Lord of the Apes: A Blog about Ethology, Primates, Minds, and Culture

Is there really such a thing as a spandrel?

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:32:00 +0000

While engaging in a bit of background research for last week's post, I stumbled upon a discussion of spandrels on one of my favorite blogs. When discussing the validity of evolutionary theories and evolutionary psychology in general, spandrels come up fairly often because they are usually red herrings. If a trait is a spandrel, and did not develop in an adaptive way, applying adaptive logic to it in order to justify your theory could undermine your work.

The article I linked to mentions the spandrel of blood color. As far as anyone knows blood doesn't appear red for any adaptive reason, it's just the color imparted by the iron element in hemoglobin. But hold on: the redness of inflamed or swollen tissues is absolutely used adaptively, in primate reproductive swelling, which I can't seem to stop referring back to.

The swellings themselves are certainly not spandrels; in baboons the swellings appear on their rumps, but in geladas swellings appear on their chests. Geladas are perhaps best knows by this trait, having been nicknamed the "bleeding heart baboons" (another of my favorite blogs). In each species the swellings appear in the most visible location. If these traits are adaptive and rely upon the redness of blood, can blood color still be a spandrel?

The real answer is that it doesn't really matter. Adaptive traits and spandrels are all evolving in concert with each other over the course of thousands and millions of years. None of these traits are independent, they are all inexorably intertwined (which is exactly why there are so many adaptive traits that rely on the bright redness of blood function). This is one of the most important lessons of ethology.

Gould and Lewontin, the the creators of the spandrel theory, wished to classify traits as spandrels or not spandrels. Spandrel traits can be found along all avenues of evolutionary biology, not just psychology. For instance, reproductive swellings in primates rely on both biology and psychology. Given the previously discussed risks of misapplying evolutionary psychology, focusing on spandrels just isn't a particularly useful or efficient way for an evolutionary psychologist to spend their time.

Tell Truths, Not Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:30:00 +0000

On either side of a recent conference in London, where participants discussed the possibility that "human ancestors were exposed to a period of semiaquatic evolution", a number of voices have taken aim at the so-called Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. The AAH attempts to grapple with some interesting ideas, like why fish protein and fat is so important to our health, notably brain development, or why infants have an instinctual ability to swim, which disappears between 4 and 6 months. According to the mainstream theories of recent human evolution, these facts don't make a whole lot of sense.

It has been pointed out by many journalists (see the infamous Space Ape Hypothesis) that the AAH is still kind of ridiculous. Henry Gee points out the most crucial of flaws in the AAH, and more importantly, faulty underlying reasoning. For instance, sinuses, proposed to aid the theoretical Aquatic Ape in maintaining buoyancy underwater, are found in all mammals.

The AAH debate has been warmed over by a million people, both qualified and unqualified, over the course of decades. We don't need another tiny voice in that mix; I don't have anything to add about the AAH. But, the AAH represents much of what is wrong with evolutionary psychology, and points to a core issue that I've argued and discussed with many of my peers over the past several years: How do you make any progress in evolutionary psychology without creating a bunch of baseless just-so stories?

The short answer is, Slowly, and with a lot of hesitance.

When a psychologist found that that individuals who worry the most about social rejection are most likely to act out in response to rejection cues, what she found was truth. This is a fact of human psychology. There aren't any such facts about ancient psychology because we have no prehistoric psyches to work with, only archaeology, non-human primates, and modern humans.

What can we then say? Still quite a bit. Example: incest avoidance. Animals avoid mating with siblings and other close relatives because of the dangers of incest. There are many mechanisms spread across the kingdom that work to prevent incest from happening; in baboons, males disperse to a new troop to avoid reproducing with their relatives. In humans, we come to recognize those who we grow up in close company with as family members. This frequently applies to childhood friends of the opposite sex, and was a major problem for the sustainability for the Israeli kibbutz system. This is a psychological mechanism, born from an evolutionary need. It is respected enough to have been named. It is called the Westermarck effect.

Ultimately, the validity of evolutionary psychology lies with the validity of all science. If your findings aren't logically sound, other scientists will see through them, and you won't get published. Modern science has an additional tool: statistics, which allows us to falsify theories with varying degrees of confidence. Like any other field, statistics isn't perfected, but it is a powerful tool.

Unless your argument against evolutionary psychology is that all evolutionary psychologists are deranged, there is no particular reason to target evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is like psychology which is like all of science. There is fraud, there are charlatans, and sometimes just honest people get things wrong. We do what we can about that, but we don't disavow the entire field.

