Pharyngula

Posted by: ice9 | October 17, 2009 11:39 AM

God clearly has instilled those small, hairy, apelike people with moral sense and a deep reverence for life.

ice9

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | October 17, 2009 11:43 AM

Looks like they are paying their last respects...

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | October 17, 2009 11:50 AM

Careful! You don't want Andrew Sullivan to tell you to "chill out" again, do you? [/snark]

Are we supposed to care what sullivan thinks?

Posted by: Dave | October 17, 2009 12:10 PM

Not a regular poster here, but this makes me think directly of one of my favorite quotes/images... it's from the silverback gorilla Michael, the friend and pupil of Koko, the sign-language gorilla. Michael also learned to sign, and this was his recounting of the day his mother was killed by poachers: "Squash Meat Gorilla. Mouth-Tooth. Cry Sharp-Noise Loud! Bad, think-trouble, look face. Cut/neck Lip(girl) Hole." Wikipedia "Michael_(gorilla)"

But that's OK for us to kill them... they're just animals without God-given souls.

Posted by: Lilith | October 17, 2009 12:12 PM

Wonderful photo.

I once saw a parliament of ravens gathered on a powerline that appeared to be paying their respects to a fallen comrade - a raven that had been run over - laying in the road below. As I watched, more and more birds arrived, until there were about three dozen, all perched silently looking down at the deceased. They sat there for about 5 minutes, then flew away in all directions.

Posted by: aratina cage | October 17, 2009 12:14 PM

Are we supposed to care what sullivan thinks? -MAJeff

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | October 17, 2009 12:19 PM

No. Sorry, I didn't mean it like that. It was a cheap shot at the guy if he happens to read the comments.

Mine too. Can't stand that bell curve publishing, let's give Nancy McCaughey space because her lies are "interesting," "Brothers welcome" wanker.

Posted by: Quidam | October 17, 2009 12:49 PM

While it is a touching picture, we should be cautious of over anthropomorphism.

The origin of the picture is here

When we brought her to the grave site, they asked to see her again, so I took her body close for them to see her a final time. None of them left until the burial was finished.

There was a large crowd of humans there, something important was happening, I'm sure all the local animals were watching too and also went away when everyone left.

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | October 17, 2009 12:54 PM

Dude, those are CHIMPANZEES. They are all just wondering how he'll taste and whether those humans have a decent knife in their pockets.

Was that an attempt at humor or just a display of ignorance?

Posted by: Damon B. | October 17, 2009 1:02 PM

Chimpanzees are brutal, violent, unpredictable opportunists that would just as quickly rip you to shreds as comfort you.

They are more like us than most people imagine.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/PbW94bQ7hfDDpgZIW3U_hMjFlIlrQRqxDkwdPxjeJX9Bt9yQZ6yJi6Qwhij8ldlG#35d13 | October 17, 2009 1:33 PM

Let the dead bury the dead

It is truly comforting to trace my lineage back to a common chimp-human ancestor and not to the “first” Adam. Today's chimps do not demonstrate any religious perversions of their nature:

They do not pray (though they beg). They do not have rituals (though they play). They do not indulge in theology (since they can’t).

Humans were not thrown out of Eden; they walked upright out of it.

anti_supernaturalist

Posted by: skeptical | October 17, 2009 1:46 PM

I wonder if they're confused by the burial. Do you think they consider their human caretakers to be burying a sleeping friend? Are we unwittingly fueling the chimpanzee uprising?

Posted by: Ibis3 | October 17, 2009 2:08 PM

I think the constant warning against anthropomorphism really stems from a denial of our animal nature. Somehow we're thought to be 'more highly evolved' or 'of a different order' than other animals--the notion being a direct descendant of Adam with his dominion over the Earth. In fact, as any objective observer of non-human animals will observe, with self-awareness comes emotion, and with life in social groups comes empathy. The more intelligent and social a species is, the more those qualities will manifest. That's not anthropomorphizing, it's just looking at other animals without the 'human superiority' glasses on.

