Well, you can't express complex ideas without grammar, but that's not the same as not being able to have complex ideas. If you know anyone with stroke-induced aphasia, you know that one of the immense frustrations of aphasia is not being able to express what you have conceptualized. You can SEE it happening.

I had aunt in a nursing home who had expressive aphasia. She as always getting mad at her roommate for moving stuff onto *her* side of the room. Clearly she could *conceptualize* "My side" vs. "her side", and even property rights (my stuff vs her stuff). She just couldn't put it into words.

You are taking me out of context. I was asking "Why is it necessary for a chimp to show he can master human grammar?" You have not addressed that question.

This is an interesting position, but it seems to me to have some problems. If I understand your position, rights and obligations arise out of each other. In other words, if I expect you to respect my private property, then I have to respect yours. That seems reasonable, but this framework also seems to suggest that I can opt out of this arrangement; that I can steal from you as long as I'm OK with you stealing from me.

Your framework also suggests that children have no human rights until they have the developed the cognitive capabilities to understand their responsibilities. They cannot participate in any kind bargain over rights and responsibilities. Likewise mentally handicapped people could be murdered since they can't understand the philosophical bases of the anti-murder bargain.

Likewise under your framework torturing an animal is OK, as long as the animal isn't capable of understanding the philosophical basis for why torturing animals is wrong. I understand that some people believe torturing animals is OK, but not because animals can't understand why torture is wrong. Most of those same people would say it is wrong to torture a mentally incompetent human.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly *do* believe in your basic principle -- that which we demand of others puts an obligation upon ourselves. I just don't think ethics can be entirely reduced to that principle.

Sure, deer can outsprint humans, to the point where the human loses track of the deer, but nothing outruns a human over long distances. There was an article in Runner's World back in the 70s about running down deer in the Pacific Northwest. It takes about 4 hours.

The Tarahumara Indians of Mexico are famous for hunting deer precisely this way. Tarahumara have been known to run distances up to 200 miles without rest.

Humans aren't wimps; we're just specialized.

I agree. But that's not the question. The question is whether it can do that without any tools whatsoever. That means no baskets and jars for storage and re-hydrating your beans. No fire for cooking them either. You'd eat those potatoes raw, which greatly reduces the calories you can extract from them.

I'm talking about having no tools at all; no hoes, rakes, clippers or knives; no stakes for your beans to climb or cordage to tie them up with. No rocks for grinding your grains, not even pointed sticks for planting seeds. Nothing to crack your nuts with but your teeth.

As for fruits and corn, the huge, succulent varieties we take for granted are dependent upon (tool-based) agriculture. Wild apples are crab apples. Wild maize looks more like wheat. In any case without lime (the byproduct of fire) maize is a very poor foodstuff.

With tools and fire, 1600 sq ft is easily enough to support the nutritional needs of one human. With nothing but your bare hands, teeth, and nails, you'd need hundreds of acres of prime foraging habitat per individual -- habitat like modern chimpanzee habitat. But we're a lot less well adapted than chimps to exploit that habitat, from our relatively weak limbs to our puny, brittle teeth.

That's a strawman argument. Why would a chimp have to *master* ASL, which is of course a human language, in order to show it has the same kinds of cognitive capabilities as humans? In other words is human language grammar the dividing line between a human with rights and an animal with none? Why should that be necessary? What does this say about humans afflicted with aphasia?

The key ability demonstrated by ape language experiments isn't grammar; it is the ability to form cognitive categories. This in turn underpins an ability to conceive of oneself as distinct from everything else. That ability to conceive of oneself as a distinct actor seems to me to be connected to a right to life. Compare a chimpanzee to a clam; they're both animals, but a clam doesn't have any sense of self. A chimpanzee does. Therefore it's quite consistent to draw a line somewhere between a chimp and a clam. You can even argue for a right to chimpanzee liberty without arguing for a similar right for clams, because chimpanzees have the cognitive ability to make use of liberty and clams do not.

Let me stress I am undecided on the idea of chimp personhood. I'm not convinced, but I see no reason not to entertain the possibility if the facts suggest that chimps are more like us than we thought.