If you would like to read more about the AAH itself, esteemed professors and bloggers John Hawks and PZ Meyers recommend that you go here. The site is more than just a discussion of the AAH, it is an informative primer for any interested in the logic of evolutionary psychology.

Ruminations on a conversation between primatologists

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Thu, 09 May 2013 22:04:00 +0000

A couple years back I had the privilege to hear Robert Sapolsky speak. It was a detailed talk, but given how much I know about his research already, there wasn't a huge amount of new information for me to learn. However, I did pick up on something he only briefly mentioned, and eagerly looked forward to asking him about it after the talk. I said to him:

"The baboons I've seen in the bush are very thin and spend almost all day every day foraging, so they have little time to engage in social interaction except mornings and evenings. You said that your olive baboons have the entire day to socialize; how is this possible?"

Dr. Sapolsky explained that the savanna his baboons live on is a paradise, ripe with easy to find food and moisture. Of course, other baboons could and do live under different conditions. But his baboons were lucky, and their fortune was certainly part of what made them such a great study group.

I haven't thought about this conversation much recently. That is, until I encountered a recent article in National Geographic. In this article, the author asked many of the same questions that came to mind when I heard Sapolsky speak: 'what on earth do these baboons feed on?…and where do they go to drink and sleep?'

Olive baboons are widely spread species in Africa, and while they are known to inhabit arid regions, the Chalbi Desert (the area discussed in this article) is dryer than most other such regions. I am most familiar with baboons sleeping in trees, but in wilder areas where there are more predators (notably leopards), high, steep cliffs are baboons' favored sleeping grounds.

I'm not sure that the authors of the Nat Geo article knew all of this (or much of any of it), but they may have found all the answers they needed, at least for this group of baboons. The troop in question spent a lot of time around doum palm trees, which provide water rich fruit, and shade. Apparently these baboons spend a great deal of the daytime in the doum palms' dense shade. I've seen baboons rest under cover during the heat of the day, but never to the extent found by the authors, in the Chalbi Desert.

These baboons don't live like Sapolsky's monkeys, that is for sure. Their environment does not seem to be able to sustain a large population, but it does seem to be able to support a small one consistently. All this speaks for the remarkable flexibility of baboons. They, like many other species of monkeys; chimpanzees and of course humans, can adapt themselves to survive (and possibly even thrive) in a myriad of different environments. They may not live the most healthy lives, but they will survive to reproduce, and keeps their genes alive.

Oh, and if you were wondering about the truth of Sapolsky story, well have a look at this.

Okay, you probably weren't doubting me, but I'm allowed to be boastful on occasion.

Vervets: the Forbidden Circle

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Fri, 03 May 2013 00:37:00 +0000

I lied. The second article on vervets did not appear in Science, but in Current Biology. Other than that, I stand by my earlier statement: this is an unusual and thought provoking article, and it happens to be about vervet monkeys.

In this experiment, the authors created a locked container which contained appealing food. The subjects, a troop of vervet monkeys, could see inside and smell the food, but they could not get at it. Only a single low ranking member of the troop was trained in how to open the container.

Without needing to read the paper, I could tell you how things would start out. The dominant individuals in the group would mess around with the container, carrying out all kinds of violent acts in an attempt to force the thing open (which would all fail). Once the alpha got tired of this, it would go do something else and the second rank individual would make similar attempts to open the container. This is a common scene among the baboons, when they're trying to get into a locked storeroom or car.

In order for the monkeys to get at and eat the food inside the container, all dominant individuals would need to exhaust their own interest and wait. They were also required to stay a safe distance away from the container, somewhere between 10 and 15 meters. Only when the dominant individuals were a safe distance away would the monkey trained to open the container actually open the container.

It took most of these troops a few long trials to begin to understand that they would need to show restraint. But after they picked up this notion, the process went surprisingly smoothly and quickly, and the trained monkey would invariably be allowed to open the container. Unsurprisingly, the subject group that was experienced in raiding garbage bins and picnics took much longer to get over the fact that only a single low ranked individual could open the container. The authors go into great deal of game theory, but I will leave that by the wayside and get to the conclusions.

There are a number of fairly impressive accomplishments included in this paper. First, that the authors were able to train a wild vervet, to essentially be a confidant in their experiment. It is kind of incredible. Second, their main results show that these monkeys are capable of restraint on group and individual levels. Monkeys are notoriously bad at self-control, but this shows the power of reinforcement learning. I can't imagine any of the monkeys I've worked with, in captivity or the wild, being trained to show these levels of restraint. So kudos to the authors, and kudos to vervet monkeys.