Posted by: Hank Fox | October 17, 2009 2:32 PM

"Anthropomorphism" probably arrived in our language at a time when it was common knowledge that humans and other animals had nothing in common, having been poofed into existence by separate acts of creation.

The hazard in using the word is that you'll neglect to notice that a lot of "human" traits are not human traits at all, but descendant traits that arose in earlier ancestors.

For instance, your elbow isn't a human elbow, it's an elbow handed down from as far back as amphibians.

Ditto for a lot of our mental traits -- they're not ALL specifically human. For instance, to me it seems silly to think that the feelings of curiosity, fear, lust, hunger, or even affection, are specific to us. Some of those things go back as far as reptiles. Certainly they’re common enough that you can see them in dogs.

I doubt that early man pioneered feelings of sadness -- or even the understanding of death -- out of thin air.

If he didn't, it's not anthropomorphism to look at this group of chimps and see the possibility of sadness or grief reflected in those faces and postures.

Posted by: Ed Darrell | October 17, 2009 2:36 PM

Fouts relates the story of one of the chimp subjects of the Washoe project who was taken to church by her adoptive human family. Eventually she asked to be baptized, and the local priest (I think I got the title right) agreed.

Chimps can be every bit as emotional as humans. Can also be hornswoggled as humans, too.

Stiff-necked creationists who claim humans are much different from other animals tend to get quite agitated at the story of the baptized chimp. God alone knows why, and He ain't talking to them.

Posted by: Ubi Dubium | October 17, 2009 2:44 PM

The fence in the photo bothers me. There are the humans, burying the chimp, and shutting the other chimps out, pushing them back to a distance. Why do this (unless they have had bad experiences with funerals in the past)? I hope that they let all the other chimps spend some time with the body, to have some time to say goodbye. And perhaps they should have the few chimps that were the closest family members or friends of Dorothy accompany them and attend the burial. There behind the fence are our closest cousins, acting very much like we do on such occasions; I hope that we can at least accord them the respect they deserve.

Posted by: Tammy | October 17, 2009 3:10 PM

Actually My original point, anthropomorphic though it may have been was simply to point out how very similar we are... and how it seems to highlight one more reason to believe in evolution. WE are ANIMALS, and those particular animals are far more HUMAN than some Homo Sapiens I know.

Posted by: Thorne | October 17, 2009 3:38 PM

Let's face it, chimpanzees share something like 96-98% of our DNA. They are our close cousins. And they are intelligent, beyond any doubt. It's a different kind of intelligence from ours, perhaps, but it is there, and anyone with an open mind can see it.

Posted by: shaunotd | October 17, 2009 4:26 PM

@Steve #16

I've often seen "parliament" listed in dictionaries as referring to crows, rooks and ravens, but only rarely owls.

Of course, there are also respectable sources that insist a gathering of bankers is properly referred to as a 'wunch'. It's possible to take trivia too seriously ;-)

Posted by: Outlaw | October 17, 2009 5:31 PM

I took a closer look at the photo and noticed that most of the chips appeared to be puckering their lips just slightly. I looked up the gesture to find its meaning. All the sites I visited said lip-puckering in chimps is a sign of worry or confusion.

There you have it. They're worried about their friend and confused about why she's not moving (and probably where the zoo keepers are taking her). Sounds like the response you'd expect from a human child.

Posted by: amphiox | October 17, 2009 6:15 PM

Well, if you think about it, we identify and quantify emotions in other people by anthropomorphising. In other words we compare their behaviors with our own and assume that the same behaviors map onto the same inner mental states as our own - we try to simulate their thoughts with our own, and assume that because we are the same species with essentially the same brain, our simulation will be accurate. And one of the most important behaviors we use, of course, is the other person telling us explicitly how they feel.

