[MD] The Unsocialised Ape

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Ian]
But basically, I still don't agree with the rest ... the example 
evidence is I believe being misinterpreted ... ironically, in too 
reductionist a way

[Arlo]
Yes, there is some irony in that charge.

By "fossilizing", I assume you mean that social/intellectual structures 
or patterns are somehow encoded into our genetic or neural structures, 
correct? If you are talking about a newborn dropped off on a desert 
island, and that newborn possessing the capacity for social and 
intellectual activity, then that capacity must be attributable to some 
genetic coding, no?

Also, I am curious as to what you see as the nature of this 
fossilization. Is it species-general, something not specific to culture 
or exposure but something that both a newborn to a North American couple 
and a newborn to an Australian Aboriginal couple would hold identically?

Or would there be some way we could test the genetic structures of each 
of these newborns and identify specific social-intellectual patterns 
that have been fossilized there?

In other words, if something is fossilized, we should be able to 
localize it and point to it, no? And we should be able to identify or 
decode specific aspects of the fossil, since such a decoding is 
precisely what you are saying occurs at the biological level.

Or, let's say we have a newborn ape and a newborn human infant sitting 
side by side in our hypothetical non-IRB laboratory. Could we see the 
fossilized social and intellectual capacity in the human, something we 
would not see in the ape? Would you point to genetic structures? Neural 
chemistry? And to what depth does this fossilization go? Are you talking 
about Chomsky-type "universal grammar"?

Now lets say that we put on one side of the island a infant born to a 
North American family, and on the other an infant born to Australian 
Aboriginals (and lets say its a huge island and they never meet). Would 
you expect the intellectual patterns you say emerge from fossilized 
intellect to be different, based on the differences in these cultures? 
Or would they be similar, even though the fossilization contains very 
distinct and different social activity, and thus very distinct and 
different and different intellectual activity?

As for misinterpreting the data, I don't know a better source for what 
Helen Keller describes as her pre-social reality than Helen Keller, but 
its clear she equates her pre-social reality with an animalistic and 
thought-devoid existence. Nowhere does she describe any part of that 
time as containing any thoughts that should be there if such a capacity 
is fossilized.

And the feral children we have observed? Well they evidenced no greater 
social behavior than animals, and nothing about their behavior evidenced 
intellectual behavior (above what we observe in other animals with 
equivalent neural capacity). What behavior of theirs would you point to 
to say otherwise?