Great Apes

Sexy Beasts at Seed Magazine

emjohnson — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 06:00:00 +0000

Sexy Beasts at Seed Magazine

Author's Note: The following is an excerpt from my review of Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. For additional information see my posts Reexamining Ardipithecus ramidus in Light of Human Origins, Those Cheating Testicles, or Who's Your Baby? as well as Helen's Lament and the Origins of Forbidden Love. Christopher Ryan also blogs at Psychology Today.

When we think of the first swinger parties most of us imagine 1970s counter-culture, we don't picture Top Gun fighter pilots in World War II. Yet, according to researchers Joan and Dwight Dixon, it was on military bases that "partner swapping" first originated in the United States. As the group with the highest casualty rate during the war, these elite pilots and their wives "shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual" and had an unspoken agreement to care for one another if a woman's husband didn't make it back home. Like the sexy apes known as bonobos, this kind of open sexuality served a social function that provided a way to relieve stress and form long-lasting bonds.

For the husband and wife team Christopher Ryan and Cacilda JethÃ¡ in their new book Sex At Dawn, this example is one of many that suggests the human species did not evolve in monogamous, nuclear families but rather in small, intimate groups where "most mature individuals would have had several ongoing sexual relationships at any given time." We are the descendants of these multimale-multifemale mating groups and, even though we've constructed a radically different society from our hunter-gatherer forebears, the behavioral and psychological traits our species evolved in the distant past still manifest themselves today. Ryan, a psychologist, and JethÃ¡, a psychiatrist, argue that understanding human sexual evolution this way helps to explain our species' unique creativity inside (as well as outside) the marriage bed. It may also shed light on why fidelity has been such a persistent problem for both men and women throughout recorded history.

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Interesting...a group of people I hung out with in my mid 20s all seemed to have slept with one another at some point (they had known each other since college). "Jane" went out with "Jeff" for a year but then broke up and Jane slept with "Jack" and Jeff went out with "Joan" for awhile and then slept with "Jenny" etc. It all seemed really incestuous and I only dated one person from the group. Currently everyone is in their late 30s, we are all still friends and have all married people from the outside and have started families, and, as far as I know, all the sleeping around has stopped. Everybody is still pretty close and get together regulary for family oriented parties. This research could explain a lot.

Anthropology, Primatology, and the Definition of Culture: Reply to Sperber

emjohnson — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 06:30:00 +0000

Anthropology, Primatology, and the Definition of Culture: Reply to Sperber

Chimpanzees have culture (or not) depending on your definition.
Image: Irish Wildcat / Creative Commons

Author's Note: The following is an expansion on my reply to anthropologist Dan Sperber on the PLoS ONE article "Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees."

Culture is like art or pornography, it's hard for people to define but everyone knows it when they see it. Cultural anthropologists have long struggled to develop a consistent definition of the very thing that they study, a problem that has resulted in bitter arguments between scholars that, to an outsider, may seem as esoteric as church doctrinal disputes over how many angels can sit upon the point of a needle.

In his 1959 book The Evolution of Culture anthropologist Leslie White famously defined culture as "the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism." His goal was to bring some consistency to a field that had 164 separate definitions of "culture" being used interchangeably in the anthropological literature (which, predictably, made cross-cultural comparisons challenging at best). Today, this view has expanded beyond the human animal and a widely accepted definition is from Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd's celebrated work Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution:

Culture is information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission.

By information, we mean any kind of mental state, conscious or not, that is
acquired or modified by social learning, and affects behavior.

Earlier I reported on a new study in PLoS ONE by Victoria Horner, Darby Proctor, Kristin E. Bonnie, Andrew Whiten, and Frans de Waal that found chimpanzees will adopt novel behaviors after watching them performed by high-ranking members of their group. The authors concluded that these findings demonstrate "prestige-based cultural transmission" for the first time in nonhuman animals. Their results were consistent with Richerson and Boyd's definition of culture as well as their argument that:

[N]atural selection has shaped the psychology of social learning so that we are predisposed to imitate people with prestige and material well-being. . . [M]any phenomena, ranging from maladaptive fads and fashions to group-functional religious beliefs to symbolically marked boundaries between groups, might result from the properties of prestige bias.

However, French anthropologist Dan Sperber (Research Director at the Jean Nicod Institute, CNRS and 2009 recipient of the Claude Levi-Strauss Prize in Social Science) has recently challenged these findings in chimpanzees and insists that it does not represent cultural transmission at all. In a critique, following from his work in linguistic anthropology, he suggests that humans alone are capable of culture. However, just like in anthropology's past, his conclusions rest on the definition that he prefers to use.

Responding to the study at PLoS ONE Sperber states:

Talking of prestige among the chimpanzees, who don't gossip about one another, extends the idea of prestige to that of being seen as superior. This then supports the prestige bias thesis only if, in that thesis, prestige does not mean more than this. In other words what it supports is at best a diluted thesis where the ordinary or the sociological notion of prestige plays no role at all.

In other words, because chimpanzees don't use language to gossip about one another, it doesn't fit the definition of prestige and therefore isn't a genuine example of cultural transmission. Sperber then goes on to state that the variables of age and rank were not properly accounted for and argues that the third criteria of prestige in this study (chimps with previous experience introducing novel behaviors) brings with it a "risk of circularity":

We don't know what factor had helped an individual chimp to introduce novel behaviors in the past (imagine, for the sake of argument that it was something about her smell), and so it can be that same factor that explains her doing it successfully again.

There are a number of things wrong with this argument (some of which Horner et al. have responded to). First off, Sperber's insistence that prestige is limited to populations who "gossip about one another" (i.e. humans) doesn't take into account the amount of information that can be conveyed non-verbally. Chimpanzees are highly social and utilize grooming in much the same way humans use conversation. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar measured the number of individuals in the average human clique and estimated that human gossip was almost three times as efficient a bonding mechanism as chimpanzee grooming (he later expanded this hypothesis in his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language). His argument was that human gossip evolved out of the same social utility that grooming served in our common ancestors with chimpanzees. However, in a reanalysis of Dunbar's data by Japanese primatologist Michio Nakamura, he estimated that:

Chimpanzees can obtain about the same efficiency as humans in terms of quantity of social interactions because their grooming is often mutual and polyadic [involving three or more individuals].

In other words, the amount of social bonding that Sperber insists can only occur through gossip can be achieved nearly as well through nonverbal grooming behavior.

Second, it's difficult to understand how Sperber could object that Horner et al. didn't separate the variables of age and rank considering that research on prestige in human societies doesn't separate these variables either. Both are intertwined in the anthropological literature and contribute to the prestige of an individual within a given society.

For example, anthropologist Allyn Stearman wrote of the YuquÃ foragers in eastern Bolivia:

The YuquÃ concept of leadership and prestige . . . consists of (1) being saya [upper caste], (2) being a good hunter and therefore provider of meat to the band, (3) having senior status based on age (but only relative to the ages of the rest of the band), and (4) possessing a certain charisma in terms of an aggressive personality and ability to deal with peers.

Elsie Begler, in her analysis of egalitarian societies, likewise found age and rank to be intertwined:

Age almost invariably provides the basis for a system of ranked statuses, whether appearing as formal age-grades, or simply being recognized informally as stages through which a person passes in the course of his/her life.

Finally, Joe Henrich and Francisco Gil-White, the same researchers cited by Horner et al. as an example of denying prestige in nonhuman animals, likewise linked age and rank together in their definition:

Age is a proxy for skill/knowledge/success; the longer someone has lived, the more and better skills/knowledge he/she has likely accumulated. Simply living longer is a complex "skill" with acquirable components. Deference toward elders allows proximity and thereby promotes the acquisition of useful information. This reasoning predicts a general correlation between age and prestige, and also that elderly individuals will maintain their status well past their prime.

If Sperber accepts this multifaceted understanding of prestige for human societies it would be hypocritical to object when the same standard is applied to nonhumans.

Furthermore, the suggestion that there was "circularity" in the study because Model A in both groups had previously been observed introducing novel behaviors can't be taken as a serious objection. The purpose of the experiment was to determine whether novel behaviors were adopted because of prestige or because they were more effective. In the experiment both high-ranking Model A and low-ranking Model B received a food reward after placing a token in their respective containers, so the only reason to follow one versus the other was the social prestige of the model. What Sperber calls introducing bias was actually the variable the researchers were interested in studying.

These methodological critiques suggest that Sperber may not have a great deal of familiarity with primates or the primate literature. An additional example of this is his suggestion that "something about her smell" may have influenced the decision to follow Model A versus Model B. Atsushi Matsui and colleages have recently shown that there are no significant differences in the number of functional olfactory receptor genes between marmosets, macaques, and the hominoids (see Jerry Coyne's blog for a review). Humans and chimpanzees have nearly identical numbers of intact or truncated OR genes (396 in humans compared to 399 in chimps) and both species use olfaction in largely the same way. Furthermore, as Horner et al. reported, there were no threat displays by the chimpanzee models nor unusual vocalizations during the experiment that would have influenced other members of the group. The researchers further controlled for the color and appearance of the containers by using two separate groups and reversing the container used in each. In both groups it was the prestigious chimp alone who influenced others to follow her lead.

Sperber has shown this unfamiliarity with the nonhuman literature before. In his critique of Richerson and Boyd's Not By Genes Alone he made this rather shocking claim:

In non-human animals, relatively little information if any is acquired by social learning. Humans on the other hand owe much of their information to others.

This is profoundly wrong. There isn't space to do an adequate literature review of the many examples of social learning in nonhuman animals (but see the edited volume Social Learning in Animals for an excellent overview). However considering that Sperber's area of expertise is cultural linguistics I will cite a few sources that he ought to be made aware of: "Vocal Learning in Mammals" (Janik and Slater, 1998), "The Evolution of Vocal Learning Systems in Birds" (Farries and Perkel, 1997), "Social Communication in Whales and Dolphins" (Tyack, 2009), "The Different Roles of Social Learning in Vocal Communication" (Janik and Slater, 2000), "Social Processes in Communication and Cognition in Callitrichid Monkeys: A Review" (Snowdon, 2001), "How Can We Know the Dancer From the Dance?: The Dynamic Nature of African Great Ape Social Communication" (King, 2003), "Ethological Studies of Chimpanzee Vocal Behavior" (Mitani and Wrangham, 1996), "Geographic Variation in the Calls of Wild Chimpanzees: A Reassessment" (Mitani, Hunley, and Murdoch, 1999), and "Dialects in Wild Chimpanzees?" (Mitani et al., 2005). This is, of course, just a partial sample of studies that identified social learning in vocal communication. Including other forms of social behavior would result in a great deal more.

Given all of this, I don't think the primary disagreement Sperber had with Horner et al.'s paper was its methodology. Rather, I suspect that his objection comes from the definition of culture that he prefers and the kind of cultural anthropology that he studies. Sperber is perhaps best known for his work with linguist Deirdre Wilson on the mechanisms of communication, what he refers to as the "epidemiology of representations." These microprocesses involve the subtleties of human language that, by definition, would exclude any species that doesn't have the linguistic complexity of humans.

It is from this perspective that he challenged the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior" presented by Richerson and Boyd and insisted that:

To explain culture so understood, the object of study must be the overall flow of information among humans, through its mental and public implementations; the question that must be answered is what causes some of [sic] causal chains to extend more than others in time and space and to stabilize better than others the contents they vehiculate. For this, the study of culture must be embedded in a more general epidemiology of representations and practices that attends--as does medical epidemiology--to the complexities of both individual and ecological mechanisms.

I admire a good deal of what Sperber has to offer in seeking to understand the complexities of human culture (and we share a common objection to Richard Dawkins' meme theory), but in this case he appears to be using an unnecessarily narrow definition that would restrict any species but humans from demonstrating cultural behavior.

References:

Horner, V., Proctor, D., Bonnie, K., Whiten, A., & de Waal, F. (2010). Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees PLoS ONE, 5 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010625

Richerson, P. & Boyd, R. (2005). Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Dunbar, R., Duncan, N., & Nettle, D. (1995). Size and Structure of Freely Forming Conversational Groups Human Nature, 6 (1), 67-78. DOI: 10.1007/BF02734136

Nakamura, M. (2000). Is Human Conversation More Efficient Than Chimpanzee Grooming? Human Nature, 11 (3), 281-297. DOI: 10.1007/s12110-000-1014-2

Stearman, A. (1989). YuquÃ Foragers in the Bolivian Amazon: Subsistence Strategies, Prestige, and Leadership in an Acculturating Society Journal of Anthropological Research, 45 (2), 219-244. Permalink

Begler, E. (1978). Sex, Status, and Authority in Egalitarian Society American Anthropologist, 80 (3), 571-588. Permalink

Henrich, J. (2001). The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefits of Cultural Transmission Evolution and Human Behavior, 22 (3), 165-196. DOI: 10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00071-4

Matsui, A., Go, Y., & Niimura, Y. (2010). Degeneration of Olfactory Receptor Gene Repertories in Primates: No Direct Link to Full Trichromatic Vision Molecular Biology and Evolution, 27 (5), 1192-1200. DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msq003

Sperber, D. & ClaidiÃ¨re, N. (2008). Defining and Explaining Culture (Comments on Richerson and Boyd, Not By Genes Alone) Biology and Philosophy 23, 283-292. Permalink

emjohnson Tue, 06/15/2010 - 02:30

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Just like there is no value in defining locomotion to include humans walking, fish swimming, and frogs hopping so there is no value in doing the same thing for culture.

ds: no, it's completely different. Human locomotion is a variation on a theme -- the same gene-clusters, the same spinal circuits, homologous tissues all control different vertebrate forms of locomotion. They're all perfectly analogical with each other.

Human communication, however, is symbolic in a way that few other animals are capable of. The wealth of communication, the total amount of information, the subtlety of the information, the forms, the spatial and temporal displacement possible, the levels of negation, recursion and meta-communication...

No other animal has Prinicipia Mathematica. There is a great deal of value in not flattening everything into "more of the same" when there are important differences. There is no chimp internet, there is no chimp Vatican, there is no chimp Picasso, there is no chimp Godel. This is where we differ -- it's the only really important way we differ. Everything else is variations on a theme -- but this, culture, is why we live everywhere, eat everything, and destroy everything, in a way unparalleled in the biological record.

I think your interesting critique is based on a misunderstanding.

Sperber does not deny the existence of chimpanzee cultures. He just pointed out that Horner et al.'s evidence does not show that cultural transmission in chimps is biased by the model's prestige - a quite different issue.

Though animal cultures exist, non-human animals are not as dependent on their culture for their survival as we are on our cultures. Most animals are able to survive without receiving information from their conspecifics, we can't. True, some animals rely heavily on cultural information for specific tasks, but none is so generally indebted to culture as we are. There are many genuine and interesting observations of social learning in animals, enough to establish without a doubt the existence od animal social learning. But a species' reliance on culture cannot be measured by the number of publications documenting social learning inside that species.

To sum it up :

Sperber does not deny that animals have culture. In his Plos comment, he said the evidence for a prestige bias in chimps is weak.

In the rest of his work, he says that humans rely on their culture much more than other animals do. The issue is one of impact, not one of existence.

"..animal cultures exist, non-human animals are not as dependent on their culture for their survival as we are on our cultures. Most animals are able to survive without receiving information from their conspecifics, we can't"

@Olivier Morin
Disagree totally here. culture is more like an addiction in this instance, not a necessity. With our superior abilities we can live outside the constraints of culture. Granted doing your own dentistry is difficult, but not impossible. You're confusing wants with needs and won't with can't.

Is "proto-culture" illustrated by the difference between turtles laying eggs & swimming away, and crows building nests & "teaching" the babies not to peck each others' eyes out?
Is "culture" not a matter of degree but of a unique response to environs?
Does Sperber understand the difference between "prestige" & "notoriety"?
My assessment of the experiment- and its indications- would be judged by the response of the "prestigious" (A-group) chimp to the equally (or better) performing B-group individual. (Maybe Culture depends upon the existence of sarcasm...) ^..^

>> "Most animals are able to survive without receiving information from their conspecifics, we can't ..."