But even with other humans, in our day-to-day dealings with other people, we can be frequently wrong, even when they are appearing to directly tell us how they feel.

We can assume that the closer related a species is to us, the more likely the use of anthropomorphism in assessing their emotional states will be accurate, but given its unreliability even in accurately determining the emotions of other humans, the caution against anthropomorphism seems justified to me.

We've diverged for some six million years with chimpanzees, and over that span of time our respective brains is among the traits that have changed the most. Have we evolved mental states that they do not possess? Have they?

The thing is, we have no other reliable method of determining another organisms emotional state. Objective measures like physiological reactions and brain scans are at present not specific enough. We can most certainly be confident that many non-human species will have something akin to what we call emotions in ourselves, and we can be quite confident that many of these emotional states will be shared, but we can be equally suspicious that some states will not be shared, and that among the ones that are shared, the degree of overlap will vary.

To me, trying to determine emotions in non-human species right now is pretty much akin to trying to imagine alien life. In both cases we are trying to extrapolate hypotheses based on a pre-existing data set of one. I don't think either line of inquiry is necessarily invalidated by this, but our assumptions in both instances at this preliminary stage should be viewed with the appropriate caution.

Posted by: justagreenie | October 17, 2009 6:32 PM

What a terrible picture. A pity the killers of the great apes in Africa and south east Asia can't see it, but they wouldn't care anyway.

I have no doubt (from considerable personal observation) that horses, dogs and sheep all grieve. I strongly suspect that some birds including parrots also recognise death and grieve for loss. The idea that they don't seems to me another case of belief that humans have superiority and domination over all the rest of the animal world (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/94514/I_see_dead_people.html), a belief it seems that is as strong among the fundamentally religious as among some biologists.

I have written here http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/76890/Through_the_Looking_Glass.html about the way "anthropomorphism" is knocked out of biology students in the name of objectivity and the harmful consequences this has had for conservation.

Posted by: Uncephalized | October 17, 2009 6:50 PM

How timely.

I just finished reading "Our Inner Ape" by Frans de Waal, so this doesn't surprise me a bit. Apparently chimps and bonobos are brimful of what we like to consider uniquely human qualities.

Posted by: Kel, OM | October 17, 2009 7:09 PM

Wow, so incredibly sad. Stupid anthropomorphic brain.

Posted by: Quidam | October 17, 2009 7:27 PM

Ibis #33

Why are you putting 'human behaviour' on one side of a great divide and 'animals doing "nice" things' on the other? (When they're doing 'nice' things), humans are behaving as animals, so why can't chimps doing 'nice' things be behaving as animals too? It seems like you want (need?) to set human behaviour in a special category as if we're somehow fundamentally distinct from the rest of nature

Boy you do read a lot into things, imagining what I 'need' to think.

Sure chimps can do 'nice' things and can and do have very similar behaviours and characteristics to humans. However I caution against attributing human like motives to behaviours with little or no evidence simply because it reinforces a nice story. It isn't scientific, it's story telling.

What is more interesting is to see how chimps treat the death of one of their own when humans are absent. But if they start eating the deceased we shouldn't read too much into it either. Humans vary widely in how we treat each other and treat our dead, I expect chimps do too. Chimps can be loving and caring and they can hunt and eat each other too.

Let's not get too misty eyed when they get interested in what some humans are doing with a dead chimp.

Posted by: butterflyfishhm | October 17, 2009 8:43 PM

I caution against attributing human like motives to behaviours with little or no evidence simply because it reinforces a nice story.

Why? What great massive danger is there in thinking "boy, that chimp looks sad. Maybe he's actually sad."

Let's not get too misty eyed when they get interested in what some humans are doing with a dead chimp.

And again, I ask why?

Posted by: JohnM | October 17, 2009 9:14 PM

#16
It's a parliament of Rooks - not owls. Goodness knows how San Diego Zoo got it so wrong.

