Word: kingdom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...found it inconceivable that an animal might have the ability to "use words or signs, putting them together as we do." Charles Darwin delivered an unsettling blow to this doctrine a century ago when he asserted that humans were linked by common ancestry to the rest of the animal kingdom. Darwinism raised a series of tantalizing questions for future generations: If other vertebrates are similar to humans in blood and bone, should they not share other characteristics, including intelligence? More specifically, did the earliest humanlike creatures, who split from the ancestors they shared with apes between 5 million...
Even if some other creatures have crossed this mental Rubicon, human analytical abilities remain vastly superior to anything demonstrated elsewhere in the animal kingdom. In virtually all studies of animal intelligence and language skills, performance plummets as more elements are added to a task and as an animal has to remember these elements for long periods. By contrast, humans can call on vast working memory...
Blooming flowers can serve, however, as a rather colorful and ominous warning that their other friends in the vegetable kingdom are about to release their pollen on the public...
...mysterious prophetess, Crone Accustomed Toherface (Jeremy Nye) warns the kingdom (in appropriate iambic pentameter) that evil lies ahead. But the king, who has inexplicably become a Hindu, pays no heed. (The Pudding show can be awfully random...
...best characters have little to do with the plot. Brian Martin does a terrific job as Tess Pattern, a wovewy journalist with a speech impediment. She and Tab Lloyd (Andrew Howard), a 15th-century Geraldo Rivera-Maury Povich type, dig away at the sleazy side of the kingdom, threatening to broadcast everyone's dirty laundry. (Political Subtext...