Eduquer au XXIe siècle. Entre 1900 et 2011, tout a changé pour les écoliers qui vivent à présent dans le virtuel et dans une société multiculturelle, analyse Michel Serres. Il faut aider l'école à prendre la mesure de cette nouvelle ère. Le Monde.fr | • Mis à jour le | Par Michel Serres, de l'Académie française Avant d'enseigner quoi que ce soit à qui que ce soit, au moins faut-il le connaître. Qui se présente, aujourd'hui, à l'école, au collège, au lycée, à l'université ? Ce nouvel écolier, cette jeune étudiante n'a jamais vu veau, vache, cochon ni couvée. En 1900, la majorité des humains, sur la planète, travaillaient au labour et à la pâture ; en 2011, la France, comme les pays analogues, ne compte plus qu'un pour cent de paysans. Sans doute faut-il voir là une des plus fortes ruptures de l'histoire, depuis le néolithique.
. - Il habite la ville. . - Son espérance de vie va vers quatre-vingts ans. . - Alors que leurs parents furent conçus à l'aveuglette, leur naissance est programmée. Bilan temporaire. Je répète. Human evolution. Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys | Wired Science | Wi. Campbell’s monkeys appear to combine the same calls in different ways, using rules of grammar that turn sound into language. Whether their rudimentary syntax echoes the speech of humanity’s evolutionary ancestors, or represents an emergence of language unrelated to our own, is unclear.
Either way, they’re far more sophisticated than we thought. “This is the first evidence we have in animal communication that they can combine, in a semantic way, different calls to create a new message,” said Alban Lemasson, a primatologist at the University of Rennes in France. “I’m not sure it has strong parallels with humans, in the way that we will find a subject and object and verb.
But they have meaningful units combined into other meaningful sequences, with rules imposed on how they’re combined.” Lemasson’s team previously described the monkeys’ use of calls with specific meanings in a paper published in November. “I’d shy away from that. Image: Florian Möllers See Also: Humans and Chimpanzees Share Roots of Language | Wired Science |
Chimpanzees and humans use the same parts of the brain when communicating, suggesting a common ancestral root to our linguistic prowess and raising the possibility that chimps are capable of highly complex communication. In a study published today in Current Biology, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center measured the neural activity of three chimpanzees as they asked for food. An area of the chimpanzees’ brains similar to our own Broca’s area lit up when the chimpanzees gestured and called out. Scientists already knew that chimpanzees and humans share the Broca’s area — a locus of speech production and processing — as well as the related Wernicke’s area, but it wasn’t clear whether chimps actually used them. "It’s been held as scientific dogma that non-human primate vocalizations are more of a visceral, emotive response," said study co-author Jared Tagliatela.
Either way, chimps are capable of high-level chatter. Video: Chimpanzee making and hunting with a spear. Campbell's Monkeys Use Affixation to Alter Call Meanin. Human language has evolved on a biological substrate with phylogenetic roots deep in the primate lineage. Here, we describe a functional analogy to a common morphological process in human speech, affixation, in the alarm calls of free-ranging adult Campbell's monkeys (Cercopithecus campbelli campbelli). We found that male alarm calls are composed of an acoustically variable stem, which can be followed by an acoustically invariable suffix. Using long-term observations and predator simulation experiments, we show that suffixation in this species functions to broaden the calls' meaning by transforming a highly specific eagle alarm to a general arboreal disturbance call or by transforming a highly specific leopard alarm call to a general alert call.
We concluded that, when referring to specific external events, non-human primates can generate meaningful acoustic variation during call production that is functionally equivalent to suffixation in human language. Figures Editor: Art F. Results. Chimps: Not Human, But Are They People? | Wired Science | Wired. As a population of West African chimpanzees dwindles to critically endangered levels, scientists are calling for a definition of personhood that includes our close evolutionary cousins.
Just two decades ago, the Ivory Coast boasted a 10,000-strong chimpanzee population, accounting for half of the world’s population. According to a new survey, that number has fallen to just a few thousand. News of such a decline, published today in Current Biology, would be saddening in any species. But should we feel more concern for the chimpanzees than for another animal — as much concern, perhaps, as we might feel for other people? "They are a people. Fouts is one of a growing number of scientists and ethicists who believe that chimpanzees — as well as orangutans, bonobos and gorillas, a group colloquially known as great apes — ought to be considered people.
It’s a controversial position. Some even suggest that chimpanzees and other great apes should be granted human rights. "They don’t have time. The Jane Goodall Institute of Canada. Blessé en Irak, le soldat aveugle qui voyait avec sa langue | Ru. Sciences et Technologies : Cerveau : la bataille de. Mais pourquoi donc le chant du canari diffère-t-il d'une année sur l'autre ? C'est grâce à cette question improbable que la connaissance du cerveau fit un grand pas en avant.
Nous étions dans les années 80. En étudiant le cerveau de Serinus canaria, des chercheurs observent que des neurones du centre vocal supérieur, qui en contrôlent le chant, se volatilisaient à l'automne pour être remplacés par une nouvelle génération de neurones au printemps suivant... Cliquez sur l'aperçu pour agrandir l'infographie réalisée par Olivier Cailleau Dans un premier temps, cette découverte ne fit pas grand bruit.