Posted by: Gerry L | October 17, 2009 9:34 PM

Dorothy in the photo is not a "dead chimp" to the onlookers. She is one of their community. Chimps learn about death the same way we do -- or the way we used to -- by observing it.

More and more, zoos and sanctuaries are allowing their chimpanzees to have a chance to spend time with deceased companions. If an individual dies while undergoing a medical intervention, the body may be returned to the holding area where the others can come in and "say goodbye" in their own way. They react differently, sometimes emotionally, sometimes calmly, maybe a combination.

Last month we experienced the sudden loss of a chimpanzee in a group that has been together for decades. All of us, humans and chimps, are going through stages of grief at our own pace. Although we can't say what those stages are for the chimps, they are adjusting to a changed community and have been quite subdued.

Posted by: cyan | October 17, 2009 9:59 PM

compare photos of human expressions in similar circumstances to these chimp expressions, without bias of human clothing and other human cultural accoutrements:

look at normal human/chimp body stance, posture, facial expression vs when viewing a formerly interactive member of the community now dead

Posted by: deadman_932 | October 18, 2009 1:14 AM

Hamai, Miya, Toshisada Nishida, Hiroyuki Takasaki and Linda A. Turner (1995) New records of within-group infanticide and cannibalism in wild chimpanzees. Primates, 33: 151-162.

Kawanaka, K., (1981). Infanticide and cannibalism in chimpanzees, with special reference to the newly observed case in the Mahale Mountains.Afr. Study Monogr., 1: 69–99.

Murray, Carson M. (2007) New Case of Intragroup Infanticide in the Chimpanzees of Gombe National Park. International Journal of Primatology, 28: 21-37

Nishida, T. and K. Kawanaka, (1985). Within-group cannibalism by adult male chimpanzees.Primates, 26: 274–284
Norikoshi, Kohshi (1982) One observed case of cannibalism among wild chimpanzees of the Mahale mountains. Primates, 23: 66-74

Suzuki, A. (1971). Carnivority and cannibalism observed among forest-living chimpanzees. J. Anthropol. Soc. Nippon 79: 30–48.

Takahata, Y., (1985). Adult male chimpanzees kill and eat a male newborn infant: Newly observed intragroup infanticide and cannibalism in Mahale National Park, Tanzania.Folia Primatol., 44: 161–170.

Watts, David P. (2002) New cases of inter-community infanticide by Male Chimpanzees at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda. Primates 43(4)

Watts, David P. (1994) Infanticide and cannibalism by male chimpanzees at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda. Primates 41(4)

---------------------------------

Just sayin'.

I'm not sure what to make of that photo, though. Suzuki was the first to record cannibalism in chimps. I haven't found any instances of cannibalism of animals that died a natural death, just those that are killed. I dunno about the odds of them eating that, too.

I'd like to be able to say otherwise, but, hey. Chimps will often share the meat of the dead, though (both in intragroup and intergroup cannibalism). Meat's meat, I suppose. Humans almost certainly engage in it, so who am I to deny chimps the right to a tasty treat? (No offense, Rev.BDC)

Posted by: aerie | October 18, 2009 3:21 AM

Quidam,

You deny it, but this seems a lot like the 'ol human need to feel superior. Your post screams "I didn't come from no chimpanzee". Not to mention plain old boorish machismo. What are you afraid of? Afraid of looking vulnerable? or showing that you may possess an oz of sensitivity?

It's possible to be sensitive to animals and still retain your manhood. In fact, there's nothing hotter than a man who will defend & care for the vulnerable among us. THAT is a real MAN. He knows when to rescue a starving puppy & when to shoot an attacking dog.

And frankly YOU are denying the evidence of 98% shared DNA, personal experience, our own interactions w/ animals, their unique way of communicating with us, the things observed & documented by researchers who lived with them for years, I could go on. But I sense you are being willfully ignorant. You're not using your reasoning cap.

