TagApes
Planet of the Apes and Human Exceptionalism
This movie franchise makes us wonder what makes human beings unique.One semi-random movie franchise I’ve been a massive fan of is the newest iteration of The Planet of the Apes. The original trilogy, directed by Matt Reeves (The Batman) concluded in 2017, but a “fourth” film is set to release on Memorial Day of 2024, and a trailer for it dropped this week. I’m starting to become somewhat “anti-trailer” given that more often than not they tend to either distort the hype of the film or give away the story entirely. But in the cases of movies I’m most excited about, I confess that generally I give the trailer a quick view. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is set years after Caesar, the founder of the ape colony Read More ›
Did We Learn Sign Language Before We Learned to Speak?
The idea that humans first communicated by complicated gestures and only later learned to speak is popular among cognitive scientists. Kensy Cooperrider explainsThe origin of language is considered one of the hardest problems in science. Like the origin of consciousness, it attracts a great many theories. Cognitive scientist Kensy Cooperrider is a stout defender of the idea that human language started as sign language—a gestural “protolanguage” —hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s not a new idea. It goes back to Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746) and remained popular in the 19th century. In the 20th century, it was championed by University of Colorado anthropologist Gordon Hewes (1917–1997), who introduced the idea of studying ape communications in the early Seventies, to gain more insight. In general, apes communicate more by gesture than by voice. An Read More ›
How Not To Debate Materialists
This is the story of how a gifted scientist lost a debate with a Darwinist — a debate he should have wonAlthough ape brains do differ somewhat from human brains in cortical anatomy, it is the similarity between the brains of apes and men, rather than the differences, that provide striking evidence of human exceptionalism.
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Human-Ape Similarity Shows Humans Are Exceptional
If man is an animal biologically, but so unlike an animal cognitively, the obvious implication is that some aspect of the human mind is not biologicalIronically, if humans and apes were biologically more different, materialists could claim that the material biological differences rather than immaterial spiritual differences account for our powers of abstract thought. The biological similarity precludes such an argument.
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Why Apes Are Not Spiritual Beings
Apes do not have language, which enables humans to think about abstract ideasEvery thought has an object, and without language, the only possible object is a physical one, not a spiritual one. Thus, abstract thought presupposes language.
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