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Violent crime in America shot up sharply in the mid-1980's and
continued to climb until 1991, after which something unprecedented
occurred. The crime level declined to a level not seen since the
1960's. This revised edition of The Crime Drop in America focuses
first on the dramatic drop in crime rates in America in the 1990's,
and then, in a new epilogue, on the patterns since 2000. The
separate chapters written by distinguished experts cover the many
factors affecting crime rates: policing, incarceration, drug
markets, gun control, economics, and demographics. Detailed
analyses emphasize the mutual effects of changes in crack markets,
a major focus of youth violence, and the drop in rates of violence
following decline in demand for crack. The contrasts between the
crime-drop period of the 1990's and the period since 2000 are
explored in the new epilogue, which also reviews major new
developments in thinking about the causes and control of crime.
Violent crime in America shot up sharply in the mid-1980s and
continued to climb until 1991, after which something unprecedented
occurred. The crime level declined to a level not seen since the
1960s. This revised edition of The Crime Drop in America focuses
first on the dramatic drop in crime rates in America in the 1990s,
and then, in a new epilogue, on the patterns since 2000. The
separate chapters written by distinguished experts cover the many
factors affecting crime rates: policing, incarceration, drug
markets, gun control, economics, and demographics. The detailed
analyses emphasize the mutual effects of changes in crack markets,
a major focus of youth violence, and the drop in rates of violence
following decline in demand for crack. The contrasts between the
crime-drop period of the 1990s and the period since 2000 are
explored in the new epilogue, which also reviews major new
developments in thinking about the causes and control of crime.
This book is a critique of the experiments of recent years that tried to teach language to apes. The achievements of these animals are compared with the natural development of language, both spoken and signed forms, in children. It is argued that the apes in these studies acquired merely crude simulations of language rather than language itself and that there is no good evidence that apes can acquire a language. A survey of the communication systems of apes and monkeys in nature finds that these systems differ from language in profound ways--language is a uniquely human attribute.
Language is regarded, at least in most intellectual traditions, as
the quintessential human attribute, at once evidence and source of
most that is considered transcendent in us, distinguishing ours
from the merely mechanical nature of the beast. Even if language
did not have the sacrosanct status it does in our conception of
human nature, however, the question of its presence in other
species would still promote argument, for we lack any universally
accepted, defining features of language, ones that would allow us
to identify it unequivocally ours from other species and contention
over the crucial attributes of language are responsible for the
stridency of the debate over whether nonhuman animals can learn
language. Aping Language is a critical assessment of each of the
recent experiments designed to impact a language, either natural or
invented, to an ape. The performance of the animals in these
experiments is compared with the course of semantic and syntactic
development in children, both speaking and signing. The book goes
on to examine what is known about the neurological, cognitive, and
specifically linguistic attributes of our species that subserve
language, and it discusses how they might have come into existence.
Finally, the communication of nonhuman primates in nature is
assayed to consider whether or not it was reasonable to assume, as
the experimenters in these projects did, that apes possess an
ability to acquire language.
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