Chimps may surpass us on the evolutionary scale and make humans look like fish in a fishbowl. But that's only my personal hypothesis. Evolution is a continual process.

Posted by: Michael Kingsford Gray | October 18, 2009 4:58 AM

They are all thinking:
"She owes me two bananas and 37 minutes grooming!
Yeah Ogg, I know that 37 minutes is nit-picking..."

Posted by: Al | October 18, 2009 7:03 AM

Just to make the point that I think we have more in common with a lot of creatures than we realize, four or five years ago I saw behaviour I never expected from fish. I had had one goldfish in an aquarium for a while (usual story - child wants fish, gets fish, is fascinated for a day, daddy looks after fish until fish or daddy dies). So we were given another fish that someone didn't want and I thought company for my fish would be good. This new fish, when put into the aquarium seemed very agitated, darting around, and knocking into the glass sides. I would say "panicking" wouldn't be too strong a term. I can't remember how long this happened for, maybe just a minute or so. Now I have no doubt that the old fish understood exactly how the new fish felt, because it swam straight up to it and positioned itself shoulder-to-shoulder as it were, which looked to me exactly like it was communicating, "Here I am - it's OK - nothing to worry about." and almost instantly the new fish calmed down. They just stayed swimming quietly side by side for some time, until the new fish was happy to explore by itself, and I found it quite amazing. I felt I learnt something quite extraordinary that day, about the capabilities of even a fish's mind. (They're still together, but now they just get on like we expect fish to.)

Posted by: gettingfree | October 18, 2009 9:30 AM

We have all heard things like this...

"One study at UCLA indicated that up to 93 percent of communication effectiveness is determined by nonverbal cues."

And I myself have seen this, for example, I have had many times when I know what my husband is going to say or ask about because I can see in his face, etc, before he says a word.

Why do people think we can't be reading real expressions from the face of a chimp just because we can't talk to them and confirm it? I think when we see sadness on the face of a chimp we can trust that we are reading that nonverbal communication as accurately as we do when we read sadness on the face of a human because nonverbal communication is mostly what we do.

Posted by: Eonir | October 18, 2009 1:23 PM

Well, there are some animals that'd think: "mmm... yummy".

Posted by: Gerry L | October 18, 2009 3:11 PM

Just curious. How many people commenting on this story actually have any experience working with or observing great apes? And I don't mean occasional trips to the zoo.

Most of what I have been reading in the comments seems to be pure speculation or "I saw this paper."

Posted by: sammywol | October 18, 2009 6:31 PM

Yes the language in the article comes across as anthropomorphic and sentimental but the picture is nonetheless remarkable in the unity, attention and stillness it conveys. Video would be better admittedly. I find excessive anthropomorphism irritating but i find the obverse, the pseudo rational assertion that until we can 'prove' empirically that animals have emotions that it is somehow wrong to empathize with them, to be chilling.

As for Gerry L's point at #72 probably the spokesperson here who has the most experience working with great apes is the one who wrote the sentimental and anthropomorphic description in the article. REad into that what you will.

And much as I would love to actually make this a conversation once comment registration goes back on I'll be locked out of the dumbass system again so bye.

Posted by: Phoenix Aquua | October 28, 2009 11:37 AM

God instilled morals in apes? Are you kidding me?

Ignorance prevails!

Animals are not tainted by the word of God...thank goodness!

otherwise, animals would wage war against each other!

Remember, God told George Bush to invade Iraq and Afghanistan....also he told our soldiers to kill and rape the people.

Morals....are you f-ing kidding.

Stupidity prevails.

Hundredth Monkey effect........check out my blog and learn!

Goodbye Dorothy, you will be missed. Be happy you are longer in this physical plane of existence...where hatred, fear, and false morals are proceeded wars, famines, floods and quakes. Man wants chaos. In fact, he's gotta have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread. We're irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It's in all of us. We revel in it.

Morals...laughable...