bring the media in?

I don't know, but I'd place my wager on whoever turns this into a movie.

If she was very young when she was abandoned, then it's likely her speech center never developed and will never develop.

It's worse and somewhat fascinating. Instead of acquiring human language which leads to normal human consciousness, she'll have acquired the language of the apes and presumably developed a sort of ape-like consciousness. In theory she would exhibit visual memory and recall superior to what humans are normally capable of (like the apes in this article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2279528/Memory-chimp...).

Cases like this are so extraordinarily rare that we will probably never really know for certain what the human brain is capable of in these extremes.

Monkeys, not apes. English is a "language of the apes". And chimpanzees, who are in the same hominin family as we ourselves, are really no more similar or comparable to monkeys than we are.

Huh? Feral children can acquire language skills, but they will never have a full native fluency. Genie learned to communicate with language. In OP child's case, she'd be learning language like most people learn to speak a second language late in life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)

Cases like this are so rare and so unique that you simply cannot speak in general about "feral children". In the case of Genie she would have acquired some human language from her father in the first 20 months even if she only ever overheard him talking, enough apparently to seed a rudimentary semantic layer in her mind that facilitated her learning more advanced language later on (but nothing approaching full maturity).

Don't people usually learn a second language by bootstrapping on their native language though?

In a formal learning environment like a classroom, sure. Native language (or even another second language) is a crutch to associate concepts in the new language. Informal environments without a base language, I'm not sure many (if any?) know how that feral person learns, but we do know it is possible for them to communicate using language.

I think a lack of metalinguistic awareness plays a major role in language learning as the learner would have no way to reflect/process on the language. This skill is huge, and it's built in ages 6-8. This is the language skill that lets us discern literal and implied meaning from language (statements vs sarcasm), reflect on non-literal concepts (idioms and "love") and analyze and correct incoming communications that contain incorrect usage in word choice, grammar or pronunciation (e.g. If someone misspoke "He is...to the store...going," we infer the speaker likely means "He is going to the store").

Without a base language and meta linguistic skills, language learning would be done with very concrete utterances and gesturing which is consistent with immersion learning of a second language, but the learner's fluency will likely never progress to the point that a second language learner's fluency could reach.

I'd be surprised if that's true.

My daughter lost most of her speech skills at the age of three, was diagnosed autistic, and after extensive therapy by age 9 was main-streamed and on the honor roll. She speaks fine, though with affectations.

But she was exposed to other people speaking, wasn't she?

The Daily Mail article pointed out in another comment said she understand everything she's told - so she must have separated from humans after learning basic language.

> of course there's a cast of busybodies crowding her room, especially during a photo/camera op

But why is there a photo op in the first place?

I can see the case for a small photo op to get them off their back and figure out what to do. But this does not look like that.

>> The monkeys seem to have been doing a better job at parenting than the people here.

Wait until she hits puberty. The monkeys probably saw her as a child. Once her pheromones started saying otherwise things would have become violent very quickly. Setting aside how the males might view here, there are hierarchies of females that need to be fought over. We don't have the natural tools, the teeth, necessary to exist in most primate societies.

In that case, it seems they found her just in time!

Not disagreeing with the general thrust of your argument, but she would have been significantly larger than the monkeys, so not sure if being ill-equipped to fight would have been her biggest problem.

That assumes that human pheromones are similar enough to monkey pheromones for the male monkeys to react to. This seems somewhat unlikely, given that male humans don't react with sexual attraction to the pheromones of female monkeys.

> ... given that male humans don't react with sexual attraction to the pheromones of female monkeys.

Umm, where are you concluding that from? Does it not seem possible that humans would share with our relatives some olfactory communication substances and their effects?

We still have very little understanding of olfactory communication between humans (no human pheromones are known AFAIK) so I am sure we don't know yet about the lack of reaction to chemicals from other monkeys that you are positing.

Anyways, our reactions to other species' pheromones would not lead to conclusions in the opposite direction.

Animals can certainly tell male humans from females. Anyone with a dog or cat can see this. We are all mammals. Our chemistry isnt all that different.

Yes, but recognizing a distinction between males and females of another species is not the same thing as recognizing that one of them is the gender you're attracted to sexually.

Ever been to a zoo that had monkeys? Ever had the least bit of attraction to a female monkey (if you're male) or seen a human man attracted to a female monkey?

You said (not that that would be especially relevant to the discussion) that humans wouldn't experience such feelings in response to monkey pheromones, but that does not necessarily relate to our lack of sexual attraction towards monkeys. The facts are, they already did seem to perceive her as belonging to their group (as they defended her) and it is possible that things would have turned violent because of social dynamics and competition if she matured among them.

This discussion is kind of too long already but here's a few things you may be missing:

* Apes do rape women. * Humans use apes as "prostitutes" in some villages. (Tangential to your argument but not really relevant to the girl's case.)

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