
Wild chimpanzees use at least 66 gestures to communicate with each other - jamesbritt
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9475000/9475408.stm
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asnyder
It's a shame that chimpanzees get all this attention, lets shift some of that
to bonobos.

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kadavy
True. Bonobos are more closely related to humans. There's some incredibly
fascinating information about how humans are related to bonobos in sexual
behavior (and overall communal behavior) in the book _Sex at Dawn_. Highly
recommended.

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joe_the_user
Interesting...

I once saw a parrot dance to the beat of music while singing along then call
out to the children in the next room to join it.

There are a number of very intelligent animal species. Still, I think the
barrier to "human-like intelligence" isn't understanding words but using words
in grammatical sentence (call me a stick-in-the-mud Chomskyan...).

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6ren
Does the intelligence of human beings fill a niche that in some way prevents
other intelligences from evolving?

As the dominant species, on top of the foodchain, I can see that we might try
to prevent a rival intelligence from competing for resources; but it seems
that that would not prevent that rival intelligence from arising in the first
place.

The brains of birds have developed further since our common ancestor, and it
seems reasonable that an intelligence similar to our own could evolve in quite
a different brain structure. (I think abstraction is the key need; maybe
grammar is somehow based on an internal mechanism for relating abstractions,
but it certainly helps in communication - and without that, we would gain much
less benefit from our intelligence.)

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vacri
That's 65 more than I use when driving!