Vervets: Flavor & Social Transmission

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:45:00 +0000

This week is vervet week. I have declared it. Coming from me, this means a lot, since I've never been particularly interested in vervet monkeys. But, two articles have been released in science recently: both on vervets, both so intriguing that I have been compulsively rereading them.

The first of these comes from Andy Whiten of primate culture fame. He has done impressive work in the past, and this latest vervet paper is an extension of that, though perhaps not the intuitive extension. The authors presented their wild vervet subjects with two types of food, varying two attributes of each type. First, the food was either colored blue or pink. Second, the food either tasted good, or tasted terrible.

Taste aversion can be found in pretty much all mammals; a type of learning that most humans are familiar with. By taste aversion, I mean that when you taste something bad you learn very quickly not to eat it again. Often it only takes one exposure to learn this, which in the animal behavior world is very very fast. Not only will animals learn to avoid foods that taste digusting, but they will also learn to avoid foods that they think made them sick, even if they didn't eat anything that tasted bad.

There is a broad literature on taste aversion in rats (a literature I happen to know pretty well), and in rats you will find even stranger, related phenomena. Rats possess the ability to socially transmit taste preferences through their sense of smell. They will actually smell the breath of other rats, and later, they will show a preference for food that smells and tastes like the odors they smelled on the other rat.

It turns out that vervets can do basically the same thing. The authors of this paper have shown that while vervets quickly learn to avoid the color of food that they know tastes bad, they can learn socially through watching other vervets to ignore their earlier preferences. For example, if a male vervet learns that pink food tastes gross, and then the male disperses to another group where everyone learned a long time ago that blue food doesn't taste good, the newcomer male will watch and learn to eat blue food, in spite of his earlier memories.

Rats possess a unique neurochemical mechanism for learning this kind of stuff, and cannot learn taste preferences socially. Yet this is exactly what vervets do: watch other members of their own species and using that information, learn new preferences and extinguish old ones.

To see this in vervets is striking. If someone reported these results in chimpanzees, it would not be particularly surprising because chimps are extremely smart and adaptive. Vervets are not great apes, not lesser apes, they're just old world monkeys whose brains are smaller than many other old world monkeys, notably macaques and baboons. If we see this kind of behavior in vervets, it really does suggest that this cognitive ability is fundamental in all old world monkeys.

Moreover, the authors refer to this type of learning as "cultural learning". I am not sure if I fully agree with this; the line between cultural and social learning is not clear. However, I would certainly say that this type of learning is at least an evolutionary antecedent to cultural learning.

van de Waal, E., Borgeaud, C., & Whiten, A. (2013). Potent Social Learning and Conformity Shape a Wild Primate's Foraging Decisions Science, 340 (6131), 483-485 DOI: 10.1126/science.1232769

Lip smacking and the origins of language

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:49:00 +0000

In a previous installment, I discussed gelada vocalizations and some new research specifically dealing with copulation calls. Thore Bergman, one of the same researchers who put together that paper, just published a short correspondence discussing a wide array of gelada vocalizations and their relationship to the evolution of human language.

This topic is been a tricky subject to approach because no primates' vocal range compares to humans'. The closest connection has been "lipsmacking", which is exactly what it sounds like: monkeys smacking their lips at each other without vocalizing. It very common among multitude of primate species.

Lipsmacking isn't a behavior that intuitively seems like it would have a connection to human language, but it turns out that the rate at which these monkeys smack their lips together is remarkably similar to the rate at which human lips open and close when they produce speech.

Gelada's take lipsmacking a step further. It turns out that they can produce a vocalization while smacking their lips together; it is called a "wobble". A as with lipsmacks, the rhythm of these wobbles is very close to the rhythm of human speech (between 3 and 8 Hz).

As I am fond of repeating, wobbles and human language are an example of convergent evolution. Baboons don't wobble. Chimps don't wobble. All of these species lipsmack. Even though the wobble is closer to language than the lipsmack, we just aren't that closely related to geladas, so the simplest explanation is that wobbles and language evolved independently from the same foundation, lipsmacking.

Have a look for yourself. Bergman provided a video in the supplement to his new publication, here.

Monkey Funk (or lack thereof)

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:46:00 +0000

Sea lion is first non-human animal to keep a beat

Ronan is the first known non-human mammal successfully trained to bob her head in time with a metronome-like sound — and then to apply her new skill to tempos and music she had not previously heard, according to researchers at the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

This is the biggest news in auditory (or at least musical) animal behavior, right now. Make sure you get to the bottom of the linked page where you will be rewarded with video evidence. It will be worth your while.

Reminds me of a similar, recent article featuring rhesus macaques. I was quite surprised to find that I had not previously written a post about said article. I won't let it by me a second time.

