Essay On Complex Communication

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Complex Communication Humans have cultivated a complex and well-defined language that differentiates them from animals. Languages allowed humans to share and pass down information across countless generations. This process is called collective learning which is how individuals learned to do many fundamental tasks and how various cultures and languages in the world developed (Big History Project, Early Evidence of Collective Learning). All living beings have communication, but what’s special about human communication is that there are elaborate languages. These languages are flexible enough to have additions of new words added constantly (Text 8). However, in other organisms that does not happen because they keep on communicating stagnantly.…show more content…
The way that chimpanzees communicate is through calls, postures, and gestures that add up to a sophisticated way of communication, but it is not verbal or written which differentiates them from humans (Text 5). Nevertheless, some people might argue that animals, like chimpanzees, can learn to communicate like humans. For example, a chimpanzee named Koko learned 1,000 ASL signs and understands 2000 spoken English words. She also has an IQ of between 70-95 which is the average IQ of a human (Text 6). Another bonobo chimpanzee named Kanzi can understand 3000 words of spoken English and can use 400 symbols called lexigrams to communicate and can combine them to form simple sentences (Text 7). These chimpanzees are “speaking” to each other non-verbally. Also, the chimpanzees are not voicing their opinions or asking questions and also are not thinking in an abstract way like humans. Furthermore, it is believed that the chimpanzees were only cooperating for rewards and only imitating what they were taught without having any understanding of the words. So in all chimpanzee communication differs from humans because the human language is very precise and has countless words that makes it even more complicated for animals to

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