The Sklansky Chimpanzee Question

It is funny how DS admits that proof of the resurrection would change his beliefs (as is reasonable), but proof of a monkey evolving into a sentient being with human-like intelligence will still not change the views of the religious.

Of course, that makes sense, since those views aren't reasonable to begin with.

[chezlaw]

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It is funny how DS admits that proof of the resurrection would change his beliefs (as is reasonable), but proof of a monkey evolving into a sentient being with human-like intelligence will still not change the views of the religious.

Of course, that makes sense, since those views aren't reasonable to begin with.

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I think you claim a bit too much. Many religous people would change their views. I know religous people who have no problem with evolution or any other science, they don't believe bible stories are the literal truth.

chez

[David Sklansky]

"My question to you and my answer is what would lead you to believe that if this was possible, it would not have already occured in nature?"

Because nature doesn't totally stop the breeding of the dumb and force the breeding of the smart.

[TomCollins]

Hasn't it already happened?

[Jedster]

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Hasn't it already happened?

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More to the point, there are religious scientists who accept evolution. I know orthodox jewish neurobiologists.

People can rationalize anything.

I guess one question I have would be whether if the experiment worked, would you consider the resulting being to be any different than man?

[KeysrSoze]

I dont think chimps have a certain lobe or something that would enable spoken language even if there was a voicebox operation. But anyway, selective breeding is astonishingly quick compared to natural selection. Breeding for intelligence might not take long at all depending on how lucky you are to get the right mutations along the way.

[The Truth]

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I dont think chimps have a certain lobe or something that would enable spoken language even if there was a voicebox operation. But anyway, selective breeding is astonishingly quick compared to natural selection. Breeding for intelligence might not take long at all depending on how lucky you are to get the right mutations along the way.

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Yea, It would be blazingly fast compared to natural selection, but how many orders of magnitude are we talking?


-blake

[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.

[WaimanaloSlim]

I'm not really adding anything, but this post reminded me of the Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns was showing off his sweatshop of millions of monkeys banging on keyboards. They were working on the greatest novel known to mankind.

One of them strolls over and hands Mr. Burns a draft of his work.

Mr. Burns reads aloud, "'It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?!' Stupid monkey!"

[Jeff V]

MMM peyote.