[lit-ideas] The Memoirs of Nim Chimpsky

From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2014 09:39:45 -0400 (EDT)

In a message dated 6/6/2014 6:36:48 P.M.  Eastern Daylight Time, 
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes in ""Group selection",  "natural selection": 
chimp-group violence
it is not clearly a sign of any  greater fitness in a Darwinian way. We 
might have to face the fact that chimps  whose individual fitness was less than 
another group might nevertheless manage  to exterminate that group by 
picking off its members one by one: one group  survives not because it is more ‘
fit’ or more intelligent but simply because it  is more prone to gang 
violence. 
For these reasons, we may question whether  chimp “group selection” via 
chimp-on-chimp killing falls within the ambit of  “natural selection” of a 
Darwinian kind.
Nim Chimpsky
Simple-minded  Darwinist  

----
 
So it seems we should distinguish:
 
survival of the fittest-1
 
from
 
survival of the fittest-2
 
If 'fit' applies to the individual, it is the original Darwinian (and  Spen
cerian) slightly vacuous statement:
 
"The fittest survives" -- meaning the fittest INDIVIDUAL survives.
 
I'm surprised that Spencer and Darwin, who were careful with their  
language, did not notice that 'fittest' is a superlative adjective in need or  
search for a missing noun ('fittest WHAT?', as Garfield could ask).
 
survival of the fittest-2
 
then applies to
 
the fittest GROUP (of chimps) survives.
 
Darwin, alas, like Noam Chomsky, were unable to explain why Nim Chimpsky  
never wrote his own memoirs.
 
Cheers,
 
Speranza
 
--------
 
Nim Chimpsky (November 19, 1973 – March 10, 2000)
 
In the entry for April 17, 1998, Nim Chimpsky uttered his longest  
utterance:
 
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me  
you."
 
the implicatures of which are somewhat _fuzzy_.
 
A. Palma suggests that the imperative form, "give!" is obviously the kernel 
 of the utterance. "The subject is of course Nim Chimpsky's care-giver" --  
usually left just implicated in colloquial speech, but not by Nim  
Chimpsky, who represents this as "you", with which he closes his  utterance. 
The 
indirect object Nim Chimpsky himself ("me" -- strictly 'to  me'). The DIRECT 
object of 'give' is complex "orange". The 'orange' is to be  eaten. So 
'orange' is, syntactically, both the direct object of both 'give' and  'eat' 
(in 
that order) -- cfr. "you cannot have your orange given and eat it too"  
(implicature: unless you mean 'successively'). 
 
The fact that 'orange' is repeated four times is 'ambiguous' qua  
implicature-triggerer. "It may be that he means that FOUR oranges" be given to  
him 
-- or, as Palma suggests, "it may just be emphatic". 
 
""Me" is also repeated four times", which Palma suggests may be proof of  
Kant's transcendental apperception of the ego -- if I understood him alright, 
 that is.
 
 
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[lit-ideas] The Memoirs of Nim Chimpsky

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