Word: human
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Cell Biologist Anne Hamburger, discovered three years ago that by "conditioning" culture medium with spleen cells taken from mice prone to cancer, they can grow tumor cells from people with common forms of cancer. (The mouse cells apparently produce some yet unidentified factor that supports the growth of certain human cancer cells.) According to Salmon, the cancer cells that thrive and form colonies in the laboratory's plastic petri dishes appear to be the tumor's "clonogenic," or "stem," cells. Though they account for less than 1% of all the cells in a tumor, these cells are thought...
Hahn keeps her professional distance and differentiates between communication that is characterized by animal instinct and communication that is conceptual and learned from humans. A parrot that asks for a cracker is only mimicking a human or another parrot. But a chimpanzee who can "speak" in Ameslan (American sign language) or Yerkish by striking combinations on a keyboard of color-coded symbols seems to be creating syntax, a property of human language. It is not the voice but the process that is critical...
According to one of the author's informants, a psychologist named Michael Fox, about 80% of all human communication consists of nonverbal gestures. Dogs are ever watchful of their master's changing stance and expression, a genetic inheritance from their wolf past when subtle shifts in packmates' ears, eyes or tails communicated fear or aggression...
...grown chimpanzee has great strength and must be respected. Says one scientist: "If I get into an argument with Billy or Washoe or some of the other chimps, I try to change the subject." Earlier books on the subject report that some simian students are eager to join the human club. A female chimp placed a photo of herself in a pile with Eleanor Roosevelt but a snapshot of her own father with the four-legged beasts. A chimp with a degree in Yerkish or Ameslan exhibits the ability to form concepts from his store of word symbols. The Indian...
...facts and, when necessary, the lack of them. "Though total silence still holds between the two species," she writes of chimps and men, "the linguistic exchanges now happening will serve to underscore the close biological relationship between the two." Still, like the upwardly mobile chimp who thought she was human, there are humans who seem more willing to believe in the possibility of communication with superior extraterrestrials than in a probability of a common bond here on their own planet of the apes...