A few related questions…
Domesticated animals have been bred for all sorts of characteristics. Dogs, for instance, have been bred for speed, appearance, size, etc. In a relatively short time humans have radically changed their morphology.
My first question is, has any animal been specifically bred for intelligence? Ethical considerations aside, how hard would it be/how long might it take to breed, say, chimpanzees that have a level of intelligence approaching that of a human? (Is that how the apes got so smart in Planet of the Apes?)
For that matter, couldn’t we breed chimps that can “speak” by continuously selecting those with the most complex vocalizations? Are parrots bred for talking ability?
(Well I guess the McGlaughlin Group is all the proof I need of these last two questions.)
Parots are natural mimics, they are not domesticated, just easily tamed.
Most animals have been bred for stupidity - in almost all cases the wild version is far more intelligent than the domesticated version.
Some chimpanzees (and gorillas) already have intelligence approaching (or surpassing) that of a human. Koko the gorilla scored a 95 on an IQ test for children, and a number of her answers were counted wrong when, for her, they weren’t - i.e. when shown a series of pictures and told to pick the place you would go in a storm, she chose the tree over the house, and when asked which item was good to eat, she picked a picture of a flower. 95 is well within what is considered ‘average’ intelligence for a human. Chimps seem to be smarter than gorillas even, but their personality is not as conducive to teaching them sign language.
Problem with teaching apes to talk is they just aren’t built for it - certain human brain structures are specialized for speech, and we gave up a lot of biting power in exchange for better voices. Despite this, when people were first beginning to try and teach language to apes they were able to get some to speak a handful of simple words, before they figured out sign language was much better suited to them. Many can understand human speech fairly well - Koko could understand a lot of spoken English, and I seem to recall reading in one of the interviews with her that they printed in National Geographic years ago that sometimes she would answer the interviewers questions before they were translated to sign language by the trainer.