This is in fact not true. Try to release a home-raised chimp or wolf or killer whale, such as Keiko, and see what happens (Keikio tried to survive begging for food from humans). Animals need many skills to survive and most of these are acquired from others, such as what to eat, and what predators to fear (and which ones to ignore or attack). This is why successful re-introductions of captive animals to the wild are so rare -- those that succeed relied on lots of behavioral preparation.

I'd say most smart social animals are as culture-dependent as us humans.

As for Sperber's comments, little is to be added to Eric's blog and to our exchange with Sperber on the PLOS-One website: Sperber believes our evidence is weak, whereas in fact we feel it is the other way around. We have no idea what kind of evidence cultural anthropologists bring to the table. This field seems to get by without any empirical evidence, let alone controlled experimentation.

Once anthropologists start collecting the sort of data we collect on primates, we can compare notes and see if there are substantial differences. But until then anthropologists should think twice before asking others for evidence they themselves never produce.

To zoologists, Anthropology sometimes seems almost comically self-constrained. The fact that people studying the biology of nonhuman primates (interesting, btw, that you guys seem to conventionally leave off the 'nonhuman') have historically self-identified as "anthropologists" and have had their own journals, societies, conferences, etc. has seemed to really limit the perspective of many.

'Anthropologists' would do well to learn more about crows.

To Frans de Waal : again, this is all a matter of degree. I said "most animals", I did not say "all smart social animals".

There is plenty of hard empiricial evidence coming from ethnography, showing that humans' reliance on accumulated cultural traditions is important in an uncommon way.

If you are not convinced, I suggest you take the 1999 Nature paper by Whiten et. al., demonstrating the existence of chimpanzee cultures, and ask yourself : how many of these skills are absolutely indispensable to master, if a chimp is to survive ?

When you are done, take an ethnography of a human society - whichever one you want (I would suggest Thomas Gladwin's ethnography of navigators on Puluwat, or Melvin Konner's work on the !Kung - or see the last chapters of Robert Boyd and Joan Silk's handbook of human evolution, for other references). These books, by the way, are packed full with uncontroversial empirical facts, along with the occasional speculations. Then count the number of indispensable skills that are passed on culturally. I bet these will be more numerous than any chimpanzee cultural repertoire described in the Nature paper.

Or just look outside your window and count the number of things that you could hardly live without, and that you owe to cultural transmission.

To A. Smith : yes, if you are so sure of your point, do perform that dental surgery on yourself, I am curious. Who needs all these experts and doctors anyway?

Olivier Morin-
Ya do what ya gotta do. Could someone else do it better? Decidedly, but the search for better, cheaper, faster, is its own cultural slippery slope. Do we have to go there? No, you decided to go there because it gave you more dates & fresher breath at half the cost.
Quality of life is the issue, and there's a whole lot of baggage that is invented to keep everyone occupied. One good "handyman" could replace a lot. Does a handyman on some acreage constitute a culture, or is it the aberrant part of the larger picture? Just wondering.

Please note that in their 2005 book, and which was used here to draw the definition of culture, Richerson & Boyd are highly critical of culture in apes. They state that the underlying reason is weak social learning skills.

Doesn't this boil down to the (apparent) fact that for Sperber "prestige" is primarily verbal, while others are using the same word as synonymous with "status"?

From the Oxford American Dictionary:

prestige |presËtÄ zh; -ËtÄj| noun

widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements or quality : he experienced a tremendous increase in prestige following his victory.

â¢ [as adj. ] denoting something that arouses such respect or admiration : prestige wines.

Nothing verbal in that.

chris @ # 12: Nothing verbal in that.

Nope - but if prestige is something that can only be generated by "gossip", as per Sperber, the non-verbal component approaches nothingness asymptotically.

Gossip may not be neccessary:
In: Russell, Y. I. et al. (2008). "Image Scoring in Great Apes." Behavioural Processes 78(1): 108-111.
From the intro:
"âReputationâ refers to knowledge about an individualâs
typical behaviour based on knowledge of that individualâs
past behaviour (Russell, 2007). Animals learn about the typical
behaviour of others in three ways (Smith and Harper,
2004): direct reputation (personal encounters), indirect reputation (observing events as uninvolved bystander), and reported reputation (âgossipâ)."

Dan Sperber replies

I should be glad and grateful that Eric Michael Johnson is discussing my ideas on his excellent blog, Primate Diaries. Well, I would be if he did. He might have for instance discussed, or at least reported our paper: Nicolas ClaidiÃ¨re and Dan Sperber (2010) "Imitation explains the propagation, not the stability of animal culture." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277(1681): 651-659, with a topic highly relevant to his blog. He might, for that matter, have looked at the mere title of that paper and its mention of animal culture and spared himself the embarrassment of attributing to me the view that âhumans alone are capable of culture.â I have known better ever since I read John Tyler Bonnerâs The Evolution of Culture in Animals in 1983, and I have often found myself arguing against fellow anthropologists for the existence of animal culture.

Johnsonâs whole post consists in a series of misattributions and misinterpretations, followed by generous attempts to help me see the light. Regarding my comments, which Johnson misrepresents, on Darby Proctor, Kristin E. Bonnie, Andrew Whiten, and Frans de Waalâs paper, âPrestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzeesâ PLoS ONE 5(5): e10625. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010625, see my comments and replies there.

Incidentally, Johnson also misrepresent the views of J. Henrich and F. Gil-White when he says that they âlinked age and rank together in their definitionâ (my emphasis) of prestige. These authors point to the strong link between age and rank on the one hand and prestige on the other, but they define prestige in contrast to dominance ranking (the one being based on persuasion the other on force), and they make the following prediction: âprestigious individuals but not dominant ones are preferentially copied in many behavioral domains,â which would not make sense if rank was a component of prestige.

Johnson is right in pointing to the âmultifaceted understanding of prestige for human societies.â Contrary to what he says, what I do is not object to the same standard being applied to nonhumans. What I do is point out that the standard is actually not the same, (and I donât object to that either).

Johnson writes:

âSperber has shown this unfamiliarity with the nonhuman literature before. In his critique of Richerson and Boyd's Not By Genes Alone he made this rather shocking claim: âIn non-human animals, relatively little information if any is acquired by social learning. Humans on the other hand owe much of their information to others.â This is profoundly wrong.â

He then proceeds to educate me with a bibliography of texts most of which I would recommend myself. What we meant, Nicolas ClaidiÃ¨re (a biologist) and me in the article Johnson cites â and this should have been clear in the context â is that nonhuman animals acquire, relatively to humans less information from their conspecifics, and I stand by this. This is true in two senses. The sheer amount of information acquired from others is vastly greater in humans. In reading the newspaper, you acquire more information from others in an hour than most animals do in their lifetime. It is true also in the sense that the part of individual learning relative to social learning is greater in nonhumans. Among humans, we claim, individual learning heavily relies on socially transmitted conceptual tools and inferential skills, and hence is never purely individual. To a large extent, all human learning is social learning. Moreover, when we talk of animals we do not just mean primates, and other highly social mammals and birds. âAnimalsâ includes for instance a vast number of species of insects. Among insects, social learning âis currently known only from a few well-studied examples in social Hymenopteraâ (Reuven Dukas (2008) Evolutionary Biology of Insect Learning, Annual Review of Entomology, Vol. 53: 145-160). Johnson may disagree with our claim, but he had to interpret it in the most negative manner to find it âshockingâ.

Minor corrections:
-I have worked in anthropology and in linguistics, but never in cultural linguistics, which Johnson says is my âarea of expertiseâ.

-Johnson writes: âSperber is perhaps best known for his work with linguist Deirdre Wilson on the mechanisms of communication, what he refers to as the "epidemiology of representations."â In fact, In fact, we describe to our work on human communication as ârelevance theoryâ. Relevance theory is quite distinct from my work done with several other collaborators but not Deirdre Wilson on the epidemiology of representations.

For more comments and in particular a reply to Frans de Waalâs comment to Johnsonâs post, go to here at www.cognitionandculture.net

Prestigious Chimps and the Emergence of Cultural Innovation

emjohnson — Thu, 27 May 2010 06:25:00 +0000

Prestigious Chimps and the Emergence of Cultural Innovation

New research finds chimpanzees follow
prestigious models when learning new tasks.
Monika Thorpe / Creative Commons

If one were to play psychiatrist to the natural world, most human beings would be committed for our certifiable obsession with other peoples' behavior. We compulsively examine, study, appraise, size up, and scope out what those around us are doing and then gossip with others about what we've seen or heard. New ideas or behaviors are especially compelling and will often have cultural critics discussing them at length, whether they're tribal elders or the United States Congress.

Given this equal opportunity scrutiny, why is it then that only some individuals and not others become cultural innovators, serving as models for our own behavior? For example, when Benjamin Franklin adorned his rustic fur cap in France or when Tupac Shakur wore his baggy jeans on stage, they inspired widespread cultural trends that made their mark on history (by contrast, notice how few people copied Henry David Thoreau's fetching neckbeard or the, let's call it unique, style of Vanilla Ice). In societies around the globe certain influential figures, to use the concept of anthropologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, benefit from "cultural capital" because of their social prestige in a given society. This results in others being more likely to adopt any unique cultural traits that they invent. After all, if someone who is widely admired and successful adopts a new way of doing things, perhaps following their lead could make you admired and successful too?

Now, a new study in PLoS ONE by Victoria Horner, Darby Proctor, Kristin E. Bonnie, Andrew Whiten, and Frans de Waal suggests that prestige is an important factor in other primates as well. By employing a simple behavioral experiment these researchers demonstrated that chimpanzees, when given a choice between two nearly identical tasks, will choose the one they previously witnessed a high-ranking member of the troop perform.

It has long been assumed that humans are the only species in which prestige has an influence on the behavior of others in a social group. To cite just one example, anthropologist Francisco Gil-White and economist Joe Henrich wrote in their 2001 paper "The Evolution of Prestige" (pdf) that:

Humans appear to be the only species with prestige status. The reason why, we argue, is culture.

This argument, of course, breaks down once it's granted that nonhuman primates also possess culture. As I wrote earlier in my post Cultural Transmission in Chimpanzees (also see here for bonobos) not only is culture a common feature in our evolutionary cousins, the number of cultural traits are more frequent in some societies than others. Johan Lind and Patrik Lindenfors found that female chimps were the primary carriers of cultural innovations and those groups that had a higher number of females were more likely to have a higher number of unique cultural traits. But how did these traits get started in the first place?

To explore this question Horner and colleagues conducted a series of trials at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center's Field Station near Atlanta, Georgia. The experiment involved two separate groups of female chimpanzees as the models (n = 4) while the rest of the troop was divided between the groups as test participants (n = 10). The models were selected to have very different social ranks, such that Model A in both groups was older, held a position of high status in the troop, and had previously been observed introducing novel behaviors. In contrast, Model B was younger, held the lowest rank in the troop, and had no previous experience introducing novel behaviors. Based on these criteria, Model A held the characteristics of prestige in chimpanzee society while Model B did not.

(A) trained models retrieve a token from an experimenter standing between the receptacles outside
the enclosure fence; (B) models deposit their token into their respective receptacles; (C) a food
reward is thrown to the model by a second experimenter standing on an observation tower.

Model A and Model B were then trained to perform identical behaviors with a single variation (see figure above). In Group 1, Model A was taught to collect plastic tokens and place them in a spotted container in order to receive a food reward. In the same group, Model B was taught to deposit identical tokens into a striped container located 10 meters from the first and would also receive a food reward. In Group 2 this was reversed so that Model A used the striped container and Model B used the spotted one. The question was, would the rest of the troop follow the example of high-ranking Model A, low-ranking Model B, or would it be evenly divided since both received identical rewards?

In three experimental trials on separate days Model A and Model B each collected and deposited their token only once while the rest of the troop watched. Each participant was then allowed to copy one of the two models until all chimpanzees had accomplished the task. Group 1 and Group 2 were separate from each other and did not see either the models or the participants from the other group perform their task. The results clearly demonstrated that, in both groups, participants preferred to follow the example of the high-ranking Model A by a significant majority. These results remained consistent both between groups (p < 0.0001) as well as between individuals within groups (p < 0.05). When given the choice between two similar tasks, chimpanzees overwhelmingly chose to follow the example of the most prestigious model.

In both Group 1 and Group 2 participants were significantly more likely to follow the behavior
of high-ranking Model A to low-ranking Model B.

What this study suggests, apart from debunking yet another myth about human uniqueness, is that chimpanzees carefully observe the behavior of other members of their social group and preferentially follow the behaviors of those deemed successful within their society. Like in humans, they confer cultural capital onto certain high-ranking members and use these individuals as models for their own behavior. It's also important to emphasize that there was no evidence of coercion or threats by the high-ranking chimpanzees who modeled the behavior and there was no significant difference in the distance between participants and the behaviors of Model A or Model B. Participants merely chose to follow the cultural innovation of the more prestigious chimp.

The evolutionary benefits of such a strategy in the wild should be relatively straightforward. Those individuals that rose to positions of high social rank, whether influenced by successful gene variants or because of fortunate decisions, would have demonstrated that they had what it takes to make it in a difficult environment. Other members of the social group that followed their example would therefore have had greater potential fitness than those who weren't paying attention (or who followed the behavior of less successful individuals). Discriminating between those with obvious prestige and those of more modest ability would therefore be under strong selection pressure. In the evolution of humans, as in the evolution of chimpanzees, paying attention to the behavior of influential members of the community and hopping on board cultural trends would have been in our reproductive interests.

This doesn't mean, of course, that the individuals who invented "The Macarena" or who somehow inspired a generation to wear bell-bottoms have better genes than the rest of us. All it means is that we're predisposed to follow cultural trends set by prestigious members of society. For our ancestors this may well have been a life or death decision. Today, in our mass media landscape, these largely unconscious desires can be easily manipulated by corporations and celebrities who have nothing to offer but the cultural equivalent of junk DNA. While both chimpanzees and humans may have evolved to follow the example of prestigious innovators, such an adaptation doesn't hold the same significance when removed from the natural world. As our hypothetical evolutionary psychiatrist might well advise, being open to inspired innovations is all well and good. But in the artificial environment most of us are now committed to, it's probably not in our interest to obsessively follow the example of every lunatic who claims to be running the asylum.

Reference:

Horner, V., Proctor, D., Bonnie, K., Whiten, A., & de Waal, F. (2010). Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees PLoS ONE, 5 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010625

emjohnson Thu, 05/27/2010 - 02:25

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Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play To Reaping An Unjust Reward

emjohnson — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 06:00:00 +0000

Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play To Reaping An Unjust Reward

A new study shows that chimps sacrifice their own advantage if they earned it unfairly.
Image: Owen Booth / Creative Commons

Fairness is the basis of the social contract. As citizens we expect that when we contribute our fair share we should receive our just reward. When social benefits are handed out unequally or when prior agreements are not honored it represents a breach of trust. Based on this, Americans were justifiably outraged when, not just one, but two administrations bailed out the wealthiest institutions in the country while tens of thousands of homeowners (many of whom were victims of these same institutions) were evicted and left stranded. It smacked of favoritism, the corruption of politics by corporate money, and it was also just plain unfair. But isn't that the way the world works? Isn't it true, as we were so often told as children, that life is unfair?

The American financial tycoon Andrew Carnegie certainly thought so and today's economic elite have followed his example. In 1889 he used a perverted form of Darwinism to argue for a "law of competition" that became the cornerstone of his economic vision. His was a world in which might made right and where being too big to fail wasn't a liability, it was the key to success. In his Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie wrote that this natural law might be hard for the least among us but "it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department."

We accept and welcome therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.

In other words, his answer was yes. Life is unfair and we'd better get used to it, social contract or no social contract.

