This haunts me. Gorillas and chimps are crazy smart and can be taught sign language, so why can’t they speak? They have human-like mouths and they’re obviously vocal, so why don’t they at least have the vocabulary of a toddler?
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It is coded in your DNA how you get built from just an egg. It contains info to make a whole new living being. However as you are coded in a way that you will be a being that talks, you have that tools avaliable to you in that code and will eventually have that tools in final build. It is really similiar to building a computer. Lets say you were an android in human form; to be able to speak first you need phsical tools for that such as tongue, cords, lungs etc. Then you will need what we can call the hardware. In our brains; we don’t start with perfect software(driver) for many things but we get to have hardware(sound card) that allows it to be used to start with. It is such a neat way because we create our own software based on our own hardware. Our senses gather informations which we are not familiar with at first such as sound, noises, light etc. then in time we learn to give them meaning and finally create a software that effectively hears, sees etc. This way we get to have a custom made driver for our own system and even if we would be different from other humans, we get to have a nice working set up since its custom made for each of us. If that wasn’t the case and we started with an inbuild software then any difference in our build could make our software have troubles. Here comes to your answer, even with brain power equals to us, without our tools, apes may still not be able to speak as we do since they won’t have the process I described. It is not only our intelligence that allows us to use all the sound gathered by our ears to understand. First our hardware along with the software in our brain filters the sound and gives them meaning. Only then we use the filtered sound for listening. If we didn’t have strong tools for filtering meaningful noise in a way that can be effectively used in communication, we would have hard time with it as well.
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