I've long been aware of the fact that when you point at something for a cat to look at, they often look at your finger instead of at what you are pointing toward. Based on a simple "two-cup one-treat" experiment done with chimpanzees and children in one episode of Alan Alda's SciAm/PBS "Human Spark" series, chimpanzees (and wolves) apparently don't get it either, even though puppy-dogs (thanks to something like 50,000-100,000 years of co-evolution with us) have this down pat.
It's also possible that as we imagine evolving toward more levels of sub-system correlation, or even just stronger correlations (e.g. with center-of-mass niche-network layer-multiplicity approaching 6), that we too will find ourselves in a world of folks who won't get it when we point at stuff with the goal of helping them out. If you can think of places where this has happened in the past, or if you encounter this same effect now, let us know!
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