aggle-rithm
Ardent Formulist
I haven't been able to find a thread on this, so I'm starting my own.
Last night I watched Animal Planet's "Jane Goodall's When Animals Talk". I was dreading it, for the promos seemed to indicate that it was going to involve more than a little woo-woo nonsense about telepathic animals. Sure enough, my worst fears were realized.
I have a feeling that if Jane Goodall realized what kind of program she was participating in, she would never have agreed to it. It was a two hour program, with regularly interspersed interviews and appearences with Jane Goodall, but much of it was clearly produced and narrated without her input.
My wife and I watched one section where Jane visited an African grey parrot who had an extraordinary vocabulary, and apparently used sentences that demonstrated a fairly sophisticated internal model of the world. She observed with interest, but didn't attempt to come to any conclusions.
The sequence was introduced with a brief fragment of an interview in which Jane Goodall said, "We were told about a parrot who can read minds." I imagine the next thing out of her mouth would have been, "I doubt if he can really read minds, of course, but it sounds interesting." Of course, we weren't treated to that. Instead, the program cut to a more credulous "scientist" who designed an experiment to see if the parrot could identify pictures that her owner was looking at in another room. A split screen was used to show that the parrot was describing exactly what the owner was looking at at the exact same moment!
My wife was convinced that something miraculous was going on, until I pointed out to her how easily the tape could have been edited to look much more impressive than it was.
What really ticked me off about the whole thing was that this appeared to be something of genuine scientific interest. If (and this is a big if) a parrot could really apply abstract reasoning, think about the future, and demonstrate flexibility in language, then perhaps we should rethink the cognitive abilities of animals. WHY, oh why, bring telepathic hocus-pocus into it?!? Isn't the fact that this bird with a tiny brain has a vocabulary of over a thousand words fascinating enough without trying to posit magical powers?
Sheeesh....
Last night I watched Animal Planet's "Jane Goodall's When Animals Talk". I was dreading it, for the promos seemed to indicate that it was going to involve more than a little woo-woo nonsense about telepathic animals. Sure enough, my worst fears were realized.
I have a feeling that if Jane Goodall realized what kind of program she was participating in, she would never have agreed to it. It was a two hour program, with regularly interspersed interviews and appearences with Jane Goodall, but much of it was clearly produced and narrated without her input.
My wife and I watched one section where Jane visited an African grey parrot who had an extraordinary vocabulary, and apparently used sentences that demonstrated a fairly sophisticated internal model of the world. She observed with interest, but didn't attempt to come to any conclusions.
The sequence was introduced with a brief fragment of an interview in which Jane Goodall said, "We were told about a parrot who can read minds." I imagine the next thing out of her mouth would have been, "I doubt if he can really read minds, of course, but it sounds interesting." Of course, we weren't treated to that. Instead, the program cut to a more credulous "scientist" who designed an experiment to see if the parrot could identify pictures that her owner was looking at in another room. A split screen was used to show that the parrot was describing exactly what the owner was looking at at the exact same moment!
My wife was convinced that something miraculous was going on, until I pointed out to her how easily the tape could have been edited to look much more impressive than it was.
What really ticked me off about the whole thing was that this appeared to be something of genuine scientific interest. If (and this is a big if) a parrot could really apply abstract reasoning, think about the future, and demonstrate flexibility in language, then perhaps we should rethink the cognitive abilities of animals. WHY, oh why, bring telepathic hocus-pocus into it?!? Isn't the fact that this bird with a tiny brain has a vocabulary of over a thousand words fascinating enough without trying to posit magical powers?
Sheeesh....