While this perspective may be common among those primates who live in the concrete jungle of Wall Street, it doesn't hold true for the natural world more generally. Darwin understood that competition was an important factor in evolution, but it wasn't the only factor. Cooperation, sympathy, and fairness were equally important features in his vision for the evolution of life. In The Descent of Man he wrote that "Those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring." By working cooperatively, by sharing resources fairly, and by ensuring that all members of society benefited, Darwin argued that early human societies would be more "fit" than those societies where members only cared about themselves. The Russian naturalist Peter Kropotkin championed this aspect of Darwin's work and argued that mutual aid was essential for understanding the evolution of social mammals as a whole. In the time of Darwin and Kropotkin the research needed to verify these claims was in its infancy, but recent work has supported this vision of the natural world. Now, a new study has added one more plank to this growing edifice of knowledge, and the view from on top suggests that life, in contrast to what Carnegie believed, may not be so unfair after all.

According to research due to be published in the journal Animal Behaviour, fairness is not only essential to the human social contract, it also plays an important role in the lives of nonhuman primates more generally. Sarah F. Brosnan and colleagues conducted a series of behavioral tests with a colony of chimpanzees housed at the University of Texas in order to find out how they would respond when faced with an unfair distribution of resources. A previous study in the journal Nature by Brosnan and Frans de Waal found that capuchin monkeys would refuse a food item when they saw that another member of their group had received a more desired item at the same time (a grape instead of a slice of cucumber). Some individuals not only rejected the food, they even threw it back into the researchers face. The monkeys seemed to recognize that something was unfair and they responded accordingly. This raised the provocative question: can the basis of the social contract be found in our evolutionary cousins?

Chimpanzees are known to be highly individualistic where food is concerned, so Brosnan and colleagues sought to determine whether these earlier results could be replicated in a more competitive species. The researchers first trained all 16 chimpanzees to exchange an inedible token for a food reward and then assessed their food preferences (it turns out that chimpanzees always prefer grapes to a similarly sized piece of carrot). In this simple cash economy they came to understand that each token was worth one reward and they eagerly handed it over to the researchers in expectation. Once all chimps had made the association individually they were brought into the testing area in pairs where they were allowed to exchange their tokens for food so that researchers could gauge their responses when in the company of a group mate.

In the first trial both chimpanzees were given the same food reward when they exchanged their token (sometimes the high-value grape, other times the low-value piece of carrot). This served as the control test and was used for comparison in the trials that followed. In the second trial, what the researchers called the Inequity Test, only one member of the pair was given a grape while the other received a carrot. In a third variation, both individuals were shown a grape at first, but were then given carrots once they handed over their token. In each trial the researchers recorded the number of times that chimpanzees refused a food item and then compared this with the control test to determine if they behaved differently when receiving a different reward.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, chimpanzees behaved the same way that capuchins did and objected if they only received a carrot when their group mate was given a delicious grape for the same price. Out of 76 trials the chimpanzees were significantly more likely to refuse a carrot in these tests compared to times where both received the same low-value food reward (p = 0.004). Likewise, when both individuals received a carrot after first being shown a grape, they were significantly more likely to refuse than in cases where no expectation of a better reward had been presented. The bottom line was that if things weren't fair a tantrum would ensue.

If this sounds eerily familiar, you're right on the mark. Parents will testify to how careful they must be to make sure that siblings are always treated equally and fairly, and chimpanzees are known to have the cognitive abilities of three-year-old children. What these results suggest then is that chimpanzees have an expectation of fairness and will protest in cases where this expectation is not met. This existed both in cases where rewards were handed out unequally and when a prior agreement was not honored.

However, chimpanzees in this study went beyond the basic tenets of the social contract and demonstrated what could be considered the foundation of social solidarity. In 95 trials chimpanzees that received a grape were significantly more likely to refuse the high-value reward when their group mate only received a carrot (p = 0.008). Even those who benefitted from inequality recognized that the situation was unfair and they refused to enjoy their own reward if it meant someone else had to suffer. As the authors reported:

We unexpectedly found that chimpanzees were more likely to refuse a high-value grape when the other chimpanzee got a lower-value carrot than when the other chimpanzee also received a grape. . . This reaction was not seen in previous studies of inequity in primates, either among chimpanzees or among capuchin monkeys.

But in comparing this simple behavior in chimpanzees to the complexities of human ethics aren't we really talking apples and oranges (or, perhaps more appropriately, carrots and grapes)? I don't think so. When we were children we wouldn't have understood that using financial derivatives to repackage subprime loans in order to resell them as AAA-rated securities was an unfair thing to do. Few of us today (including members of the commission charged with overseeing the financial services industry) can even understand that now. But we did know it was unfair when our sibling got a bigger piece of pie than we did. We began life with a general moral sense of what was fair and equitable and we built onto the framework from there. Chimpanzees, according to this study, appear to have a similar moral sense. The intricacies of what we judge to be fair or unfair would seem to have more to do with human cognitive complexity than anything intrinsically unique to our species. In other words, what we're witnessing here is a difference of degree rather than kind.

What this also suggests is that we've been swindled. The Andrew Carnegies of the world have led us to believe that they are an exception to the social contract; fairness and equality may be fine for the little people, but for masters of industry it is best to leave such quaint ideas by the wayside. But he was as wrong about this as he was about the way that evolution operates. As we move to regulate financial markets it might be wise to consider Darwin's understanding of human society and follow the lead of our ape cousins. By emphasizing cooperation and sympathy with other members of our society we stand a better chance of success than each of us working alone. But if the situation is unfair we should refuse to perpetuate it, even if that means giving up a larger share of the pie for ourselves.

For more on this topic see:

The Sacrifice of Admetus: How the Evolution of Altruism Reveals Our Noblest Qualities
Punishing Cheaters Promotes the Evolution of Cooperation
The Bonding Brain: Primate Sociality is Linked to Brain Networks for Pair Bonds
Why Chimpanzees Make Bad Suicide Bombers
The Struggle for Coexistence: Individuals, Systems and the Emergence of Cooperation

Reference:

Brosnan, S., Talbot, C., Ahlgren, M., Lambeth, S., & Schapiro, S. (2010). Mechanisms underlying responses to inequitable outcomes in chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes Animal Behaviour DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.02.019

emjohnson Thu, 04/22/2010 - 02:00

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Brain & Behavior

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I think the problem with this research and this approach to the balance of "social fairness" vs "personal greed" is that the balance point is likely contingent on the physiological state of the individual at the time of determination.

Under tremendous stress or deprivation, or the "fight or flight" state, the balance is likely to be shifted toward the "personal greed" axis.

I'd be curious to know how the chimps social status affected the grape rejection rates. Would a lower-ranking chimp who got the grape rarely accept it when a higher-ranking chimp got the carrot, or vise versa?

I'd be curious to know how the chimps social status affected the grape rejection rates.

High-ranking individuals were more likely to refuse a low-value reward and males were more likely to react to inequity than females were. But there was no significant difference reported for individuals that rejected a high-value reward unfairly.

The authors state in their study that it's unclear what the true motivations for refusing a greater reward may be and suggest that it could have been based on prosocial motivations or because they were concerned about any social repercussions that would come from accepting an unfair reward in front of their group mate. I think either option (or even both) is consistent with other studies looking at chimpanzee sociality. When we're talking about fairness in humans both certainly play a role as well. Public displays of morality often serve a social function, even though we like to flatter ourselves by saying that virtue is its own reward.

I'm not entirely convinced - the key piece of this study is that the chimps were necessarily aware that their behaviors were being watched by their partners.

We know for example that a lower ranking monkey is happy to take food when it is hidden from a higher ranking monkey behind an occluder.

We also know (e.g. Stammbach, 1988 Behavior) that a higher ranking monkey will only share food equally with a lower ranking monkey when the lower ranked individual has privileged information about how to access the food.

I'm happy to know that the authors acknowledge this limitation at the end of the paper, but I would love to see a study done where the partners don't get to watch the responses of the test subject. I bet that the effect completely goes away.

Uh oh... I feel a blog post coming on.

The search for the missing link is over. It is us.

The evolution of Communism?

In responce to Jason's comment "the key piece of this study is that the chimps were necessarily aware that their behaviors were being watched by their partners", I don't think this matters a great deal.

Certainly it would be interesting to see if this was a contributing factor, but the fact that they even feign solidarity is remarkable enough. It implies a much more sophisticated moral code, even if they do break it when the others' backs are turned. But then to be honest, that's a behavioural trait we share as well.

"In responce to Jason's comment "the key piece of this study is that the chimps were necessarily aware that their behaviors were being watched by their partners", I don't think this matters a great deal."

In my opinion, it matters: the one who received more might have attracted hostility of its pair, if this, the non-favored one, were to know of the advantage acquired by the other. This specially in cases where a chimpanzee of low ranking would receive a better reward than other of high ranking. As EMJ's post shows, the rejection of food has at least some correlation with the social ranking of individuals within pairs.

What I found most noteworthy in this study is this: other studies in this same model have already been published, and in them, as the authors admit, the finding of greatest importance in their paper - that even those who were favored had some tendency to reject the better reward when their pairs had not been treated in likemanner - was not verified, either in studies with chimpanzees or in those with capuchin monkeys. What is the reason for this: what distinguishes these chimpanzees from those of other studies? I think in two alternatives in this respect: either there was a greater variability of ranking within pairs in this study, or a higher degree of relatedness.

The best way to control for these factors is that of making pairs with unrelated individuals of equal social standing. But not even this would solve the problem entirely: the fact that an individual rejected a better reward could still be explained by making reference to the fear of hostile envy.

Instead of 'pair', I meant 'peer' in some instances of the
post above.

What one can see reading you guys are who wants to see chimpanzees in a 'only behavioral' perspective and those that expect a greater span of ideas and ideals hiding under what we can see in those studys. Those that see it behaviorally will also be the ones only granting domestic animals the minimum allowance of their needs going all the way back to those arguing that animals have no soul and therefore also (logic?) can feel no pain :)

I had a friend describing this later approach to Darwinism as vulgar-Darwinism, being right too, as I see it. And I wonder about your sense of ethics also reading you. Do they only apply to humans? In which strata then? Objectifying what you study to distance you work both ways. It might make you able to see yourself as a 'scientist' doing it for the good of all, but it will also 'steal' some of that humanity from you, as we can see in all small arms wars today. Yeah, I do mean this. Without working ethics you're just a kid, pulling the wings of a fly to see what happens.

Why is there not a PRINT command on this and other articles????

Cultural Transmission in Chimpanzees

emjohnson — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Cultural Transmission in Chimpanzees

Culture defines who we are but few can explain where it comes from or why we adopt one tradition over another. In the classic musical The Fiddler on the Roof the main character, Tevye, muses on this basic fact of human existence:

Here in Anatevka we have traditions for everything... how to eat, how to sleep, even, how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered and always wear a little prayer shawl... This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition start? I'll tell you - I don't know.

The origin of particular cultural traits in human populations has long been a mystery to anthropologists. Many societies have responded the same way Tevye did, "it's merely part of our culture, what else do you need to know?" Nevertheless, the maintenance and dissemination of cultural traits remains a fascinating topic that scientists have long struggled to understand. More recently, however, researchers have discovered that humans aren't unique in this regard. Nonhuman primates also have culture and research into how this is transmitted between individuals has recently taken a major step forward.

While nonhuman primates don't have obvious cultural traditions the same way humans do, such as variation in their clothing or adding extra spice to their food, primatologists have nonetheless identified behavioral practices that vary between communities and which are transmitted through social learning. For a behavior to be considered a cultural practice in nonhuman primates it must meet certain conditions: the behavior must be practiced by multiple members of the community, it must vary between societies, and the potential for that same behavior must exist in other societies.

A good example of such a cultural trait was discovered in January and published in the journal Current Biology (review here). Kibale Forest chimpanzees were found to use sticks to get at the honey in a fallen log, whereas Budongo Forest chimpanzees used chewed leaves as sponges to collect the same thing. Both societies had the same tools at their disposal, but they each chose a different approach. A single individual first used one of these techniques and other members of the group adopted it through imitation and social learning. This is merely the latest example of cultural traditions in different chimpanzee societies.

Cultural diversity in chimps from National Geographic's "New Chimpanzees" (1995)

However, some societies have more unique cultural traits than others. To understand why this would be researchers Johan Lind and Patrik Lindenfors of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution and the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University, Sweden analyzed the demographics of different chimpanzee societies. Their findings are detailed in a new report published in PLoS One. They hypothesized that, since infants so readily imitate their mothers as they're growing up, the number of females within a given society may explain the number of cultural traits. Individuals spend at least eight years in close proximity with their mothers while fathers are scarcely involved. Furthermore, tool use is central in chimpanzee societies and females use tools more frequently than males do. Since chimpanzees are patrilocal (males remain in their natal group while females migrate at puberty) any cultural traits learned by young males would remain in the society while young females would transfer that same trait to nearby societies.

Because females express and transmit more culture than males, and because females transfer between communities bringing with them their cultural knowledge, the number of cultural traits present in any given chimpanzee community should depend on the number of females in that community. Thus, we hypothesize that the number of cultural traits in chimpanzee communities should correlate with the average number of females in chimpanzee communities, but not with the average number of males.

As can be seen in the figure, the number of societies studied with documented cultural traits is not high (n = 7), however the researchers found a significant correlation between the number of females in a society and the number of cultural traits present (p = 0.010). There was no correlation between cultural traits and the number of males.

This implies that females are critical in chimpanzees for transmitting cultural traits and maintaining cultural diversity. The reported pattern may be explained by the fact that females transfer between communities, bringing with them novel cultural traits and consequently increasing the cultural diversity of the community as a whole.

This is not to say, of course, that there will always be a direct correspondence between the number of females and the number of cultural traits in that society (as can be seen by Mahale M-group), but the evidence is suggestive that there is a pattern of cultural transmission in chimpanzees being driven by females.

The authors point out that the pattern for human societies is different from chimpanzees and that the number of cultural traits increases as the population of both males and females increases. This would appear to demonstrate the important role that fathers play in the social learning of their children. However, as The Fiddler on the Roof reveals all too clearly, new cultural ideas from outside one's community can infiltrate as societies continue to grow. Under such conditions neither mothers nor fathers can maintain a single cultural norm for long.

Reference:

Lind, J., & Lindenfors, P. (2010). The Number of Cultural Traits Is Correlated with Female Group Size but Not with Male Group Size in Chimpanzee Communities PLoS ONE, 5 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009241

emjohnson Thu, 03/25/2010 - 03:00

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I thought culture was something that was unique to people? How can chimps have culture if it's something that only human beings have?

It's simply not the case that only humans have culture. The anthropologist Lewis Bimford defined culture as "the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism." However, there is nothing fundamentally unique about human culture other than the scale with which it influences human life. Cultural traditions are now well established in the primatological literature and they are also being found in other nonhuman animals. See, for example, KrÃ¼tzen et al. (2005), "Cultural transmission of tool use in bottlenose dolphins" published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

BCR, culture by definition, varies from one discipline to another. The concept of culture in Primatology and Anthropology is the transfer of idea from one individual to another, and the ability of these individuals to disseminate it later to others. Using this definition, you can see that primates do have culture, as we observe new innovations being taught and shared within and/or among populations.

I remember studies of macaque populations in college at UC Irvine over 40 years ago where cultural patterns (adopting food washing practices and different diets in different groups of genetically identical populations) were first adopted by early-adopter juvenile monkeys but only became the dominant cultural practice over time as the juveniles became adults. Don't recall if those studies looked at the number of females, but it's been known for a long time that primates have learned cultural practices.

@bcr

Our own cultures can shape and limit our understanding of non-human cultures. Frans de Waal recently wrote a great piece on the topic:
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/03/rousseau-meets-japanes…

... females transfer between communities, bringing with them novel cultural traits and consequently increasing the cultural diversity of the community as a whole.

If relocating females are the vectors by which "novel cultural traits" are disseminated, then wouldn't they be responsible for homogenizing (otherwise separate) chimpanzee cultures, rather than diversifying them?

