http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22377952-13762,00.html
I was doodling around, trying to find something to post on and the link above caught my eye. The introduction of the article does an excellent job of summing up the finding: "In another case of researchers reporting the bleeding obvious, European scientists have found that children are smarter than chimpazees."
Oh really? Wow, I never would have seen that coming. Anyway, onto the point. Usually, you'd dismiss an article with the headline "Shock: kids smarter than chimpanzees" to be another ridiculous finding (such as the famous "Girls are different than boys" headline, which I can't cite the source of, sorry). But what gets me is that funding went into this. Time and money went into it. Here's an example from the article:
"European scientists gave a battery of cognitive tests lasting three to five hours separately to 105 2-year-old children, 106 chimpanzees and 32 orang-utans over two weeks." (Dunham, para. 5). Doesn't that sound rather like a lot of time, a lot of children and chimpanzees (and orang-utans), AND a lot of effort to figure out something that should be painfully obvious to everyone? Those who put stock in evolution would agree that it's a logical conclusion; if we evolved from apes, we should be smarter than them, right?
Why is so much research going into common knowledge? It is said by Ether Herrmann in the article that this is the 'first time anything like this has been done', but why DID it have to be done? Have they nothing more important to spend scientific funding on than determining common sense?
It frustrates me. There are much more valuable things to devote time, energy, and funding to than determining that two-year-olds are smarter than chimpanzees and orang-utans, and full-grown ones at that.
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scientists should be more focused and dedicated to investigating new remarkable discoveries that would actually interest the public. It's obvious that a human who once was a baby would develop more intelligence than a chimp, especially since our race dominates.