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Is Geometry the language that makes us uniquely human?
I got so excited to see this article in the NY Times today! It kind of blows my head open thinking about it. Maybe because I was a B student in Math, but an A student in Geometry. I loved it. It made sense to me and I did really well on those weird questions on the SAT where you had to turn shapes around in your head. It’s just the way my brain works. I can picture things. Almost like a parlor trick, I doubt it means much!
But I digress! This beautiful article is right up my alley! Geometry may be the language that is unique to humans! And they are testing it right now. Baboons recognize all kinds of fruit, for example, even when you mix them in with similar shapes. But they do not recognize geometric shapes. But that could be because they don’t need to and aren’t taught to…they are looking more closely at this.
This is my kind of article. I took Anthropology and Archaeology courses in college and Psychology too. I took Bio and Formal Logic. I had a liberal arts education and consider myself pretty well rounded — but my favorite stuff is neuroscience and human origins. The idea that they are using cave art to prove this theory is really exciting to me!
So this article rings the bell!
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/science/geometry-math-brain-primates.?searchResultPosition=…