In this article, the authors describe results which suggest that macaques can detect rhythmic perception, but not beat induction (according to the earlier study, sea lions are the only mammal other than humans that can do both). The theory that there is a distinction between these two faculties is know as the dissociation hypothesis.

None of these terms are intuitively obvious. Beat induction is the ability to detect regularity of beats in a rhythm. It is what gives us our ability to tap our foot along with the beat in a song. Rhythmic perception merely refers to the ability to tell that some specific amount of time has passed. This sort of timing work has been studied extensively in many animal species, and it is well known that pretty much all mammals can time intervals. In fact, I have myself done some work demonstrating rhesus macaques' flexibility in timing intervals (Diapadion et al, unpublished results or something).

There is a major drawback to this monkey study: there is no behavioral data. It is entirely EEG. In many ways, I prefer EEG to fMRI or electrophysiology for brain imaging. EEG takes a distributed look at the activity of billions of neurons, unlike eletrophysiology, where you isolate signals from single neurons and pretend that the entire brain region surrounding acts the same way. fMRI also takes a distributed look at brain activity; in fact it is often more accurate than EEG. Unfortunately you can't put monkey into a MRI scanner unless the monkey has been knocked unconscious. You have to stay still in the scanner to get good data, and monkeys, well, they're not so good at that, ever.

fMRI is also superior to EEG because fMRI allows you to see deep into the brain, whereas EEG only lets you look at surface areas because it is on the surface of the skull that you place the EEG electrodes. There might be something going on deep in the auditory cortices that the authors' EEG findings are missing. Which is why it would be nice to see some results from additional metrics. Practically speaking, I don't believe it is likely that the authors are mistaken; the primate literature supports their hypothesis.

In the sea lion video, the speaker suggests that beat keeping may be far more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously thought. No, probably not. This EEG study suggests that monkeys are totally incapable of beat induction, and it stands to reason (and evidence) that this holds for other primates. As it stands, convergent evolution is the most likely explanation.

Honing, H., Merchant, H., Háden, G., Prado, L., & Bartolo, R. (2012). Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) Detect Rhythmic Groups in Music, but Not the Beat PLoS ONE, 7 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0051369

Old Drifters

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:22:00 +0000

Since reading and writing about prairie dog dispersal, my thoughts have returned to some odd events which took place among the baboons some time ago.

I wrote about these occurrences in a some old posts. To summarize: two old male baboons, Chester and Mortimer, both moved from the main troop to the second troop, higher up on the mountain. In Chester's case, he was following Eunice, his favorite female. Mortimer's motives were less clear. Eventually, both returned to the main troop. This was not the first time the older males have pulled stunts like this, and it won't be the last. Although, there won't be many more opportunities for these two in particular. They're getting pretty old.

At the time, I wondered if there were any examples of behavior like this in the literature. The prairie dog article sheds some fresh light on these baboons' behavior. I don't think these baboons are dispersing for the same reason as prairie dogs, but I think it is likely that mid to late-life dispersal may be more common, and perhaps systematic, than researchers have been inclined to believe.

For my baboons, the odd origin of these troops (they were all one big troop many years ago when the population was smaller) muddies the water. These behaviors might not even be valid dispersals. However, it is difficult to say if these males would leave the area if they had the option, for baboons in Tokai can't disperse beyond the forest without encountering serious resistance from human populations. Or, as I am fond of considering, they might just be outliers.

On Prairie Dogs

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 22:14:00 +0000

Not exactly my model species, but I talked about birds a short while ago, so why not prairie dogs? They're at least mammals with strong social organization. Anyway, I paper came to my attention, about dispersal in prairie dogs, and it was published in Science, so of course I had to read it.

Prairie dogs disperse when all close kin have disappeared

Prairie dogs pull up stakes and look for a new place to live when all their close kin have disappeared from their home territory--a striking pattern of dispersal that has not been observed for any other species.

Original article is here (behind Science's paywall). As previously discussed, baboons disperse when they are on cusp of full adulthood. They find a new troop, and usually stay with that troop until they die.

Prairie dogs differ from baboons in several striking ways. They live in large groups, called colonies, and the size of these groups can vary quite a bit, which is nothing unusual to a primatologist. But unlike baboons, prairie dop groups can range from five to thousands. Colonies can be further subdivided, into wards, and then coteries. Needless to say, prairie dogs almost certainly do not possess baboons' rich understand of who's who in the group. Nevertheless, these subdivisions are oddly reminiscent of the four-level hierarchy found in Hamadryas baboons.