The homogenization of traits would be expected if culture was transmitted horizontally (from peer to peer) rather than vertically from mother to child. What this study seems to show is that daughters import their cultural traits when they transfer between groups and then teach it to their offspring. The more females in a community, the more unique cultural traits. This doesn't preclude horizontal transmission but it does suggest that it's not how new cultural traits get introduced. Females are the carriers of culture in chimpanzee society.

Orangutans Confront Their Fear of Water For Sex

emjohnson — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:39:00 +0000

Orangutans Confront Their Fear of Water For Sex

An adolescent female orangutan practices her ape stroke.
Image: Anne Russon / New Scientist

Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) are not the most dexterous of creatures (especially for primates) and this is particularly true when they're in water. Zoos across the country have removed the moats surrounding their exhibits precisely because of their tendency to sink. However, researchers Anne Russon, Purwo Kuncoro, Agnes Ferisa, and Dwi Putri Handayani have just published a paper in the Journal of Comparative Psychology showing how a group of orangutans on Kaja Island in Indonesia have developed an innovative use of their watery foe. Wouldn't it figure that sex had something to do with it?

As Russon told New Scientist:

My guess is that the male chose the location because there was less chance of him being interrupted by other, more dominant males.

However, the orangs appear to have overcome their fear and utilized water for a number of reasons, something that the researchers say reveals important clues about orangutan cognition and sociality. Innovation requires creativity to apply old behaviors to novel situations and the researchers argue that a similar process is at work in Pongo as in humans.

Interestingly, it was the mid-rank males who were most willing to innovate. This is probably because it is in the reproductive interests of alpha males to maintain the status quo and they therefore avoid "rocking the boat" or, in this case, coming anywhere near the boat. Mid-rank males, however, have much to gain and little to lose in their efforts to experiment with novel situations. Afterall, since alpha males typically dominate the mating opportunities in a given area, taking a chance with an attractive female could pay off in a big way. I'd be curious to know what the female's role was in all of this. Was she hesitant to follow her young beau into unfamiliar territory? Or did she dive right in, eager to avoid any interruptions from the guy with prominent cheek flanges and an intemperate disposition?

emjohnson Fri, 03/19/2010 - 10:39

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Great Apes

Primatology

Great post! It would make sense that those middle rank males innovate and find a way to mate. They are the ones who has much to gain and powerful enough to coerce (my guess) females. Similarly, like you said, it would be interesting if this is the female choice too ... I mean, we know that these males are no Prince Charming and almost always force copulate these poor females.

Prince Charming or not, it's a pic of a FEMALE orang desperately swimming. Go figure it out.

Ilya, he mentioned that.

Orangutan males have long been known to engage in coercive mating, however there is recent evidence that demonstrates female choice as well. See this study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (Knott et al., 2010) and the National Geographic review of their research:

"Using the first hormonal data from wild orangutans, we show that around ovulation females preferentially encounter and mate with prime males whose impressive size and ornamentation are probable indicators of genetic quality," Knott and others write in their research paper . . . But when not ovulating, females mate willingly with unadorned males and those past their prime, the scientists discovered.

AP: "Thirty Dead Monkeys Were Essentially Cooked Alive"

emjohnson — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:44:58 +0000

AP: "Thirty Dead Monkeys Were Essentially Cooked Alive"

Image Source: Monkeys in the NewsMonkeys In the News has alerted me to an Associated Press story today about a Nevada research lab, part of Charles River Laboratories, that is one of the world's largest suppliers of clinical and laboratory research services to pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The company was fined after thirty monkeys died as the result of not following proper procedures. While it is clear that there are necessary medical reasons for using primates in invasive experiments, I think everyone can agree that strict regulations need to be put in place to prevent negligence or abuse.

A series of errors began when a repair technician left the heater in the "ON" position at 8:20 a.m. An alarm three minutes later warned the temperature in the primate room had risen to an unsafe 84 degrees, but no one noticed it, a Department of Agriculture report shows. Another alarm went undetected nearly two hours later.

It wasn't until 12:30 p.m. that lab personnel found 30 dead monkeys. Surviving monkeys were moved to a cooler location and given fruit; two later had to be put down.

Workers quickly opened the doors to circulate air and gently sprayed down the monkeys with a hose, according to a government report. It's not known how hot it got in the quarantine room.

It wasn't the only problem for the company.

Another monkey died after going through a cage washer last year. In 2007, Agriculture Department reports show two monkeys at the now-closed Sparks lab had fingers amputated after they were caught in the wiring of their cages while being moved, and a third monkey suffered a cut to the tip of its tail.
In addition, the former director of laboratory sciences at the Sparks lab has filed a civil lawsuit accusing the company of mistreating research animals, falsifying records to cover up the abuse and firing him in October 2007 for complaining about it.

The AP story goes on to say that, according to Agriculture Department records, Charles River Laboratories is one of the largest violators involving negligence in animal deaths nationwide. Charles River had sales of $1.2 billion in 2009 and reportedly housed nearly 10,000 primates nationwide in 2008. Under existing legislation, as part of the Animal Welfare Act, violators are required to pay a fine of $10,000 per violation. The AP reports that the lab where the monkeys died in Nevada was fined only $14,000 based on this and a separate incident. The Animal Welfare Act was amended in 2008 which increased the fine from $2,500.

Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, co-authored the amendment raising the fines in 2008 and has been urging USDA to fully exercise its authority under the law ever since.

"I increased the penalties for Animal Welfare Act violators from $2,500 to $10,000 in 2008 for one reason: Serious violators of the Animal Welfare Act should be punished more severely," he said in a statement to The Associated Press on Wednesday.

My own view, which I've stated previously is that we should eliminate all testing on Great Apes as soon as possible as proposed under the bipartisan House Bill HR 1326 The Great Ape Protection Act that is currently before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. We should also conduct a review on the use of primates in general, the same way that the European Union has been engaged in for the last couple of years (see, for example, here, here, here, here, and here).

emjohnson Thu, 03/18/2010 - 07:44

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I think it's only fair to point out that when this incident happened Charles River notified the USDA immediately, and after investigating what happened fired one employee and disciplined another, presumably the employees who should have responded when the alarms went off. Charles river have also changed their procedures to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Even in the best systems people screw things up, and when this happens those responsible should be punished (if appropriate) and steps taken to make sure the accident doesn't happen again. Charles River appear to have both punished the staff members responsible and taken steps to improve their procedures, I wouldn't be surprised if the relatively low fine reflects USDA satisfaction with the way CR responded to this incident, a single incident which accounts for over 90% of the accidental primate deaths at CR in the past couple of years.

Looking at this story I can only say that I wish some hospitals and social services departments would respond as promptly and efficiently to accidents and negligence.

I also note that you didn't quote the part of the report which states that:

"The company denied the allegations and said the worker was fired because he made derogatory and sexual comments to women."

Could it be that an employee fired for sexually harassing female staff might just be motivated by something other than a desire to tell the truth? At least security at Charles River is good, otherwise I guess we'd be reading another report of someone going postal.

As to the EU, well that debate appears to be coming to the conclusion that non-human primate research is still vital to many areas of research and should continue, certainly the EU parliament thinks so. The reason why the USA is the last major country to have research chimpanzees is because they are very expensive to house and researchers don't want to use then except for a very small number of diseases (e.g. Hepatitis C) where they still play a vital role. In most other countries with much smaller research sectors maintaining colonies of chimps for research is simply not a practical option. Research on chimps ended in the UK a decade before it was effectively banned, and the situation was the same in other Eurpoean states. It's very easy to ban something that no-one is doing.

I don't like seeing chimps used for invasive research, and obviously I believe that they should only be used as a last resort when no other animal or in-vitro method would be appropriate, and it wouldn't be possible to do the research on human volunteers. What I'm not prepared to do is to say to people living with HepC that scientists studying the disease will no longer be able to use one of the most valuable research resources they have, are you?

Thanks for bringing attention to this--always such interesting posts. How you maintain this blog, write for HP, and get anything done for your doctorate is beyond me.

Cheers.

@dusty: You forgot to include raising an infant. Thanks. Writing for folks like yourself is one of things that keeps me going. You've got some great stuff on your blog as well.

@Mike B: I don't know what the whistleblower's motivation was (and neither do you). In combination with the documented violations of the Animal Welfare Act I would think an independent investigation is necessary, wouldn't you?

What I'm not prepared to do is to say to people living with HepC that scientists studying the disease will no longer be able to use one of the most valuable research resources they have, are you?

I'm not sure all HepC sufferers would be pleased to know about the cost that research to cure their disease has on other sentient beings. I think they'd be happy to know about alternative models.

Charles River Labs is one of the largest violaters involved in negligence in animal deaths? Who knew.

I wept loudly over this blog post while eating my Big Mac. Cows are delicious, and will nourish us and make us strong for our long struggle against the evil, evil people who are hurting primates who are just like slaves, or children. This all makes me feel so much better about myself than all that blather about racism & sexism & death threats & violence against animal researchers & whatever you read on some of these Scienceblogs. That stuff is a downer.

EMJ, I'm well aware of these other animal (and in vitro) methods) but they are not close to replacing chimpanzees yet, as the paper you cite points out:

"This work provides a clear foundation upon which we can now begin to construct an animal model for the uniquely human pathogen,â says Rice. âThis is only a first step but in terms of creating an animal model for hepatitis C, itâs a big leap forward."

Good work, but still early days.

CR have delt with the problem, that's the point!

@EMJ

Hep C is a pretty prevalent and devastating disease. I doubt many who have benefited from diagnosis and treatment would care if some psychopath shot a bunch of chimps in the head, if it meant not dying from cirrhosis.

Thankfully, research animals are not routinely tortured, and animal welfare is actually a priority for those who do such work.

@PalMD: This is a difficult issue, I'm not denying that. I'm also fully aware that research animals are not routinely tortured (I worked in a neuroscience laboratory for a year myself). However, there are legitimate concerns about using chimpanzees as models for invasive medical research. Some of these concerns I've addressed previously, others I haven't. You may find this paper in the Journal of Medical Primatology of interest. The author reviewed more than a hundred chimpanzee HCV studies and found:

troublesome questions presented by some of the reviewed articles, including statistical validity, repeatability, and biological relevance of this model.

As I see it, the issue has moved beyond the question of if medical experimentation should be banned on Great Apes, but when that will take place. It may happen the same way as the earlier commenter discussed about similar research in the UK; its use may dwindle and there would no longer be any resistance to passing legislation. Or it may be that Congress and the general public decide that the value to research does not justify its continued use. I think we will see research into alternative models increase as this debate continues and I welcome that.

EMJ, that review was written by an ARA and rather surprisingly for what was supposed to be an objective overview of chimpanzee HepC research somehow managed to miss just about every important HepC paper that involved the use of chimpanzees. Go figure!

Charles River have been the subject of several independent investigations by the USDA, you might not like their conclusions but that's not the point. Think of it like hospitals, not every surgical error or patient death due to infection/complications requires a full independent investigation. Quite often an investigation by the institution itself or regulator is enough to put the problem right.

What's going on here is an attempted witch hunt, and it's not pretty.

Ping

... sort of. The post I'm pointing to is not about these monkeys, but about the broader issue.

PAL, no one should be denying that the research that leads to progress with horrid diseases is important. Well,no one reasonable. But you need to understand that the over the top statements about the horrors suffered by the bunnies and the cute monkeys are true and not true in a very similar way that your statement about Hep C.

It is important that the conversation be held at a somewhat more productive level.

@MikeB: You're going to have to do better than that. The Journal of Medical Primatology is peer-reviewed and geared primarily to biomedical scientists who use primates as research models. For you to assert that the author is an animal rights activist and that (somehow) he was able to slip it by these researchers unawares is pretty ludicrous.

A quick addendum to my last, as yet unpublished, comment. I realise now that I had confused the JMP study wiith another commentary that I can't find now, probably something I read on an AR website sometwhere a few months ago.

I have no idea if the Bettauer is an AR supporter, he appears to be a consultant of some sort, but the involvement of HSUS in the study is clear.

Why I Am Not A Humanist*

emjohnson — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Why I Am Not A Humanist*

Looking nonhumans in the eye.
Image: Elephant Man by Chris Gallucci

In 1927 Bertrand Russell wrote his now famous essay "Why I Am Not A Christian" and outlined the general reasons for why he rejected such an ideology. This approach has been followed by other writers such as Ibn Warraq in Why I Am Not A Muslim, Ramendra Nath in his essay "Why I Am Not A Hindu" and David Dvorkin in his "Why I Am Not A Jew." My own choice of title is not in the same tradition as these other writers (since I agree with much of what humanism has to offer), but I do share with them a concern over how a system of thought frames peoples interactions with the world around them.

I first read Russell's essay a few years after being confirmed as a Lutheran and, of the many reasons offered for his views, it was the moral argument that stuck with me:

You will find that in the Gospels Christ said: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come." That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of this sort into the world.

Such arguments, along with the incompatibility of evolutionary biology with the Christian tradition, led me to abandon my faith.

However, feeling incomplete without a way to define myself, I quickly came across the concept of humanism through the work of my favorite author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He had been bestowed with the honor of being honorary President of the American Humanist Association, so he clearly knew what he was talking about. In his final book before kicking the proverbial bucket, A Man Without A Country, he had this to say on what being a humanist was all about:

How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do. "If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?"

But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being.

I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake.

But something always sat uncomfortably with me about the term (let alone the slight to poor rattlesnakes). My studies in evolutionary biology revealed that, far from privileging humans as separate from the web of life, we were intricately interwoven within it. Furthermore, the difference between any human and any chimpanzee was less than between that chimpanzee and a gorilla. We are, in fact, the third chimpanzee, a naked ape who donned fine clothing and manners as a way to mask our animal heritage. Humanism, at least in the view of many adherents, removes supernatural justifications for human uniqueness yet emphasizes the importance of "civilized man" as something separate from mere beasts.

This aspect of humanism is discussed in the latest issue of New Humanist magazine with John Appleby's article entitled "Man & Other Beasts":

Consider Richard Dawkins. As a prominent supporter of non-religious causes his humanist credentials are impeccable. In his most recent book The Greatest Show on Earth he elegantly gathers together all the current (overwhelming) evidence that evolution is a far more reliable account of the genesis of humanity than any form of supernaturalism. He discusses how species are born; detailing the way in which most species have more in common with each other than many suppose, and how the boundaries between species are blurred rather than fixed (this is known as "biological continuism"). While such an account strengthens the first humanist thread in providing an alternative to biblical explanations of origins, it simultaneously weakens the second one, in that it undermines the idea that humans are somehow unique, let alone "superior" to other species.

Much of Appleby's article discusses the work of such theorists as Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe and Donna Haraway. I have read Foucault and Haraway the way a heron might swallow a bird: as a task that doesn't come naturally but which you choke down because you already started. As you might imagine, it wasn't very satisfying. I find much of their writing needlessly opaque and I haven't read any of the other theorists that Appleby mentions. However, I think the larger issue is an important one. Humanism is a response to theism and seeks to find a meaningful existence for our fellow human beings without the supernatural. But I prefer to have a worldview that incorporates all of the natural world.

Towards the end of his article Appleby addresses this through the work of psychologist G.A. Bradshaw in her book Elephants on the Edge. Bradshaw's study of elephants shows how neuroscience is already becoming a "trans-species discipline" and that aspects of behavior that were once thought exclusive to human beings are being found in nonhumans. In her book Bradshaw seeks to understand the behavior of rogue male elephants that display unusual aggression towards each other and odd behavior towards other species (different individuals either attempted to attack or have sex with a rhinoceros). Her conclusion is that many are displaying signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

As Bradshaw wrote in the journal Nature:

How PTSD manifests has long been a puzzle, but researchers today have a better idea as to why the effects of violence persist so long after the event. Studies on animals and human genocide survivors indicate that trauma early in life has lasting psychophysiological effects on brain and behaviour. . .

