A fun story about further research into the malicious forward planning of the infamous stone-throwing chimp, Santino, in the Furuvik Zoo, north of Stockholm. Over the course of a year, researchers from Lund University, tracked his ability to camouflage his intentions to throw stones at unsuspecting zoo visitors by curbing his aggressive displays so as to reduce clues to immediate intent, and to build clumps of hay on the perimeter of his enclosure to hide caches of stones, ready for the next onslaught. It clearly seems that he has some degree of foresight and planning or the future, rather similar to the behaviour of the crows that I mentioned in CLEVER CORVIDS where they provisioned for a future breakfast by caching food from the night before only if they had been treated in a curmudgeonly fashion the day before. The question, as ever, with these studies, is what degree of theory of mind the chimp needs to be able to enact such strategies. It is not necessary for him to be thinking "I will hide the stones here because they will not think that the hay is hiding missiles" thereby profiting from the human visitors' false state of knowledge.
Because the paper is published in PLoS 1 it is freely available for those who want to read in full. The URL is:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036782
Otherwise a good precis of the research can be accessed here:
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=120108&CultureCode=en
Are we humans simply remodelled apes? Chimps with a tweak? Is the difference between our genomes so minuscule it justifies the argument that our cognition and behaviour must also differ from chimps by barely a whisker? If “chimps are us” should we grant them human rights? Or is this one of the biggest fallacies in the study of evolution? NOT A CHIMP argues that these similarities have been grossly over-exaggerated - we should keep chimps at arm’s length. Are humans cognitively unique after all?
Friday, 11 May 2012
Tuesday, 8 May 2012
Psychopathy linked to specific structural abnormalities in the social brain
In the chapter INSIDE THE BRAIN in NOT A CHIMP I detail significant anatomical and cell differences between humans and chimps relating to parts of the brain responsible for social cognition: the so-called 'social brain'. Here, Nigel Blackwood, from King's College, London, reveals results from MRI studies of prisoners with the 'cold' or psychopathic form of anti-social personality disorder and shows structural abnormalities in parts of the prefrontal cortex and the temporal pole. he claims this is the first detailed study to relate psychopathy to deficits in the 'social brain' .http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-psychopathy-linked-specific-abnormalities-brain.html