Travis The Chimp Had "Form".

In my intro top right of the blog I mention the case of Travis the chimp who recently attacked a Connecticut woman, went on the rampage, and had to be shot dead. This AP piece reports that action to send Travis to an animal sanctuary might have been taken earlier because he had previously gone on the rampage in 2003, leading police a merry dance in downtown Stamford, for hours. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection had received a load of concerned emails from Stamford citizens over the intervening years but had never acted on them. Charla Nash, whom he attacked last February is still in Cleveland Clinic where she is recovering from injuries which included her hands, nose, lips and eyelids being ripped off. She is suing Travis's owner, Sandra Herold, for $50 million. Chimpanzees do not make perfect pets. How many times......

The Second Bonobo?

A curious piece this, about the work of long-time heretic Jeffrey Schwartz (together with John Grehan) in claiming that molecular taxonomic evidence (based on similarity of DNA sequence) gives a false picture of the family tree of the higher primates - the great apes and us. In fact, Schwartz rejects the DNA evidence that we humans are more closely related to the chimpanzee and bonobo in favour of his interpretation of a more classical taxonomic approach which suggests to them that both orangs and humans evolved from an orang-like ancestor with a huge geographical range spanning Africa to South-East Asia. According to Schwartz this ancestral population dwindled and split, leaving rump populations in both Africa and Asia, the former giving rise to hominins, the latter to modern-day orangutans. New Scientist also publishes, in the same edition, an almost apologetic editorial which acknowledges widespread scorn and rejection of Schwartz's hypothesis before special pleading that the voice of heresy must he heard because, every once in a while, orthodox science is proved wrong and a new Galileo emerges. I would always run with the molecular data which accords Schwartz an emphatic "Non!!" However, read it and decide what you think......

Tactical Deception By Capuchin Monkeys?

Primatologist Brandon Wheeler, from Stony Brook University, New York, set up an experiment, using platforms baited with food, to test the idea that subordinate individuals utter a certain type of distress call with the intention to deceive dominants that danger had been spotted - thereby alerting them to leave the area, leaving the path to food open. But, of course, the ever-present problem with observations of "tactical deception" in the wild continues to bug this kind of research. In order to tactically deceive the deceiver must know that he is seeding a false belief in the mind of another. How can you prove it? There is always stress evoked in competition for food, and this stress naturally evokes what Wheeler calls resource-related stress calls. Simple association could do the rest. The subordinate monkey could simply learn that other monkeys tend to be scared away from food whenever it utters these distress calls. Their apparently deceptive behaviour would then not be intentional in any way.

Unique-ier, Unique-ier-est, Unique?

This nice little piece is about this year's Class Day address to Stanford University by neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky wrote a lovely book, "A Primate's Memoir" a few years ago about his adventures in Africa in the high-risk arena of baboon colonies. Here he bends over backwards not to accord unique cognition to humans - citing chimpanzees' ability to empathize and cuddle and comfort individuals who have been set upon. He also stresses the things we share with a host of other species. Many other species kill their own kind in anger or cold blood, he says. Bat females share food with the progeny of other bats, because, if they do not, their young will not get altruistically fed. Humans operate the same "tit-for-tat" rules. Women in college dorms synchronize ovulation in the same way as do rodents...etc. etc. So, while we are basically just another "off the rack" mammal, argues Sapolsky, there are some things we are capable of that simply have no direct equivalent in the rest of the animal kingdom. He cites the case of a nun who ministered to a bunch of the most frightening and lethal humans on the planet - on death row in a Louisiana prison. "The less forgivable the act", she had said, when questioned why she had spent most of her life on such low-life, "the more it must be forgiven. The less lovable a person is, the more you must find the means to love them." As a strident atheist, says Sapolsky, "this strikes me as the most irrational, magnificent thing we are capable of as a species". Then why does it not make us unique, Bob. Why teeter on the brink of calling us so?