Elephant society in Africa has been decimated by mass deaths and social breakdown from poaching, culls and habitat loss. From an estimated ten million elephants in the early 1900s, there are only half a million left today. Wild elephants are displaying symptoms associated with human PTSD: abnormal startle response, depression, unpredictable asocial behaviour and hyperaggression.

Elephants are renowned for their close relationships. Young elephants are reared in a matriarchal society, embedded in complex layers of extended family. Culls and illegal poaching have fragmented these patterns of social attachment by eliminating the supportive stratum of the matriarch and older female caretakers (allomothers).

In an earlier era, the idea that human psychological conditions could be diagnosed in other animals would have been immediately rejected by many biologists as anthropomorphism (a few may still object today, though that number is receding dramatically). The objection would have been that we can't know the psychological state of other animals so using human terms applied to them is inappropriate. While it is certainly important not to fall into the kind of crude anthropomorphism that reflexively assumes other animals experience the world the same way humans do (they don't), it is equally important to avoid what primatologist Frans de Waal has called anthropodenial. When common behaviors are the result of the same or comparable experiences in different species, it is reasonable to assume a common state of mind. This is especially true when these species are closely related to one another.

In his article Appleby points out how this trans-species commonality has traditionally been a problem for humanism, but that a more inclusive view of human beings as part of the natural world may actually help us better understand ourselves as well as our nonhuman cousins.

Thus in allowing ourselves to imagine the inner life of the elephant, to allow that they have one and that it can be scarred by the way it is treated in a way analogous to human trauma, we can develop both a deeper understanding of the quality of our relations to them and a deeper understanding of ourselves.

I'm happy to see that my humanist friends are opening their vision to incorporate other species in the qualities they admire. Rather than creating a division between "man and beast" it's far more inspiring to view all living beings as sharing a biological continuity. Understanding our "bestial" nature needn't undermine our positive qualities, if anything it can help us create conditions that limit those behaviors while emphasizing others. In the human zoo we've designed for ourselves we need all the good ideas we can muster.

*With apologies to Bertrand Russell

emjohnson Tue, 03/16/2010 - 08:00

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Great article. You mentioned Foucault. Yes, I had trouble with him too. He's indigestible really. If you want to see something interesting, Google Chomsky Foucault debate. You'll only find 2 segments of the debate and they're glued together but it's worth it. Chomsky is amazing, as always.

I'm an atheist and a secularist so people often assume I'm a humanist as well but I've never been comfortable with some of their ideas. Thanks for summing up pretty much what I've been thinking towards.

The hypobole in the Bertrand Russell quote (although I might agree with a modified version of it) makes me sorely tempted to play devil's advocate. Even if the devil happens to be God.

"Rather than creating a division between 'man and beast' it's far more inspiring to view all living beings as sharing a biological continuity."

That is what this recent book is largely about:

http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/empathy/

You would apparently find scientific naturalism more appealing than humanism:

http://www.naturalism.org/

Elephants are humans too! oh, wait . . .

Furthermore, the difference between any human and any chimpanzee was less than between that chimpanzee and a gorilla.

Absent a definition of what you mean by "the difference", this statement is completely meaningless. What's "the difference" you're talking about here?

I was slogging through Foucault last week. I finally had to look up on Wikipedia what it was that he was supposed to be saying. I thought it was me; thanks for the vindication.

Does humanism have to be exclusive? Can we not celebrate what makes us uniquely human without refusing emotions and morality to other species?

I doubt I will get any disagreement from a fellow scientist for a claim that humans, alone among the apes, have managed to use their large cranial cases for the betterment of their species (and yes, often the detriment). Science, itself, is the triumph of humanity.

None of that means that we are anything other than much smarter, more capable apes. I don't see the two ideologies as exclusive.

Among some factions of eco-radicals, "humanism" was (and possibly still is - the friend who was my connection to such circles has moved away) shorthand for the ideologies which try to subject the needs of all the rest of the planet to the short-term growth of one species.

Oddly enough, in the literature I scanned which used such vilifications, religious questions were never raised (not counting apparently metaphorical mentions of "Gaia").

Just sayin'.

@Comrade PhysioProf (#6): The standard difference cited is always a genetic measure. For example Wildman et al. (2003) used nonsynonymous DNA to arrive at the conclusion:

Humans and chimpanzees are >99.1% identical at the coding sequence level by both the measures of observed distance and ML augmented distance. In terms of observed distances, humans differ from chimpanzees by 0.9% and each differs from gorillas by 1.0%.

I also added the link above for other readers. For those who can't get beyond the paywall, National Geographic did a write up of their study here. Based on these results that humans and chimpanzees are more closely related than chimpanzees and gorillas the researchers suggested moving chimps and bonobos into the genus Homo to become Homo troglodytes and Homo paniscus respectively.

The standard difference cited is always a genetic measure. For example Wildman et al. (2003) used nonsynonymous DNA to arrive at the conclusion:

And what, pray tell, does percent identity at the nucleotide level have to do with "common states of mind"? And how is it that "humanism" is inconsistent with "view all living beings as sharing a biological continuity"?

Seems to me that you are just loosey-goosey conflating a bunch of shit in order to fool people into thinking there's more to what you're talking about than that you feel a lot of personal empathy for certain apes. It's fine if you feel that way, but don't expect to be able to just throw up a bunch of fancy-sounding diversionary bullshit and not get called on it.

@Comrade PhysioProf: I'm glad you're interested in this topic. I would encourage you to read The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond, Moral Minds by Marc Hauser and Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky. All are excellent introductions to what I'm talking about here and provide a good deal of peer reviewed literature in the bibliography if you want to follow up on any specific aspects of their argument. I'll still be here when you're done.

One of the advantages of calling ourselves humanists is that it lets us exclude objectivists; it advertises our liberality and altruism. Moreover, while we share much of our psychology with our fellow creatures and even some of our morality, most of our relations with other humans are derived from bargains we strike with each other, and humanism emphasizes that our laws are man-made, not god-given.

That said, I dislike the "humanist" label because it also covers two otherwise well-defined groups, scholars of the humanities and members of a particular group of Renaissance scholars. If a humanist like Thomas More could burn heretics I'd just as soon not share the appellation.

"Naturalist" is also the name of a profession; unlike "humanist" it doesn't exclude the greedy but it does exclude at least some of the mystics. It does evoke the scientific orientation that a great many of us share.

This business of labels is difficult. According to one dictionary, I don't qualify as an atheist or even necessarily an agnostic, but I can call myself a pagan, which is cool to about the extent that it is strange.

@bad Jim: I actually quite like the term "Naturalist" and it's one I prefer for myself. Like using the word gay, it's an expression whose time has largely passed for the original meaning. And, unlike atheist, it is a positive expression of how you see the world rather than saying how you don't. If I had to always list that I'm not a theist, an astrologist, an alchemist, a phrenologist, a mesmerist, etc. it would be exhausting. This way I can merely say, I think the universe is governed by natural forces and that human beings share a naturalistic relationship with other animals. Done.

This way I can merely say, I think the universe is governed by natural forces and that human beings share a naturalistic relationship with other animals.

Dude, other than for delusional wackos, this statement is a truism. Are you asserting that your argument in this post is nothing more than this?

As far as reading all those books, that's *your* job as the blogger making the claim. You are objecting to the term "humanist"--which is a *moral* label--because you feel that it unduly separates human brings from some apes. If you are asserting that human beings are more like chimpanzees in some morally salient fashion than chimpanzees are like apes, then provide some fucking evidence. Bullshitting your readers about stress reactions in elephants and nucleotide similarity in primate genomes doesn't mean jack fuck in relation to this assertion.

You are either being really, really sloppy, or you are intentionally lying about the nature of nature of your assertion and/or the evidence supporting it. Which is it?

Comrade PhysioProf: To an impartial reader such as myself, your tone isn't doing your argument any favor. Any value in the content of your message is drowned out by the inflammatory nature of your posts.

EMJ: Thanks for the interesting read. I haven't spent much time to think about these topics on my own time, but this was an intriguing starting point.

And, unlike atheist, it is a positive expression of how you see the world rather than saying how you don't.

EMJ: Indeed, but it also implies the idea that everything we do is fully caused--that contra-causal free will is illusory. Dawkins seems to prefer ducking this question, and Dennett seems to prefer to minimize its implications. It is a bit of a blow to the ego to realize that we aren't as different as we like to think we are from the ants in our backyards.

Thanks for your typical laser dissection of sloppy arguments and disingenuous dodging and weaving CPP. Some of us can stay off thefainting couch long enough to percieve your points.

Homo trog. Just a pure scientific question eh? Not polluted by an agenda at all, is it? What a crock.

And the percent nucleotide similarity argument? Betrays some seriously flawed thinking about gene-phenotype relationships. In the simplest case you can have the same exact gene present in two species (% similarity!!) but another gene or promoter seq determines whether it is ever functional. Same genetic sequence, total difference in function.

CPP: "If you are asserting that human beings are more like chimpanzees in some morally salient fashion than chimpanzees are like apes..." Are you saying humans are not apes?

You might want to look into David Ehrenfeld's The Arrogance of Humanism and Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals by Barbara Noske as both, taken together (and critically assessed), greatly expand upon the concepts you are dealing with here. Ehrenfeld's book in particular is entirely centered on debating the concept of "Humanism" and why he rejects the term as riddled with its own unsupportable assertions and ideological biases. It might read as slightly dated but the philosophical underpinnings of the work remain no less relevant.

I would also recommend the works of Paul Shepard, John Livingston and Neil Evernden. Paul Shepard, in particular, spent most of his career explaining the deep relationship between the development of the human species and its dependency on the animal "other", where we find ourselves and find life that is unlike as simultaneously. He felt that the marginalization of other species diminished us, intellectually, emotionally and "spiritually." I can't say that i buy his POV wholesale but his work has had a substantial effect on my own approach to questions of human identity in relation to ecosystems and the cultures we construct to mediate our needs within them.

Thanks for the article BTW. About elephants, i recall the following article several years ago in the New York Times Magazine, An Elephant Crackup?. Worth a reading.

@Comrade PhysioProf (#14):

As far as reading all those books, that's *your* job as the blogger making the claim.

It's pretty clear that you didn't even bother to read the link I provided for you. If you had, your question would have been answered:

The evidence both from cladistic analyses and from simply measuring degrees of genetic correspondence call for grouping chimpanzees and humans together as sister subgenera of the same genus and justify believing that chimpanzees can provide insights into distinctive features of humankind's own evolutionary origins. Chimpanzees use tools, have material cultures, are ecological generalists, and are highly social. Their anatomical inability to produce most of the sounds of human speech long obscured the fact that chimpanzees are also capable of understanding and using rudimentary forms of language, as shown by recent studies on communication via sign language and lexigrams.

If you're not willing to do a little bit of reading on your own there's not much I can do for you. It gives the appearance that your intent is to merely criticize without understanding.

That passage you just quoted, EMJ, contains a whole passel of half-truths and poorly supported assertions. Have you evaluated the strength of the evidence on which *your* assertions, insinuations and conclusions rest?

"rudimentary" "highly" "communication" "language"

All slippery weasel words designed to create an inaccurate portrayal of the truth in people who you know won't go and read the original papers with anything resembling a critical eye. Your referenced *book* authors have a pronounced tendency to go beyond the actual evidence and, worse, to be further misinterpreted and elaborated by casual / less critical readers.

CPP's main point stands- Assuming the audience here are all good true believers in evolution, none of your "similarity" arguments are shocking or surprising. The question boils down to "how similar to humans, how different from humans?" whether we are talking about genotype or behavioral phenotype. That last 2% or 4% or wtfever of genes could mean all the difference in the world. The chasm between "communication" and "language" is a vast one, as yet uncrossed.

Telling someone to "do the reading" is just insufficient. Some of us have "done the reading" and come to a substantially different conclusion than you do. The solution is to take your assertions point-by-point and evaluate the evidence. Since people are reading these words via interaction with a series of tools created by humans, perhaps you can start with the evidence for tool use and creation of increasingly complex tools using other tools.

CPP: "If you are asserting that human beings are more like chimpanzees in some morally salient fashion than chimpanzees are like apes..." Are you saying humans are not apes?

No, I'm not saying that; I mistyped apes when I meant gorillas. It was in reference to this assertion in the OP: "Furthermore, the difference between any human and any chimpanzee was less than between that chimpanzee and a gorilla."

The argument you're trying to make about how we are "closer to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas" based on genetic similarity is frankly bogus.

Imagine that we at some point met a sentient alien life form that had almost no genetic relation to us (assuming for the sake of argument that it had DNA at all). Would you then claim that because of that there is no chance of it being deserving of the moral considerations we would normally apply to other human beings?

No of course, it's a ridiculous argument. Our perceptions of what is sentient, or failing that, "somewhat like us" and deserving of ethical considerations is not related to the degree that our genes happen to be similar.

Might as well be honest about that.

@DrugMonkey:

Since people are reading these words via interaction with a series of tools created by humans, perhaps you can start with the evidence for tool use and creation of increasingly complex tools using other tools.

Here's a recent post at Science discussing the use of "toolkits" by chimpanzees. They point out that chimpanzees have not yet been observed using tools to make other tools in the wild, which suggests something that is unique in humans. However, given that one benchmark for human uniqueness after another has been torn down over the years I wouldn't hold my breath about this one either.

You may also be interested in the paper "Continuing Investigations into the Stone Tool-making and Tool-using Capabilities of a Bonobo (Pan paniscus)" by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Given that a bonobo, Kanzi, was able to be taught to flintknap it suggests that this is not beyond the cognitive abilities of other chimpanzees or bonobos in the wild.

However, even if it is, my point about biological continuity isn't affected in the slightest (and thanks for helping to emphasize my point about anthropodenial).

Wow, maybe it's just me, but it seems like everyone here is making up what the post is about to go all fuck-nuts about the possibility of animals being *gasp* close to us! Okay, for example, look at the analogy Coriolis wrote. He's saying the exact fucking opposite of what the post is about! EMJ basically says, "chimps are pretty fucking close to us and have a lot of traits that we might call 'human,' so maybe we should treat them with a bit of respect." So Coriolis says that that must mean that EMJ thinks that everything out there that doesn't share our genes is therefore NOT deserving of our respect. Sorry, I'm not following that logic.

Honestly, I don't get why this is even controversial. Look at a gorilla, a chimp, and person. Is it really that crazy to think our genes are closer to a chimp's genes than his are to a gorilla's? No, it certainly doesn't mean that a chimp is 10% "more human" than a gorilla, it just means that the chimp is a little closer to our genes than he is to the gorilla's genes. End of story. Manufactured controversy unnecessary.

I will admit that I am unfamiliar with the literature on this one, but when you claim that non-human animals have been diagnosed with the same "psychological" illnesses as humans, what does that mean?

Many of our diagnostic language for psychologic disorders is inexact, and much of it is based as much on our and our patients' perception of meaning as it is on observable behavior. Much of what we think about as mental illness in humans is diagnosed symbolically ("he is behaving as if he believes..."). How close are our analogies in non-human animals? What would it mean to diagnose an elephant with "PTSD"? Is it the same disorder biochemically, behaviorally, and psychologically as it is in humans?

This sort of thinking betrays not only a naivete about animal behavior but a profound misunderstanding of human mental illness.

@Coriolis: I'm not saying anything of the sort.

@rob monkey

I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that non-human apes share a number of important emotionally- and psychologically-appealing characteristics. From a purely subjective viewpoint, I find apes quite fascinating, and to the extent their behaviors resemble ours, I feel a kinship.

I also think kittens are very cute.

Both kittens and apes "deserve respect", whatever that may mean in an operational sense. But what is the ultimate goal of statements such as Eric's? Even a child can see the "appeal" of chimps. But what does that mean?

I suspect, based on Eric's earlier piece, that the primary implication is for animal research. I can't see a whole lot of other relevant implications, other than conservation which most people can also agree on.

And the unwritten question is how would being a "nonhumanist" affect our thoughts and behaviors? If it's "us or the damn, dirty apes" who wins?

@PalMD:

non-human animals have been diagnosed with the same "psychological" illnesses as humans, what does that mean?

