I wonder why he brought up “primitive” people at all, especially in the context of them being able to adapt to “civilised” society. Why not simply point out that all human societies around the world have complex language and culture compared to any animals? Doesn’t that get the same point across?
Another example that would have got the same point across minus the shades of racism would be that of feral children. In the few documented cases it’s clear that with little/no linguistic stimulation at an early age their linguistic abilities were severely delayed or restricted for life. Yet, with instruction, they generally are able to gradually learn at least the rudiments of complex language, far beyond what any other animals have demonstrated.
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I think he was trying to paraphrase (badly) an argument I’ve made in the past:
Humans across the globe, from all “races,” have the same innate intellectual potential. Children from every geographical and ethnic category, if given every advantage in their upbringing, can learn mathematics, music, art, writing, physics, and any human language to which they are exposed. The capacity for all these things exists in remote and isolated hunter-gatherers too; in fact, we all were hunter-gatherers not long ago.
The gap in abilities between humans and animals is very wide. Apes cannot learn complex language, nor can they enter civilization. The most complex sentence signed by Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee raised among humans, was sixteen words: “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.” His signs lack the grammatical structure of human speech.22 He was not able to build compound nouns like bath-room or shoe-box.23 A human toddler is far more linguistically astute.
(p. 128, GAE).
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Between humans and other animals.
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Sure. I’m fine with that.
It would be nice if you would adopt that sort of phrasing all the time. Humans and other animals; humans and other apes; humans and other opisthokonts. It’s salutary.
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@John_Harshman, I don’t think it’s linguistically always wrong to differentiate between humans and non-human animals. It’s one of the accepted definitions of the word “animal”. See definition 2a: “one of the lower animals (see LOWER entry 3 sense 3) as distinguished from human beings.” Do people have an obligation to use the scientific definition all the time?
Undoubtedly that is technically correct. But “animal” has undoubtedly a negative connotation in certain contexts. And you can’t just gloss over that by insisting that your definition is the scientifically correct one. Because we don’t just communicate in a scientific context. Like I’m sure you wouldn’t want to write “Chinese people and other animals”.
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Yes, because that implies that only Chinese are animals.
Not, one would hope, in the context I suggest. Denial that humans are animals plays into the hands of creationists. This is a context in which the scientific meaning is the proper one. People need to realize that they’re part of the tree of life. That’s what GAE gets us.
I thought @John_Harshman was making a rather different point.
Actually, the more I think about it, I don’t really know what point Craig thinks he’s making. Let’s say it’s true that humans have the best ability of any organism to learn a language. Yay us.
Bats would probably laugh at how lame we are at echolocation.
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Bat’s do not have means to ask the question about their exceptionality 
.
No. And we suck at echolocation. Or I do, at least.
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I think the forum software will let me “ping” you. That counts, right?
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Yes. We can have our human exceptionalism. But bees can have bee exceptionalism, beavers can have beaver exceptionalism and bats can have bat exceptionalism.
I thought that was @John_Harshman’s point – that we humans should show a bit more humility about our place in the biosphere.
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The book 1491 has some pretty good examples.
Funny you choose that example, a son ended up in my neighborhood and is a good buddy of mine.
Indeed, there are all kinds of particular features which can be a challenge to those unfamiliar with them. Polish would present challenges to someone not familiar with Slavic languages, I’m sure. As you note, an Eastern tonal language would probably be tougher! Nevertheless these challenges are regularly overcome by people through means such as simply listening to and processing the language over a period of time. We all share the ability to use language. The rhetoric used seems to convey a feeling we’d expect an “uncivilized aboriginal” to be some kind of grunting Tarzan character certainly unable to process something as strange to Western European language speakers as Polish. Odd, and I’d try to reexplain it, presuming he’s just got a bit hung up on the idea of people’s language abilities.
The gap in abilities between present-day humans and animals is very wide.
It wasn’t always thus.
Actually, Tarzan is a poor example, since he taught himself to read English all by himself, from books, learned fluent French in a matter of months from one instructor, and learned to speak English even more quickly once he found English speakers. He also spoke Great Ape as a native, and seems to have learned a variety of African languages.
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I’m not even sure it is “very wide”. What is the unit of measure used, and where does it cross from wide to very wide? For all we know, it could take a relatively small number of genetic changes to cross this “gap”.
And on whatever unit of measure of intelligence or learning ability you might invoke, it could be that the differences between humans and our primate cousins is actually quite narrow, and that there are levels of intelligence and learning ability possible that would make anything we do seem amoebic in comparison. It is possible we are intellectually closer to ants, than we are to some yet-to-evolve forms of intelligence.
I also think we some times forget there’s a spectrum even within the human population. Some people (and I don’t mean to imply they are of any less value as human beings) are honestly not much more cognitively impressive than other great apes.
If the alleles for making a human person basically on-par with an average chimpanzee in these measures of cognitive performance, already exist within the human population, and some rare person happens to have inherited this particular set, then it seems to me there isn’t really that much of a gap at all, since the lower ends of the cognitive performance spectrum in the human population thus overlaps with the spectrum in the chimpanzee population.
Gap in abilities is different than the gap in genetic distance, as should be well known to you @Rumraket.
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I wasn’t so much commenting on the width of the gap, as on the realisation that the gap hasn’t always been as wide as it appears now. We are looking at the situation after a couple of millions of years of human social and cultural development, quite apart from whatever biological evolution has also taken place over that time. Comparing today’s differences doesn’t really tell us a great deal about what the differences were back when it became even noticeable that humans were distinct from their great ape cousins. I don’t think there was ever a ‘great leap forward’.
I know but they’re undeniably related. And the point I was making is that without an actual objective measure of “abilities”, some sort of unit by which to evaluate differences, whatever you think the magnitude of the “gap” between humans and non-human animals becomes a futile exercise in subjective labeling. The gap is “very wide”, whatever that means. If you can say that, I can say it’s “quite narrow” too.
And perhaps more importantly with respect to the reality that our cognitive abilities are evolved attributes, if that very same “gap” in abilities exists to the same degree even within the human population, because some unlucky individuals plausibly are pretty much on-par (however you would measure that) with our closest primate relatives, then there’s all the more reason to think this “gap” ultimately owes to evolved genetic differences.