Join us for a Web chat with William Fields and Daniel Povinelli and win a Barnes & Noble Gift Certificate.
During the week of March 3rd, 2008 Daniel Povinelli and William Fields will answer one question from the public each day. The writers of the winning questions will receive a $25.00 Barnes & Noble gift certificate. (You can only win once during the week).
The site is at: http://www.dnafiles.org/chimp-chat
Chimps are our closest living genetic relatives, but what does it mean that humans and chimps have nearly identical DNA sequences? Put a human and a chimp side-by-side and there's no confusion about who's who. So what makes us human, and what makes a chimp a chimp? Comparing chimp and human genomes has given us insight into evolution and disease, but how alike are we in mind and spirit? In this web chat we give you the chance to ask two researchers who have studied our simian relatives about the similarities and differences between humans and chimps.
Daniel Povinelli, Professor and Director Cognitive Evolution Group, Center for Child Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette and author of Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee's Theory of how the World Works. Our genetic similarity with chimps may tempt us to say we just have a sort of souped-up version of the basic ape mind, but Povinelli says if you look hard at the experimental cognitive data on humans and chimps, it seems there's really a qualitative, fundamental difference in abstract, symbolic thought between the two species.
William FieldsWilliam Fields, Director of Bonobo Research at the Great Ape Trust outside Des Moines, Iowa and co-author of Kanzi's Primal Language. Fields has studied bonobos' ability to learn language and also refers to some of them as friends. The bonobos and humans at the Great Ape Trust have developed a shared culture, a culture that led Kanzi and his sister Panbanisha to learn to communicate with humans by using a keyboard and symbols called lexigrams.
Submit your question for a chance to win a gift certificate from Barnes & Noble!
http://www.dnafiles.org/chimp-chat
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