[einbert]

Awesome post, very interesting stuff to chew on.

To say it would never be accomplished would be pretty ridiculous in my opinion. Given enough time, this would almost certainly work. They would be able to reach the levels of human communication in many ways, and perhaps even civilization. But would they be "on the level" with humans? Because by the time humans are able to do that, to test whether they are "on the level" would be to see if they could train a less evolved species to reach the levels of communication/civilization that they have already reached.

I believe a few animals have a larger cerebral cortex than humans (in relation to their body mass), whales and dolphins being some of them perhaps? In any case supposedly the cerebral cortex is the area of the brain that allows for this kind of advanced thought, the kind of thought that allows for high-level communication like language. Maybe we should try this with dolphins as well. Too bad they don't have fingers--I guess they're just going to miss out because of that.