Experts on language - the real ones, not those of us who merely use it - are having an intense debate about which species can talk.
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In a new book called "The First Word," Christine Kenneally catalogs the complex debate over language and includes one particularly revealing experiment in which scientists put two male apes who knew sign language together. One might have expected these guys to start grousing about their keepers. But, no, they started madly signing at each other, a manual shouting match, and in the end, neither appeared to actually listen to the other.
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With a hot August and a long political season ahead, we might venture that what really separates human from ape is not the ability to talk in complete sentences. It is our underused capacity to listen.