It means just what it says in Nature:

Under normal conditions, early motherâinfant interactions facilitate the development of self-regulatory structures located in the corticolimbic region of the brain's right hemisphere. But with trauma, an enduring right-brain dysfunction can develop, creating a vulnerability to PTSD and a predisposition to violence in adulthood. Profound disruptions to the attachment bonding process, such as maternal separation, deprivation or trauma, can upset psychobiological and neurochemical regulation in the developing brain, leading to abnormal neurogenesis, synaptogenesis and neurochemical differentiation. The absence of compensatory social structures, such as older generations, can also impede recovery.

I have a number of questions regarding some of the assumptions in that, but one quick question: how did they define right brain dysfunction? Synaptogeneses? Etc?

And if we are to posit these results are accurate, what does it mean re humans? I suppose it gives us something to look for in analogous human situations, like....i dunno. I mean, what is "PTSD" (a syndrome, not pathologically defined disease) in elephants? Do humans develop a predisposition to violence in the same way as animals?

Violence in animals is natural, often adaptive. In humans it may be sometimes, but our social constraints..er..constrain it.

I smell absurdity.

@PalMD:

Violence in animals is natural, often adaptive. In humans it may be sometimes, but our social constraints..er..constrain it.

And they don't in other animals? I'm not as familiar with the literature on elephants, but in primates the use of aggression is often mediated by social structure. Disruptions in that social structure can then result in aberrant behaviors. The different behavioral norms (or "culture") of a particular group can also curtail what would be considered "species typical behavior." Robert Sapolsky described a great example of this in baboons a few years ago (free access here):

[T]uberculosis, a disease that moves with devastating speed and severity in nonhuman primates, broke out in Garbage Dump Troop. Over the next year, most of its members died, as did all of the males from Forest Troop who had foraged at the dump. . .

The results were that Forest Troop was left with males who were less aggressive and more social than average and the troop now had double its previous female-to-male ratio. The social consequences of these changes were dramatic. There remained a hierarchy among the Forest Troop males, but it was far looser than before: compared with other, more typical savanna baboon groups, high-ranking males rarely harassed subordinates and occasionally even relinquished contested resources to them. Aggression was less frequent, particularly against third parties. And rates of affiliative behaviors, such as males and females grooming each other or sitting together, soared. There were even instances, now and then, of adult males grooming each other - a behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings.

@PalMD: Hmm, to elaborate, I guess I'd say that animals that share more of our characteristics deserve more respect. Maybe that's humanist of me? :) Really though, I don't think this is a stretch. I keep my pet froggy in a terrarium and occasionally feed him crickets, that's about it. If I kept my dog in his roomy kennel and fed him regularly, but did nothing else, I'd say I would be abusing him, as dogs need companionship, stimulation, etc. I work in pharmaceuticals, and we provide Disney movies for the non-human primates to watch, but the rats just stay in cages. Why do we provide stimulation to the "higher" animals in this case? Because it keeps the animals happy, and that means better data, since psychologically stressed animals exhibit behavioral and medical problems that would be confused with side effects of the treatment. Granted, I may differ from Eric's position on animal research (obviously I'm for it), but I think there's room for his ideas within the standard IACUC framework.

I love how you got to the "eventual goal" of his/my ideas, I think that's something sorely missing from a LOT of debates out there. I will say though, that conservation isn't really something people agree on. Sensible people yes, but there's Republicans out there too, and if that rainforest could make a nice parking lot, then well . . . That's kind of OT though, my main idea is that there's definitely room for respecting animals, and respecting their similarities to us is a decent way to start. That being said, I'm firmly against going Full Retard (e.g., PETA membership) in terms of animal rights.

As to the last questions you had, well, it's the same old problem with psychology, i.e., it doesn't lend itself well to hard cold diagnostics. If you look up some of the psych experiments out there on animals though, you can see a lot of good examples. The "learned helplessness" experiments on dogs are a great example of using an animal model for depression. As to the "violence being adaptive idea," well some could say that would justify sociopaths as being "more fit" than others, but that would just be people who don't understand that evolution is more than just survival of the fittest. If elephants are not normally violent in this way and it's a new behavior never before seen, I don't think it's unreasonable to think it's a negative reaction to what's happened to their population and social structure, especially since I can't quite figure out how being violent and/or raping rhinos is evolutionarily beneficial.

I'm not sure how well learned helplessness has worked out in understanding human psychology.

Well, my education in psych was pretty basic (3 or 4 undergrad classes) so I can't really go balls-out-confident on you that is has, but it was my understanding that it was important. Even if it wasn't though, I think it does show a good example of a psychological problem in a lower animal, one that couldn't be necessarily proven with a definitive lab test, but one that an animal behavior scientist (or even attentive non-scientist) would understand.

I would agree that their are many complex behaviors that we can identify in animals that are analogous to human behaviors. We somewhat subjectively endow these behavior with meanings, but we are unsure what these behaviors mean in humans, much less animals.

This doesn't mean they aren't worth studying...it means we need to be careful ascribing the same meaning to similar behaviors in animals and humans.

Finding correlations between neuroanatomy and behavior is very interesting (and probably not all that good for the elephant), but even with analogous anatomic changes, we must be careful not to over-ascribe.

Honestly, I think most of our difference lies in just what we're trying to emphasize here. I'll be upfront, I don't view humans as anything particularly special in the animal world, i.e., I don't think humans possess some magical property that makes them far beyond animals. Our brains are astounding yes, but in my mind, the complex behaviors we see in animals are the rudimentary versions of the same thing we see in ourselves. Just as we have the "reptilian brain" flight or flight reflex despite being far beyond reptiles in terms of brainpower, I think the behaviors we see in animals that we find "human" are more likely behaviors we share with animals. Not to say I don't see the point that we shouldn't overly anthropomorphize things either. In the case of PTSD and elephants, I can see how classifying it with the name of a human disorder kind of muddies the waters, but I do find it pretty logical that they would eventually show behavioral effects after what's happened to their species, especially given their large and involved family structure.

Ping!

CPP: Which animals do you use in your research lab? Or tissues thereof? Full disclosure. Right now. Or shut the fuck up.

Dude, what fucking planet are you from? Like I'm gonna answer your questions or shut the fuck up cause *you* say so. Get a fucking grip, holmes.

CPP: I accept your comment for what it is. Someday you will accept your comment for what it is as well. When that happens, you too can feel terribly embarassed for yourself.

It just so happens that I have very recently written a post which touches on the physiology behind the feelings of xenophobia. It is feelings of xenophobia, that compel humans to treat individuals that they have identified as insufficiently like them as inferiors to be maltreated.

http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2010/03/physiology-behind-xenophobia.html

Genetic similarity has a role in this, but identical twins could feel xenophobia toward each other depending on how they were raised. Greg mentions the religious conflict in Ireland between the Catholics and Protestants in one of his posts. The two groups are virtually identical genetically, but have tremendous antipathy due to cultural differences. The conflict in the Middle East between Jews in Israel and Muslims in Palestine is similar, very similar genetics, complete antipathy on a cultural level.

Feelings of xenophobia are feelings. There is essentially no rational or cognitive component to them. The feelings come first, the rationalizations of the feelings come second. How one feels and how one acts are two completely different things which may have no relationship to one another. When one's feelings and actions do not coincide, there is cognitive dissonance, which tends to cause a modification of feelings until they do coincide. This is why torturing people leads the torturers to feel they are doing the right thing, and that the objects of their torture somehow deserve it. It is a pure post-hoc justification of actions by modifying feelings.

With this understanding, it is the recognition of self-like characteristics in elephants that provide them with sufficient self-ness that they become organisms that trigger bad feelings when they are harmed. It is not necessarily human-like or human-ness that triggers the absence of xenophobia.

Many people do have positive feelings toward non-human animals, some individuals feel that way even toward non-mammals, toward large reptiles such as monitors, or large non-social animals like bears. People who anthropomorphize large non-social animals like bears are projecting social behaviors on them, social behaviors that bears are incapable of.

CPP, could you please be a little less aggressive in your tone and language. You're actually making some good points, but your choice of words obscures it.

Animal research is one of those areas in science where we do have to draw lines around what is and isn't acceptable, and as with any legal/ethical lines these are usually to some degree arbitrary. Among the pro-animal research scientists I've talked to invasive research* involving non-human great apes is always seen as borderline. Some consider it to be acceptable for research on serious conditions such as HepC where there are no alternatives for some studies, others believe that great apes should not be used for invasive research except on the same basis that we would undertake research on a non-consenting human. I tend to agree with the first group but would be happy to see invasive chimp research disappear entirely if for example it was no longer needed for HepC research.

Almost every scientists I've met acknowledges that there is a gradient in sentience, capacity to suffer etc among animals and that should be reflected in the regulations that cover animal research, and perhaps the great apes should be put on a level closer to that of our own species. Getting all shouty doesn't help in a debate where the various points and interests are so finely balanced, I know it's your house style and all but from some of the posts you put up here I can tell you that your argument works better when you leave off the swearing.

Greg Laden, what does CPP's own research have to do with this? It might be relevent if he was doing research with chimpanzees but I seriously doubt that is the case.

By the way Coriolis makes a good point about not putting too much faith in genetic closeness as a measure of how similar a species is to us. You don't even have to go to outer space for examples, whales and elephants have more in common with us in terms of self awareness and social behavior rhan the more closely related rats and mice do. To look at another example we don't give basic human rights to early human embryos, even though they are 100% identical to us at a genetic level, because they lack many of the other characteristics we associate with personhood.

* I would add that I don't really count taking the occasional blood sample as invasive.

CPP: Which animals do you use in your research lab? Or tissues thereof? Full disclosure. Right now. Or shut the fuck up.

Greg, your statements here baffle me.

CPP, could you please be a little less aggressive in your tone and language. You're actually making some good points, but your choice of words obscures it.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Dude, you're kidding, right?

@MikeB: "CPP, could you please be a little less aggressive in your tone and language. You're actually making some good points, but your choice of words obscures it.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Dude, you're kidding, right?"

Apparently he can't. Although I tend to agree with his arguments, he clearly has the mentality of a 5-year old: "Bad words sound funny and make me look special! People pay more attention to me when I use them! Woohoo!"

I think what Greg is asking for is the foundation on which CPP builds his moral structure(s), and how those moral structures inform CPP as to what types of animals can be morally used in experimental research.

CPP has asked for âmorally salientâ similarities regarding humans, primates, elephants and other organisms. Greg is asking for examples of organisms that CPP feels have sufficient morally salient differences such that experimentation on them is acceptable.

There are two parts to this, first; what differences and similarities are present and/or absent, and second; how are those similarities and differences morally salient.

EMJ seems to be saying that the ability to exhibit a mental state analogous to PTSD following exposure to trauma is a sufficiently morally salient property that renders elephants sufficiently similar to other organisms with that property that elephants should be treated a certain way.

What this really comes down to is what is the definition of âmorally salientâ? Is it having more than 99.4% DNA similarity? Is it being able to exhibit things like PTSD?

In my blog post I try to argue that the âmoral salienceâ that EMJ and CPP are talking about is really being on the âhuman sideâ of the uncanny valley. If you are on the human side of the uncanny valley, then you are perceived to be âhuman enoughâ so that gratuitous harm causes feelings of distress in others that are on that side of the uncanny valley and so everyone on the human side of the uncanny valley should be treated nice.

The problem is, the location of the uncanny valley is based on feelings. There is no arbitrary way of determining where the location of the uncanny valley actually is. There are actually many humans that are on the opposite side. To an Anti-Semite, Jews are on the other side and are not human enough to treat well. To the Tea Baggers, Obama is on the other side. To Glen Beck, Bruce Springsteen is on the other side. To Liz Cheney, lawyers who defended Guantanamo detainees are on the other side. To Pro-lifers, fertilized eggs are on the human side, people who consider abortion acceptable are not.

@daedalus2u: Nailed it, especially the part about some groups considering other groups on the other side of the valley. But this is beyond the topic. We were discussing humanism and some people felt like EMJ had hidden motives about his post.

I apreciate that the discussion was about humanism, but unless the discussion reaches to and informs behavior, it is rather abstract and disconnected from reality.

With EMJ, Comrade PhysioProf, and Greg Laden it's familiar academic personality types on parade:

EMJ: The young white knighter building up social capital through moralistic onanism.

CPP: The accomplished pro who thinks that his credentials entitle him to be a tempermental pottymouth. He'll keep getting away with it, so kudos to him.

Laden: Sanctimonious greybeard nostalgic for his activist student days. (And who knew what an animal rightist he was?! Gee whiz.)

@daedalus2u: I may be wrong on this but why does the discussion necessarily have to lead to action? There are plenty of posts on SB which are discussions only and are not meant to incite any action. Pretty much everything posted in Physics is "abstract and disconnected from reality" in the sense that it does not incite any action. Galaxies are light years apart. I'm totally going to do activism on that.

The way I see it EMJ's post was simply a discussion on humanism. It was not meant to incite action of any kind. I do not see where, as PalMD and CPP are proposing, he has made a statement about animal rights (even implicitly). As a primatologist, it's kind of obvious he would post stuff on... I don't know... primates? It seems to me like those who jumped on him here are in fact voicing their disagreement over what EMJ has said on other posts. If that is true, their opinions should be disregarded as void since they do not contribute to this discussion but to other discussions. Again, just my opinion.

You dumbfucks have put a lot of words in my mouth. I haven't asserted jack fuck on this thread other than that EMJ is full of shit, and I certainly haven't taken any position whatsoever on animal rights, animal research, or anyfuckingotherthing.

I correct my mistake. CPP has indeed not mentioned animal rights/experiments anywhere in this thread. PalMD has, however, here:

"I suspect, based on Eric's earlier piece, that the primary implication is for animal research."

As I mentioned on his post (Ping! above), to me this sounds pretty much like a conspiracy theory. The title (Why I am not a humanist) and the piece focus on humanism. In some places, EMJ has discussed research on elephants, monkeys, etc, but this is not the focus of the piece. Don't believe me? What about the parts on Russell, Vonnegut, Foucault, etc? How are they a setup for animal rights/research? It's amazing how nobody criticizing here had a problem with those parts. Most of the criticism focused on the difference between humans and chimps and PTSD in elephants.

Now that all the hoopla over what I "intended" with this post has died down I can reveal the truth. My essay at The Huffington Post on the incompatibility of religion and science had just been posted and I wanted anyone who linked back here to have a similarly themed piece to read. Appleby's article had just been published and I thought, "Hey, that works."

I quite like the humanists. But everything I expressed are the reasons why I decided that this perspective wasn't enough for me. Humans are wonderful and I'm very fond of them, but our arrogance makes us think we're the only species that matters.

Animal Rights and Human Rights

emjohnson — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Animal Rights and Human Rights

It's wonderful to see that my Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front has generated discussion on this important topic. The issue as I see it is really quite simple and boils down to two essential issues: the benefits to science versus the ethics of invasive animal experimentation. The British Medical Journal study and BUAV report (pdf) that I cited hold the position that the harm done to animals, particularly primates, is out of proportion to the benefits that come from such research. Furthermore, our current understanding about primate cognition, emotional complexity, and their rich social lives raise significant questions about using these animals for invasive medical research. However, to resolve this conflict we will need both the tools of the scientific method and the moral considerations involved in making ethical policy decisions.

This is an extremely complex and difficult issue and can generate a lot of heated emotions on all sides. Several years ago my mother was diagnosed with cancer and the chemotherapy treatment she received had been developed and tested using primate models. At the same time my work in primatology has revealed to me the joy that a baby monkey or ape clearly experiences when protected in their mother's embrace. So I'm fully aware what a difficult topic this is both for researchers and the general public alike.

However, few may realize it, but the United States is completely outside of the international consensus on this issue. Only the U.S. and Gabon allow using great apes for invasive research purposes and we have the largest number of individuals, an estimated 1,200 chimpanzees, at nine U.S. laboratories (see Table 1 below). It is estimated that between 550-650 are government owned while private parties or institutions own the rest.

