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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
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    Perspectives
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Humans possess superior cognitive capacities compared to chimpanzees despite chimpanzees' superior working memory.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.The claim illicitly conflates 'superior' with 'more linguistically complex,' importing an anthropocentric metric as a neutral standard.
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    • 2.Dennett and others in the functionalist tradition hold that cognitive superiority must be assessed relative to adaptive niche, not a single species' profile.
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    • 3.By niche-relative criteria, chimpanzee working memory represents a genuine cognitive superiority, not a trade-off loss, undermining the asymmetric framing.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.The trade-off argument structurally resembles a just-so story: it retroactively narrates a loss as a gain without independent evidence of the compensatory mechanism.
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    • 2.Gould and Lewontin's spandrels critique establishes that adaptive trade-off narratives require positive evidence for both the cost and the benefit to be explanatorily valid.
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    • 3.Without empirical confirmation that photographic memory suppression causally produced language capacity, the supporting argument commits a post hoc fallacy.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.A chimpanzee named Ayumu strongly outperformed humans in speed and accuracy on a working memory task.
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    • 2.There exists a trade-off between photographic memory and abstract/linguistic cognition in the phylogeny and ontogeny of humans.
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    • 3.By relinquishing the photographic memory shared with chimpanzee ancestors, humans developed superior capacities for complex representation and language.
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