I expect one problem with thinking in this area is the assumption there has to be just *one* cognitive that separates humans with their *entire* package of rights from animals. It seems to me the right to self-determination, the right to life, and the right not to be treated cruelly -- all of which rights humans possess -- might well stem from different sources. For example we might agree that torturing a dog is wrong, but it makes no sense to talking about torturing a clam.

Try farming without tools to plant, harvest, process and cook the result. Same goes for foraging. Without tools to process and prepare foraged food, you'd do very well in vitamins and minerals but you'd never get enough calories to support the needs of your anatomically modern human brain. Go to the produce store and imagine living off this stuff if (a) you had to find it and (b) you couldn't use tools to prepare and cook it. You need about 1000 calories per day to survive. That's ten pounds of spinach -- if someone harvests it and hands it to you. If you forage it for yourself you might need to eat 20 pounds of tender plant leaves.

People often imagine our ancestors living in a Garden of Eden filled with modern, selectively bred fruit trees (e.g. hybrid apples grown on grafted trees) bearing year-round. But such a favorable environment has never existed. The ability to prepare and eventually cook difficult-to-eat foods such as roots, grains and nuts with shells was a major driver of later human evolution.

We also imagine *chimpanzees* as the way we see them in the Tarzan movies, but in fact those are always baby chimps. Adult male chimps are much larger; not quite as big as an adult male human but 4x as strong a human of comparable size. Look at the way chimps climb; humans can't do that without some kind of aid. Just take a look at chimp teeth. Obviously chimps are much better prepared than humans to survive without tools.

Sure. Take away *all* human tools, including the lever, the rock, and the pointed stick, there are very few places on Earth where anatomically modern humans could survive.

Physically, if you were well-trained you could run a deer to death from exhaustion. Then you'd be stuck, because with your itty-bitty incisors you wouldn't be able to eat the carcass without some kind of cutting tool.

Suppose you are an alien judge in a galaxy-spanning, multi-species civilization -- something like the Federation in Star Trek, but humans haven't joined yet. Furthermore it's permissable for members, some of whom are carnivores, to kill animals, but not other natural persons.

A case is brought to you in which a research team has captured a human hunter who has just killed chimpanzee. They bring the hunter back for trial on the charges of murdering of a natural person.

What are your instructions to the prosecution? What dos the prosecution have to prove in order to get a conviction?

What are your instructions to the defense? What proof is sufficient to get the defendant off?

Stipulations: (1) The facts of the case are undisputed: the hunter did kill the chimp and did so knowingly.

(2) Personal ignorance on the part of the hunter is no defense. The hunter is guilty if, and only if, human civilization possesses enough facts to conclude that chimpanzees are likely to be natural persons with natural rights (what we would call "human rights") according to the galactic definition of "natural person".

(3) Only observable facts are admissible as evidence. Assertions about things like the presence or absence of a soul are not admissible.

(4) Your court has jurisdiction to convict any natural person of the murder of any other natural person, anywhere in the galaxy, even on non-member planets like Earth.

... emitted whenever a politician speaks.

-

It's almost certain you can't separate chimps from humans this way. Chimps not only use tools, they *learn* to use certain things as tools and the knowledge spreads between chimpanzee groups through individuals -- in other words they have a rudimentary technological culture.

Chimpanzee groups engage in warfare to annex territory, and it's not just a case of encountering other groups and spontaneous fights breaking out. They *invade* the territory of other groups. Surely that shows rudimentary planning. Within a group there is politics. The dominant male is not necessarily the strongest; a clever male can defeat a strong one by forming alliances.

Psychological experiments support the notion that chimps have a consciousness of self. Chimps have been taught American Sign Language, and appear to use all the cognitive features of language. Objections have been raised that this is just operant conditioning, but the same objections would apply to human use of language.

A hundred years ago, the idea that chimps might be persons from the point of view of ethics would be ridiculous. They were just animals in the forest. But a century of research has seriously undermined nearly every substantive distinction between humans and chimps. At this point the verifiable differences between chimps and humans aren't ones of *kind*, but of *degree*. Chimps use tools, but simpler ones than humans do. Chimps can use human language, even learn it spontaneously, but their vocabulary is in the hundreds of words, not thousands for a fluent human speaker.