Research institutions conducting invasive experiments on chimpanzees. From Conlee (2007).

The majority of these animals are used in Hepatitis and HIV research. Despite the exacting protocols that are mandated by current legislation, such as the Animal Welfare Act, Public Health Service Policy and CHIMP Act, these animals spend much of their lives in great pain and with high levels of stress. For more on this please see K.M. Conlee's report published in the Proceedings of the 6th World Congress on Alternatives & Animal Use in the Life Sciences (pdf here).

Bipartisan legislation has consistently been proposed to bring the United States into line with the rest of the world on this issue, but the bills have regularly been defeated in committee based on the pressure from powerful lobbying interests. This has created extraordinary frustration among animal rights organizations and some individuals have turned their anger into direct action. Their websites maintain regular allusions to human liberation struggles of the past and to such organizations as the underground railroad that sought to smuggle African-American slaves to freedom. It was for this reason that I chose the particular historical examples that I did in my letter to them.

Of course, the connection between animal rights and human rights is a controversial one, particularly when any comparisons are made to the struggles of minority groups. However, throughout history oppressed groups have regularly been used in invasive experiments, often without their consent. This is especially true in the American context. The folklorist Gladys-Marie Fry in her book Night Riders in Black Folk History chronicled an African-American oral tradition about "night doctors" between the years 1880 and 1915, during the period when many blacks migrated to northern cities. These stories expressed the fear of many ex-slaves that the "night doctors" would kidnap them for experimentation and dissection.

According to the book Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America Before the Second World War by University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical History and Ethics professor Susan E. Lederer, it was revealed how many of these fears were justified. But it also demonstrated how the animal rights movement and the human rights movement have frequently gone hand in hand throughout history:

During this period [1900-1940], the moral issues raised by experimenting on human beings were most intently pursued by men and women committed to the protection of laboratory animals, the American antivivisectionists. . . In fact, it was an antivivisectionist sympathizer, British playwright George Bernard Shaw, who first introduced the term "human guinea pig" in the early twentieth century, to make clear the vivisector's equation of human and animal subjects (p. xiv).

The connection between human exploitation and animal exploitation is a complex but important issue. The oppression of other human groups occurs through a process of dehumanization. Whether the perpetrators were white slave owners, Nazi military doctors, or Japanese occupation forces in China, the use of invasive experiments was justified only because the powerful were able to convince themselves that "the other" was somehow less than human.

But animals already are less than human. This is where an understanding of evolution is important. When viewed along the continuum of evolutionary time we know that our species shares a close kinship with other primates and mammals. If it is universally accepted that humans should not be experimented upon, what about an individual that is 98.6% human (or rather, shares 98.6% of our DNA) such as chimpanzees? What about 93% in the case of macaques, the most used primate in invasive experiments today? This is a complicated issue and is something that requires a great deal of public discussion.

As it currently stands, there is intransigence on the side of scientists engaged in this research, influential government and private institutions that lobby Congress to maintain the status quo, and animal rights advocacy groups that submit report after report with little headway. It should come as no surprise that some people would break off from traditional channels and engage in extreme actions. Some of these individuals may be ideologues akin to the anti-gay or anti-abortion activists that one would find in rallies organized by Fred Phelps or Operation Rescue. However, I believe that most are people who are fed up with the stalemate on this issue and want to see change happen now.

We can and should condemn any and all actions when they pose a danger to innocent people, but we should also place those actions within the appropriate context. That is, if we genuinely care about resolving the issue. The reality is very simple. As long as nothing changes you can expect such actions to continue or even grow. I believe that creating responsible changes to US law would, not only put us in good standing with other researchers worldwide, it may also reduce the level of anger that this issue currently generates.

emjohnson Mon, 03/01/2010 - 02:00

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"Bipartisan legislation has consistently been proposed to bring the United States into line with the rest of the world on this issue, but the bills have regularly been defeated in committee based on the pressure from powerful lobbying interests."

Powerful lobbying interests? Would these include the American Liver Foundation and all the many other charities that support the hundreds of thousands of people in the USA suffering with Hepatitis C infection?

http://www.liverfoundation.org/
http://www.faseb.org/Portals/0/Content/Joint%20GAPA%20letter.11.09.pdf

I guess their views don't count in this debate, after all they're just ill humans.

First, I take issue with the statement:

We can and should condemn any and all actions when they pose a danger to innocent people...

because we should condemn violence toward ANY person, whether innocent or not.

Second, the 98% human argument is deceptive because, afterall, we are 1/4 carrot (according to Jonathan Marks... can't find his book right now to follow the reference trail).

Finally, simply because demeaning, racist metaphors were used in the past by well meaning people doesn't justify their continued use today.

I'll also point out that in most (if not all) of the countries in the world that have recently banned research on chimpanzees medical research on chimpanzees had already either ceased or had never started. That was certainly in the case in the UK where medical research on chimpanzees was (effectively) banned a decade after the last research chimpanzees left UK labs

The truth is that the rest of the world decided that since thanks to advances in other techniques (including GM animals) chimpanzees are required for very few areas of research, Hepatitis C being the main, and possibly soon the only, one, they would leave it to the Americans. That is why the claim that outlawing medical research on chimpanzees would "put us in good standing with other researchers worldwide" is simply not true.

It is becoming increasingly clear that there are two mainstream views on this issue: The view held by those who carry out or are relatively closely involved in animal research (research involving animal subjects in labs) and everybody else.

"relatively closely" including about 90% of medical researchers, almost all the major medical research charities and most patient advocacy groups.

If it is universally accepted that humans should not be experimented upon, what about an individual that is 98.6% human (or rather, shares 98.6% of our DNA) such as chimpanzees? What about 93% in the case of macaques, the most used primate in invasive experiments today? This is a complicated issue and is something that requires a great deal of public discussion.

Thanks Eric.

As much as some would like to frame the issue this way, there is no such thing as animal vs. human rights. It is a falsity. Humans do not have a "right" to the benefits of medical research which causes grave and lethal suffering on a chimpanzee. If experiments on primates were ended voluntarily or legislatively tomorrow, humans could not go to a court and challenge this ban on the basis that their "human rights" were violated. A simple example makes this plain. Under U.S. law, I don't have a "right" to health care. If I can afford pay for it, then I get it. If I cannot pay for it, I don't get it. If even basic health care is not a "human right" in the U.S., which it isn't, then I certainly have no "right" to demand that animals be sacrificed for research that will never benefit me because I can't afford to see a doctor. So that's a non-starter by reductio ad absurdum.

Second, animal abuse is already illegal by statute. A narrow exemption has been carved in these laws in the U.S. for specific, licensed research projects. Even if a non-licensed, non permittable type of research could possible save my life, I have no "right" to ask a court to overturn these statutory restrictions on the basis that this research could prolong my life. That's not how the law works.

Animal cruelty laws do not operate on an "ends justifies the means" basis. They operate in exactly the opposite manner. If an "ends justifies the means" approach was the basis of statutory construction, then any and all restrictions on animal research could be overturned based on a claim to a "right" by humans to the knowledge gained by any and all animal research, no matter how heinous. This is not how our laws are constructed. If folks don't like that, they need to change the laws.

Animal welfare and cruelty laws operate on a balancing test, with the burden of proof placed on researchers, who must apply for and receive permits, and an affirmative showing by the researcher that the research is (a) important and (b) cannot be obtained in a more humane and less invasive manner.

Some wish to re-argue, from first principles, the very basis of these laws: ie. "are animals sentient" or "should they really have any rights" or "do they really feel pain and should we be required to care." That ship sailed long ago. This is all settled law. What's left is the balancing test, and the balancing test should always place the burden of proof on the researcher and any uncertainty should always side with the animal. Only by this statutory construction will there be incentives for researchers to find more humane and less invasive alternatives.

Thanks Douglas. I really enjoyed your recent piece at Tispaquin's Revenge by the way.

You need to separate organizational advocacy for non-invasive, non-lethal research vs. invasive, lethal research on animals. Those are two entirely separate issues and must not be confused. What is at issue here is not the ends but the means. Questioning the morality or efficacy of the means is not a per se rejection of the ends. It is quite the opposite.

Douglas the reason that I posted both links was to show that the American Liver Foundation does support Hep C research in chimpanzees. They do do despite also supporting lots of other research methodologies including both in vitro methods and GM rodent models of Hep C infection.

Your idea that patients and charities care only about the ends and ignore the means is incorrect, spend a little time browsing Hep C patient advocacy groups and you'll quickly find discussion of research involving chimpanzees, for example:

http://hepatitis.about.com/b/2009/12/09/spc3649.htm

The British Medical Journal study and BUAV report (pdf) that I cited hold the position that the harm done to animals, particularly primates, is out of proportion to the benefits that come from such research.

As was described before, the BMJ review (it really can't be called a proper study) was incredibly flawed. Meanwhile, the BUAV is an animal rights group; of course it concludes that the harm done to animals outweighs its good.

I hate to say it, but it's true: You really are quite ignorant of the benefits of animal research over the last several decades, so much so that your prior post inspired me to resurrect something I wrote a couple of years ago for another blog, dust it off, and repurpose it for this discussion:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/03/answering_scientific_argument…

The post answers the "science-y" objections to animal research of Ray Greek and Niall Shank that were published in SKEPTIC Magazine back in 2008, as well as a bunch of other objections.

As it currently stands, there is intransigence on the side of scientists engaged in this research, influential government and private institutions that lobby Congress to maintain the status quo, and animal rights advocacy groups that submit report after report with little headway. It should come as no surprise that some people would break off from traditional channels and engage in extreme actions. Some of these individuals may be ideologues akin to the anti-gay or anti-abortion activists that one would find in rallies organized by Fred Phelps or Operation Rescue. However, I believe that most are people who are fed up with the stalemate on this issue and want to see change happen now.

This sounds very much to me like an apologia for violent animal rights extremists. Sure, you later say that violence shouldn't be permitted, but, oh, it's really quite understandable. Those nasty, "intransigent" scientists leave the "noble" and "idealistic" animal rights extremists no choice but violent revolution!

At least, that's sure what it sounds like to me.

Orac, with all respect, you are missing the forest for the trees.

Folks like myself and the author are clearly not 'extremists.' Nor are the vast majority of people who are concerned about the welfare of any animal, that by various circumstances, finds itself dependent on human care (voluntarily or involuntarily).

As evinced by existing animal cruelty laws, which are the sole legal basis that allows any animal experimentation whatsoever, there is a balance test between the legal right of the animal to live out its life and the wishes of the researcher, who claims a societal benefit may be obtained by physically and psychologically harming the animal in its care and often causing its life to end far more quickly and sadly than would happen otherwise. These are the laws we subscribe to and must abide by.

I believe that much of the allowed animal research in the U.S. does not meet this balance test and is only allowed due to institutional intransigence and inertia.

For primates I believe there should be no balance test. Primates are so similar to humans (which is precisely why they are used for research) that all experimentation should be banned as prima facie abuse.

As we know from humans, psychological damage from prolonged confinement and isolation is as profound as any physiological damage. Acute physiological damage, if treated properly, can heal. Even a bad cut can heal. Long-term psychological damage is not amenable to treatment. So in a way this comes down to a very empirical and answerable scientific question: what is the long-term psychological effects on primate subjects by intense confinement and isolation and destruction of their normal social structure? The burden of proof is upon the researchers who enforce this isolation and cause it and seek to justify it. If researchers are unwilling to explore this and consider it, then they have conceded the game. "It's not relevant to my research objective," is not a valid response given the underlying laws which allow experimentation to be conducted.

@Orac: You're quite right that there have been necessary medical breakthroughs using animal models and your post does an excellent job of pointing those out. Personally, I thought these benefits were obvious and so felt no need to emphasize them. Perhaps I should have been more clear. You present an important side of this public debate, but it's not the only side. If you were to replace the word "primate" with "human in a persistent vegetative state" or, even, "adult with the mental capacity of a child" would you be as bold in your advocacy even if there had been a long history of medical breakthroughs using these subjects as models? This is more than a rhetorical question. Modern research has shown that chimpanzees and bonobos have the cognitive and emotional complexity of four-year-old children. This makes the ethical consideration of their lived experience an important component of this debate, one that I don't see emphasized enough.

As for your point that my position is an apologia or that I might be "coddling terrorists" all I can do is shake my head. Understanding the motivations of a murderer is not to excuse the murder, it is to figure out how such an event took place with the goal of preventing any future cases. See, for example, my comments on this post for a few thoughts on short-term solutions. I greatly respect your opinion as a scientist, but such a comment suggests a significant level of ignorance in the realm of politics.

As for your point that my position is an apologia or that I might be "coddling terrorists" all I can do is shake my head. Understanding the motivations of a murderer is not to excuse the murder, it is to figure out how such an event took place with the goal of preventing any future cases. See, for example, my comments on this post for a few thoughts on short-term solutions. I greatly respect your opinion as a scientist, but such a comment suggests a significant level of ignorance in the realm of politics.

Trying to understand people's motivations in some cases is just stupid and Orac knows that better than anyone else. I honestly can say I tried this tactic a few times with people like Jenny McCarthy. I gave myself a headache at how incoherent and jumbled their arguments are. Deep down. I know that there is some form of logic to their actions that makes sense to them but it is buried underneath a horrendous mess.

"If it is universally accepted that humans should not be experimented upon..."

In what universe is this the case, Eric? In the universe in which I'm posting this, we experiment upon humans all the time. In fact, I'm one of those humans.

Where do you get off with falsehoods like this?

"Personally, I thought these benefits were obvious and so felt no need to emphasize them."

You are denying them.

"Perhaps I should have been more clear."

You misspelled "honest."

"You present an important side of this public debate, but it's not the only side."

It's the only honest side.

"If you were to replace the word "primate" with "human in a persistent vegetative state" or, even, "adult with the mental capacity of a child" would you be as bold in your advocacy even if there had been a long history of medical breakthroughs using these subjects as models?"

This is an utterly idiotic argument. Rights are based on reciprocity. Since I may become a human in a persistent vegetative state or one with the mental capacity of a child, those humans are well within any circle of rightsholders based on reciprocation.

"This is more than a rhetorical question."

It's entirely rhetorical, cheap, and dishonest.

"Modern research has shown that chimpanzees and bonobos have the cognitive and emotional complexity of four-year-old children. This makes the ethical consideration of their lived experience an important component of this debate, one that I don't see emphasized enough."

So what? There's no research that shows that I could ever be transformed into a chimp or bonobo.

Trying to understand people's motivations in some cases is just stupid ...

Not in general, and in this case, not at all. Judges and juries have to do it all the time when determining guilt and imposing sentences. The difference between self-defense, involuntary manslaughter, manslaughter and 2nd or 1st degree murder is based upon an assessment of motivation. Motivation is a valid and necessary area of inquiry.

@John:

"This is an utterly idiotic argument. Rights are based on reciprocity. Since I may become a human in a persistent vegetative state or one with the mental capacity of a child, those humans are well within any circle of rightsholders based on reciprocation."
>> This is an utterly idiotic argument. According to you, rights are based on reciprocity. According to your crappy logic, a human baby has no rights since it does not have any responsibilities. Therefore, we can proceed further and rape it if we would feel like it. This may sound to you as if it's coming from another planet but, if you do end up in the state that you describe, most of us would still consider that you have the same rights as before. Of course, you have a few crazies from time to time, such as yourself, who would consider yourself lower in terms of rights, but hey.

I think you are confusing legal rights, as in the right to bring an action before a court on your own behalf, with a legal right which can be defended on your behalf by those who have standing before the court. In the latter context, animals have a panoply of rights of a statutory nature and these rights can be defended by people. This is the entire purpose of the citizens' suit provisions under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and the U.S. Clean Water Act.

The right of animals to not be abused has long been codified into law. Try starving or beating your dog to death and see where your argument gets you in court. Even songbirds have legal rights in the sense that it is illegal to attempt to kill or injure them and the offender can be sent to jail. It is in this sense that animals have rights.

