Beyond simple hand gestures, we don’t know how to communicate meaningfully with chimpanzees. We can’t even tell them, “Come back tomorrow afternoon. I’ve got a new shipment of bananas arriving for you.” Assessing the effort that we invest trying to get big-brained mammals to do what we say, we tend to measure their intelligence by an ability to understand us, rather than measure our intelligence by an ability to understand them. Since we can’t meaningfully communicate with any other species of life on Earth—not even those genetically closest to us—how audacious of us to think we can converse
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