Une découverte capitale, inimaginable. Le cerveau est terra incognita. «En l'état actuel des connaissances, explique le Pr Yves Agid, neurologue à la Pitié-Salpêtrière et directeur scientifique de l'Institut du cerveau et de la moelle épinière, rien ne prouve que les cellules nerveuses meurent au fil du temps. Dans le cerveau, tout ou presque reste encore à explorer. Comment les chimpanzés perçoivent la mort - En quête de sciences. Les chimpanzés sont capables de penser à l'avenir. Ça a été établi par une équipe suédoise l'an dernier. Parfois, l'avenir s'envisage avec un proche en moins. Pour les hommes comme pour les chimpanzés. Deux études publiées lundi 26 avril font la même obervation : ces primates adoptent une attitude particulière quand la mort survient.
Et certains ont un comportement comparable à celui des humains au contact d'un moribond. Pansy était une vieille femelle chimpanzé écossaise, doyenne du Royaume-uni – elle vivait en captivité. Ce n'est pas évident de le distinguer sur cette vidéo, mais les primates secouent doucement la vieille femelle. "Au bout d'un moment, les chimpanzés semblent avoir conclu qu'elle s'en était allée. Dora Biro, chercheuse à Oxford, a filmé des mères chimpanzé dans leur milieu naturel, les forêts guinéennes. Lorsqu'a été tourné ce film, cinq chimpanzés de la communauté, dont deux enfants, avaient péri d'une maladie respiratoire. Les images sont bouleversantes : The A.I. Revolution Is On | Magazine. Today’s A.I. bears little resemblance to its initial conception. The field’s trailblazers believed success lay in mimicking the logic-based reasoning that human brains were thought to use.
Photo: Dwight Eschliman; Illustration: Zee Rogér Diapers.com warehouses are a bit of a jumble. Boxes of pacifiers sit above crates of onesies, which rest next to cartons of baby food. But the warehouses aren’t meant to be understood by humans; they were built for bots. The computers are in control. The Kiva bots may not seem very smart. This explosion is the ironic payoff of the seemingly fruitless decades-long quest to emulate human intelligence. All aboard the algorithm. Model trains are easy to keep track of. What they got was the Princeton Locomotive and Shop Management System, or Plasma, which used an algorithmic strategy to analyze Norfolk Southern’s operations. The model that Powell and his team came up with was, in effect, a kind of AI hive mind. —Jon Stokes. But we must learn to adapt. The Known Universe by AMNH. Altruistic Chimpanzees Adopt Orphans. Chimpanzees can be altruistic just like humans, according to a new study that found 18 cases of orphaned chimps being adopted in the wild.
The kind-hearted chimp parents were discovered in the Taï forest in the West African country Ivory Coast. The adoptive caregivers, both male and female, devoted large amounts of time and effort to protecting their young charges, without any obvious gain to themselves. "I don't know of any other cases of unrelated orphans being adopted," said research leader Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. He said the young chimps had lost their genetic parents to predation, injury and other causes. Until now, some scientists have thought that altruism, or engaging in a costly behavior to aid another without any benefit to oneself, was strictly a human trait. In studies of captive chimpanzees — humans' closest living relatives — instances of selfless giving are rare. Chimps May Be Aware Of Others’ Deaths.
Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday | The. Video: Chimpanzees Mourn Their Dead | Wired Science. Two reports of chimpanzees tending their dead provide poignant examples of how humanity’s closest relatives grieve for the dead, a behavior once thought unique to humans. In one report, two mothers in a chimpanzee colony in Guinea carried the dead bodies of their infants for weeks. In the other, chimps at a safari park in Britain cared for an elderly female in her final days. “We propose that chimpanzees’ response to death has been underestimated,” wrote researchers led by University of Stirling psychologist James Anderson in a paper published April 26 in . A 50-year-old chimp named Pansy, kept at the Blair Drummond Safari and Adventure Park in Stirlingshire, Scotland, grew lethargic in November 2008.
Shortly afterward, the park’s chimpanzees were moved indoors for winter, but Pansy continued to grow weaker, and stopped leaving her nest. Pansy’s companions were her daughter, a 20-year-old female named Rosie; Blossom, another 50-year-old female; and Blossom’s 20-year-old son, Chippy. Notre cerveau ne sait pas faire plus de deux choses à la fois | Inutile d'essayer de suivre une conversation, en twittant, le tout devant la télévision. Ce n'est pas une question de concentration, c'est la division de votre cerveau en deux hémisphères qui veut ça. Les révélations apportées par l'étude de deux chercheurs français sont détaillées dans un article de The Independent: Les scientifiques ont découvert que lorsqu'un individu doit exécuter deux tâches simultanées, son cerveau distingue chaque activité pour que l'une soit largement effectuée par le côté gauche, l'autre principalement par le droit. L'étude de Sylvain Charron et Etienne Koechlin, publiée vendredi dans la revue Science, repose sur l'imagerie par résonnance magnétique (IRM) -qui permet de mesurer l'activité des différentes zones du cerveau- de 32 volontaires pour évaluer comment l'organe divise entre ses deux hémisphères les tâches qui lui incombent.
L'expérience est simple. Il n'y aucune différence entre les sexes concernant notre capacité à effectuer plusieurs tâches à la fois.