Alex wrote:
">> This is an utterly idiotic argument. According to you, rights are based on reciprocity. "

No, according to the way that everyone behaves.

"According to your crappy logic, a human baby has no rights since it does not have any responsibilities."

No, human babies have rights because we were all human babies at one time and many of us have human babies too. These babies will (mostly) become fully functional humans, and they gain additional rights as they gain responsibilities.

"Therefore, we can proceed further and rape it if we would feel like it."

Why would you conclude something as stupid as that?

"This may sound to you as if it's coming from another planet but, if you do end up in the state that you describe, most of us would still consider that you have the same rights as before."

That was the point I was making, Alex. Do you read?

"Of course, you have a few crazies from time to time, such as yourself, who would consider yourself lower in terms of rights, but hey."

What made you think that I was saying that mentally-impaired people are lower in terms of rights?

Douglas:
"I think you are confusing legal rights, as in the right to bring an action before a court on your own behalf, with a legal right which can be defended on your behalf by those who have standing before the court."

I'm not. Those aren't separate rights anyway.

"In the latter context, animals have a panoply of rights of a statutory nature and these rights can be defended by people. This is the entire purpose of the citizens' suit provisions under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and the U.S. Clean Water Act."

No. The existence of a restriction on human behavior, whether self-imposed or imposed by law, does not imply a corresponding right.

"The right of animals to not be abused has long been codified into law."

False.

"Try starving or beating your dog to death and see where your argument gets you in court."

Try pulling the legs off a live fly and see if anyone cares enough to drag you into court. Only those animals that reciprocate get rights, and those are strictly limited. For example, you are far less likely to get into any trouble if you torture your own dog than you would if you tortured mine.

"Even songbirds have legal rights in the sense that it is illegal to attempt to kill or injure them and the offender can be sent to jail."

I haven't seen any cats, who are prodigious killers of songbirds, being sent to jail. Have you?

"It is in this sense that animals have rights."

They don't. Of course, you will dishonestly try to twist my position to a claim that they deserve no moral consideration, which is not my position at all. Right?

So the promising young science blogger EMJ has fully outed himself as an animal rightist. To be sure, to EMJ's credit, he decries violent activity carried out in the name of this movement.

(By the way, I am very surprised by Greg Laden's views on this topic.)

Let's stop indiscriminately sacralizing primates, shall we? Should we ban research on mouse lemurs and lorises? What's next, pigs? They're surely smarter than mouse lemurs. How about the rest of the Archonta? ('Colugo' is just a handle, not my totem animal.)

How did we get to this point?

I would suggest that part of the reason is that the scientific (or rational, atheist, whatever the label) community failed to call Jane Goodall and Richard Dawkins on their animal rightist, anti-vivisectionst, ape-uplifting bullshit. Instead, their eccentric views were indulged because they are so respected as scientists. (Legitimately so.)

It's time to collectively say "Enough. No more of this animal rights bull." Before these views infiltrate any further into the rationalist community.

@John:
"No, according to the way that everyone behaves."
>> No, according to the way you believe everyone behaves. I do not behave like this and I consider that others have certain rights regardless of whether or not they can meet their responsibilities or what their responsibilities are.

"No, human babies have rights because we were all human babies at one time and many of us have human babies too. These babies will (mostly) become fully functional humans, and they gain additional rights as they gain responsibilities."
>> Again, entirely your opinion (and maybe that of others), but still no proof of anything. Also, please proceed further and define "fully funtional humans".

"Why would you conclude something as stupid as that?"
>> For obvious reasons. Do you read? A baby has no responsibilities and therefore, according to you, no rights. Oh wait! You changed your position. Incorrect, in fact it does have rights regardless of the lack of responsibilities because we add another subjective condition: we used to be like that at one time.

""This may sound to you as if it's coming from another planet but, if you do end up in the state that you describe, most of us would still consider that you have the same rights as before."

"That was the point I was making, Alex. Do you read?

"Of course, you have a few crazies from time to time, such as yourself, who would consider yourself lower in terms of rights, but hey."

What made you think that I was saying that mentally-impaired people are lower in terms of rights?"

>> I don't believe that I misread your statement, but just for clarification what did you mean by:

"those humans are well within any circle of rightsholders based on reciprocation."

My view is that you meant that other humans are now part of a group which has rights over you based on reciprocation. In other words, since you can no longer actively contribute to society in any way, they can do whatever they want with you because the social contract based on reciprocity is now void.

And I forgot the name, the above post is from me.

It's time to collectively say "Enough. No more of this animal rights bull." Before these views infiltrate any further into the rationalist community.

Well, that will be difficult, Colugo, given that this 'animal rights bull' has been codified into state and federal statute for a half a century. See also the U.S. Endangered Species Act and the U.S. Clean Water Act. You're going to have to change a lot of laws.

Keep up the good work.

Douglas Watts:

Whether deliberately or not, you are conflating animal welfare and environmental protection with animal rights. You are either being disingenuous or ignorant.

"My view is that you meant that other humans are now part of a group which has rights over you based on reciprocation. In other words, since you can no longer actively contribute to society in any way, they can do whatever they want with you because the social contract based on reciprocity is now void."

Huh? I was claiming the polar opposite. Reciprocity is alive and well because I would want to retain my rights if I ended up in that situation. That's what I meant by "those humans are well within any circle of rightsholders based on reciprocation."

"Again, entirely your opinion (and maybe that of others), but still no proof of anything."

I need to prove that we were once babies and that some of us have produced babies too?

Whether deliberately or not, you are conflating animal welfare and environmental protection with animal rights. You are either being disingenuous or ignorant.

Colugo,

If you have ever read the U.S. Endangered Species Act and the U.S. Clean Water Act, which you apparently have not, you would see that their entire purpose is protecting the welfare of animals. The welfare of animals is the only reason these laws were enacted. Reading them might illuminate their meaning.

Keep up the good work.

@John: I was probably wrong about the first comment, the one where you said you claim the polar opposite. Sorry for misrepresenting your opinion. Now, for the second comment, you either set up a straw man on purpose or did not understand my question. No I do not require proof that many of us have or have had sex and that a lot of this led to pregnancies. What I require proof of is that the simple fact of being a descendent of another human being immediately grants you unalienable "rights" that other animals do not have. You have also avoided my question of giving a precise definition for "fully functional humans" and did not respond to my other counter-points.

Doug:
"The welfare of animals is the only reason these laws were enacted."

False. Moreover, welfare is not synonymous with rights.

Alex:
"@John: I was probably wrong about the first comment, the one where you said you claim the polar opposite. Sorry for misrepresenting your opinion."

I accept your apology.

"...What I require proof of is that the simple fact of being a descendent of another human being immediately grants you unalienable "rights" that other animals do not have."

Walk into a crowded public place and kill a mouse. People might be disgusted, but that is perfectly legal in most contexts. Now walk into the same place, grab a baby from her mother, and kill her. I guarantee that the simple fact that the baby is a descendant of another human being grants her an unalienable right that you just violated.

"You have also avoided my question of giving a precise definition for "fully functional humans""

Humans whom we hold completely responsible for reciprocating.

"... and did not respond to my other counter-points."

What were those?

@John:
"Walk into a crowded public place and kill a mouse..."
>> Bad example. An example shaped by your own social conditioning and many other things. Here's a counter-example. I am sure that you have heard about the famous city of Sparta (Greece)? The Spartans practiced a eugenics policy with their newborns. If the newborn did not meet certain criteria he would be executed, sometimes in front of his own parents and the parents would agree. The Nazis attempted to practice a similar eugenics policy, but there were differences.

"Humans whom we hold completely responsible for reciprocating."
>> Interesting. Now suppose that a specific human fails to reciprocate because of refusal to reciprocate. Are his rights immediately withdrawn and is he considered an animal or do we tolerate a certain level of disobedience to reciprocity?

For my other counter-points, go back to comment 21. You have only answered my second counter-point.

"Bad example."

Why?

"An example shaped by your own social conditioning and many other things."

Yes, so?

"Here's a counter-example...The Spartans practiced a eugenics policy with their newborns. If the newborn did not meet certain criteria he would be executed, sometimes in front of his own parents and the parents would agree. The Nazis attempted to practice a similar eugenics policy, but there were differences."

You don't live in either place or time.

"Now suppose that a specific human fails to reciprocate because of refusal to reciprocate."

OK, he murders someone.

"Are his rights immediately withdrawn..."

No, there's a trial before that.

"... and is he considered an animal..."

Pretty much. Don't you know what goes on in prisons?

"For my other counter-points, go back to comment 21."

I don't see any other ones there.

"If you have ever read the U.S. Endangered Species Act and the U.S. Clean Water Act, which you apparently have not, you would see that their entire purpose is protecting the welfare of animals. The welfare of animals is the only reason these laws were enacted. Reading them might illuminate their meaning."

Wrong, ensuring the safety of water used by humans for consumption and recreartion (the sport fishing lobby being important here) was a, if not the, primary purpose of the clean water act. So far as the Endangered Species act is concerned you are confusing conservation with animal welfare, they are seperate concerns even if they do overlap in practice from time to time.

In your comments on farm animals, pets etc I believe you are confusing rights with statutory protection under welfare laws, I don't think they are the same, though I'll admit the definition of what a right is does vary between legal cultures. In any case your point is made moot bey the fact that there is a lot of legal protection in place for research animals, through the AWA and other regulatory bodies, it is simply not the case that animal research is an exception to the rules governing animal welfare in the rest of society.

I also think that it is worth noting that not every human has absolute protection, the factors that confer human rights on human beings are varied, including their level of sentience/sapience at a particular time, their potential to develop that further and their relationship to other members of society. So I support the right to choose, early in pregnancy and later in the case of serious fetal abnormalities or health risk to the mother, because I think any rights the fetus has are subordinate to the rights of the mother. Later, particularly after birth, that balance shifts to the fetus/baby. Likewise I would be happy to see presumed consent for the harvesting of transplant tissues from brain-dead patients. It gets tickier with people in a vegetative state because of both uncertainty over their status, and their relationship to others, in this case I think we are right to err on the side of caution.

We need to be vary wary of absolutes in these debates!

We need to be vary wary of absolutes in these debates!

Agreed.

Shouldn't you be more concerned about the welfare of great apes in the wild, where they're mercilessly killed by poachers, rather than a comparative handful of animals kept in labs where at least the procedures are done under painkillers, etc?

What on earth makes you think I'm not concerned about that? See my article in Wildlife Conservation.

In a legal context, this is called a 'dilatory' argument. It is a deliberate attempt to direct attention away from the subject of the discussion. It is also called 'grasping at straws.' See Eric's response.

Doug wrote:
"It is also called 'grasping at straws.' See Eric's response."

Eric offered the best example of grasping at straws when he dishonestly wrote, ""If it is universally accepted that humans should not be experimented upon..."

And he even followed up that blatant falsehood with another: "what about an individual that is 98.6% human (or rather, shares 98.6% of our DNA) such as chimpanzees?

Eric, how can you possibly claim to be a scientist when you spout such drivel. We don't "share 98.6% of our DNA" with chimps." Anyone who repeats such BS can't possibly be familiar with any genetic reality.

My wife spent a summer working for the the health dept. while there she collected mosquito samples and and tested them for west vile. We kill so many things every day however when people perform tests on animals others think they are doing horrible things to them. not all tests cause harm to the animals.

Eric states in his article: "But animals already are less than human." This is actually quite arrogant when one thinks about it. Animals are merely different from humans. And hey, humans are animals too! The other non-human animals are not on earth for humans to use for research. They have their own lives to live, and I don't believe that involves having electrodes hammered into their heads or poisons dripped into their bodies or any of the other tortures devised by humans. And no, Jon H., they are not given painkillers.

@colugo

"It's time to collectively say "Enough. No more of this animal rights bull." Before these views infiltrate any further into the rationalist community."

I bet that 50 years ago people were saying similar things about racial desegregation. I bet that that 100 years ago people were saying similar things about women's rights. I bet that 300 years ago people were saying similar things about religious tolerance.

It's all about social progress. The progress happens because people suddenly "click" and realize the wrongs committed in the past, and say "no more". Some people, like me, Greg Laden, and others have "clicked" on the point of animal rights and moved one step up the social and cultural ladder. You haven't. Enjoy being a cultural relic.

Bonobos and the Child-Like Joy of Sharing

emjohnson — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:20:00 +0000

Bonobos and the Child-Like Joy of Sharing

   Bonobos retain juvenile traits related
   to tolerance and cooperation.
            Image: Vanessa WoodsHow many times as a kid would your parents tell you to grow up and act your age? It turns out that not acting our age may be the very reason why we're so successful as a species.

Brian Hare and colleagues have just released a video (see below) showing a bonobo juvenile voluntarily helping another individual out of their cage to share a few delicious treats. In their study, to be released March 8 in Current Biology, the Duke researchers wanted to see if bonobos would choose to share with an unrelated individual even if they didn't have to.

Bonobos have long intrigued researchers for their unusual (except for us) propensity to cooperate and share with others, a trait not found to the same degree in our close cousin the chimpanzee.

Source: New Scientist

According to a review of the study in Science Daily:

The test subjects had the opportunity to immediately eat the food or to use a "key" to open a door to an adjacent empty room or a room that had another bonobo in it. The test subjects could easily see into the adjacent rooms, so they know which one was empty and which was occupied.

"We found that the test subjects preferred to voluntarily open the recipient's door to allow them to share highly desirable food that they could have easily eaten alone -- with no signs of aggression, frustration, or change in the speed or rate of sharing across trials," explains Dr. Hare. "This stable sharing pattern was particularly striking since in other, nonsharing contexts, bonobos are averse to food loss and adjust to minimize such losses."

In an earlier study by Hare, Victoria Wobber and Richard Wrangam in last month's edition of Current Biology, it was shown that bonobos may have retained juvenile characteristics related to tolerance that don't exist in chimpanzees. According to the researchers, selection for reduced aggression may have resulted in bonobos retaining a host of traits related to juvenility that are all genetically linked. Higher levels of tolerance, delayed development of social inhibition and a skull that doesn't exhibit as many morphological changes in adulthood could all be related to a similar cluster of genes. In this network approach to evolutionary change, a single selection pressure could inadvertently effect numerous traits at the same time because other genes get pulled along in a case of genetic hitchhiking.

This would explain why adult bonobos, like humans but unlike chimpanzees, resemble their juvenile stage more closely and exhibit some of the most extreme forms of social bonding in mammals (with the eusocial naked mole rats in a totally different category). A lack of inhibition would also be consistent with both bonobos and humans showing some of the most inventive and spontaneous sexual behavior in the natural world.

As Wobber, Hare and Wrangham concluded in their study:

Understanding the evolutionary processes by which ontogenetic changes occurred in bonobos may provide insight into our own species' evolution. Herrmann et al. proposed that the crucial cognitive adaptation of humans relative to other apes is the accelerated development of social skills in infants. Although the genetic changes that produce such developmental shifts are not well understood, if we can determine the process by which the ontogeny of bonobos evolved, inferences can be made regarding analogous evolution in our own species.

Reference:

Wobber, V., Wrangham, R., & Hare, B. (2010). Bonobos Exhibit Delayed Development of Social Behavior and Cognition Relative to Chimpanzees Current Biology, 20 (3), 226-230 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.070

emjohnson Tue, 02/16/2010 - 04:20

Tags

Brain & Behavior

Cooperation & Altruism

"... in our common ancestor the chimpanzee. "

The chimpanzee is an extant species, not our common ancestor.

Embarrassing slip up, thanks for catching that. Fixed.

"The Really Big Questions" http://www.trbq.org has an episode called "What Can Animal Minds Teach Us About Human Consciousness." Primatologist Frans de Waal and Cognitive Ethologist Colin Allen are guests along with Neuroscientist Christof Koch and Philosopher Colin McGinn. There is also a feature about Experimental Psychologist Nicola Clayton's Scrub-Jay studies. You should find it an interesting discussion.