If there is a defensible *ethical* distinction between the status of chimps and the status of humans, that distinction ought to arise out of clear-cut differences between humans and apes. At present there are only two clear-cut distinctions between humans and chimps. The first is genetics; chimps are close, but past attempts to create human/chimp hybrid have failed. Second, humans *rely* upon our advanced behavioral capabilities to survive. Tools are useful to chimps, but *essential* for us. Yet it is hard for me to see how we get from "chimps can get along without tools" to "it is immoral to experiment on chimps." One doesn't follow from the other.

If the answer is "well, they just aren't *human*," that has implications which are nearly as counter-intuitive as the notion that chimps have some of the same rights as humans. Most people would assume that if we ever met an alien, non-human civilization made up of self-conscious individuals, that hunting those individuals for pleasure would be morally wrong, and perhaps legally impermissible because while not human, they are "natural persons" with at least some of the basic rights of humans. Furthermore, if genetic tribalism is the ethical basis of law, why not favor Europeans over Africans, or vice versa?

This is a meaningless assertion. What units would you use to describe the "rate" or "time" flow? Images like "moving through time" or "time flowing" implicitly assume an independent time-like dimension.

In reality what all these analogies characterize is not time, but things we might use as a clock. The passage of a water molecule down a clear, straight section of stream can be used to mark out a certain length of time from any starting point in time. It's not in any way *like* time, any more than a pendulum is like time. It's just a way of measuring a certain length of time against a fixed extent of space (in this case the arc of the pendulum rather than a length of stream).

It's always comical when bigots and oppressors try to whine that they are the victims, try to pull the "show tolerance of intolerance" crap.

If someone wants to deny people equal rights, deny people the right to get married, based on the color of their skin or their religion or gender, then I will defend their rights such as free speech. However I will not invite them to my dinner table. I will not welcome them in my home. I will not welcome them in my social circle. I will earnestly endeavor not to put on damn dollar in their pocket. And I will damn well use MY right to free speech to call them a vile bigoted scum.

Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance-of-intolerance is self contradictory. Tolerance does not mean I need to be polite or accommodating to a Ku Klux Klan group who are directly harming innocent people, or who inflict or advocate indirect harm of innocent people via laws or other force of government to deny them equal rights.

Whether it's interracial marriage or gay marriage, I do not need to be "tolerant" of the HARM inflicted or advocated in denying people equal rights.

-

Most polls use the sample size to obtain a 3% or 4% error margin. The percentages I posted was the midpoint of 6 polls taken this year, and they were all within +/- 3% of what I posted. Very consistent. The vast number of polls over the last few decades show a strikingly clear and steady shift.

The political and other major events on the subject don't seem to be really pushing the numbers around. It seems that this is something that's just plain percolating through society, and the political fireworks and the court battles and the news items are more like an effect of this process rather than a driver of it.

I suspect almost the opposite. I think positions are changing faster than feelings. I think a lot of the shift is people who are still "uncomfortable" with the idea of gay marriage, but who are actively overcoming that discomfort to try to "do the right thing". I suspect a lot of the ideas and attitudes and understanding developed during the interracial marriage shift are directly responsible for the speed of the gay marriage shift. I think a lot of people are recognizing that "doing the right thing" here means supporting other people's equal rights, even when it means taking an uncomfortable position.

All of the complex factors behind it is why I find it particularly striking to compare it to the equivalent polls on interracial marriage. The shift on gay marriage is almost exactly twice as fast. Whatever the forces and processes are, they are twice as fast this time. That's huge.

-

Polling on interracial marriage showed it increased in acceptance at a fairly steady rate of 1% per year.
Polls show acceptance of gay marriage rising 2% per year. It's currently about 55% support vs 39% against.

Approval of gay marriage is overwhelming among the younger generation, who largely view it as a civil rights issue. The strongest opposition among senior citizens, who are literally dropping dead day by day. There is nothing that can stand against the force of a generational shift.

You lost this fight. You lost this fight several years ago. YOU are the gadfly that has been swatted. Get used to the word "bigot", because you're going to be hearing increasingly often.

-

When I was a teenager back in the 70s I knew a kid who put a solenoid controlled bleach dispenser over his rear tires to achieve that truly obnoxious white smoke burnout.

Why, do you ask? What possible purpose could that serve? Well, when his girlfriend dumped him, he backed up into her parent's driveway and blanketed their house in smoke for ten minutes.

This pretty much shows the level of mentality involved.