Coteries are the closest thing there is a basic unit of prairie dogs. Coteries are sort of like harems: they consist of a male, several females, plus juveniles and infants. The juvenile males disperse soon after they are a year old. They leave their natal territory, settling about 1.5 miles away, on average. Females tend to stay put.

The author of this paper, Hoogland, references the esteemed Hamilton and May. Their theory was that dispersal occurs because reducing the amount of competition (for mates, food, etc) between related individuals is good for inclusive fitness. On the other hand, the potential for cooperation between related individuals might outweigh the costs of competition. Over the past few decades, Hamilton and May have been supported by findings in the field.

Hoogland has found contradictory evidence in his prairie dogs. When zero relatives are around, females are much more likely to disperse, 2.5 to 12.5 times more likely.

These prairie dogs have no opportunities for competition between relatives, but also no opportunities for familial cooperation. You might think that the dangers of dispersal would still be a major impediment, but apparently these populations live pretty close together, and the females usually just move one colony over, so the risks are low.

Hoogland's own words, to sum it all up:

"The absence of close kin in the natal territory is thus a proximate cause of natal dispersal by prairie dogs, but the ultimate cause is presumably the opportunity to find either a new territory that offers the benefits of cooperation with close kin that dispersed there previously (rare), or a new territory in which survivorship and reproductive success might be less dependent on cooperation with close kin (common)."

This may not be a study about primates, but the laws of dispersal and inclusive fitness govern all animals. When we discover a behavior violates our conceptions about how life must act in order to maximize fitness, there are two main possibilities:

The environment that this species lives in has given rise to a different approach to the challenge; unusual local factors are altering behaviors on the fringe.
The foundations of the behavior are not what we think they are. There are factors not being considered, which are crucial to understanding why these behaviors happen. Just because our model is correct most of the time, doesn't mean the model accurately represents why animals behave the way they do, in this case.

And anyone seriously studying this stuff ought to pause and consider new evidence in this light, if only briefly. In this case, the first option is probably at work. Prairie dogs are mammals, not so different from primates, but as Hoogland states, this is the first evidence of its kind, irrespective of species. Who knows, maybe a re-examination of dispersal behavior in primates will find similar evidence that's been overlooked. If you find it, chances are you'll get it published in Nature or Science.

Hoogland, J. (2013). Prairie Dogs Disperse When All Close Kin Have Disappeared Science, 339 (6124), 1205-1207 DOI: 10.1126/science.1231689

Dispersal Patterns

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:11:00 +0000

In this post, I want to discuss an important aspect of primate group behavior: dispersal. Most baboons spend their entire lives as part of a single group, with one main exception. As males approach adulthood, they will disperse, leaving their troop of birth to join a new troop, where they will (usually) spend the rest of their lives.

Female dispersal is rare, for dispersal is hazardous. Leaving the safety of the troop is a problem, but leaving the safety of known territory is also problematic. It's much easier to get away from a predator when you know the location of the closest tree. So why do primates disperse at all? For the most part, dispersal is the only way genes are exchanged between groups of primates. There must be some mechanism for individuals to change groups, or else inbreeding will become a problem.

Male baboons typically leave a troop around the age of 8 or 9. Leaving at that time benefits everyone: the males are strong enough to have a decent chance of surviving on their own (barring bad luck, which happens), the male will have better chances at mating and producing healthy offspring in another troop, and the female relatives of the dispersing male improve their own fitness by encouraging him to leave the troop and reproduce elsewhere.

Females will often refuse to mate with males born in their group, even if the female and male are not directly related. The male can force himself on the female, but that kind of behavior usually isn't worth the extra energy investment. If a male forms a mating pair with a female who doesn't want to be paired with him, she will be looking for any extra-pair copulations she can find, and the male isn't going to get any sympathy from the rest of the troop.

If a male isn't strong enough by age 9? He can usually stick around for a little while longer, but chances are he won't get much stronger, and at some point, the males and females in the troop are likely to let him know that he isn't wanted any longer. In all scenarios, the male will usually become ostracized if he does not leave.

Dispersal is difficult to study. Researchers have to follow young adult males, which is not particularly easy even when they stay within a troop. They need to stay close to the males, so they don't miss when they leave the troop, and then follow them through mostly empty bush, savannah, forest, until they join another troop. Little is known about the daily life of a dispersing male. As far as I am aware, no one has made a career of following dispersing males. Much of what we know has been observed by researchers following troops, who have tried to glean as much as possible from events where new males have joined the troop from outside.

Around the Cape, dispersal is a major issue because the baboons' natural predators have been removed from the ecosystem by humans. While in the process of dispersing, many males are caught by leopards or lions or hyenas. If a male isn't part of a troop, he will more easily fall prey, particularly if he is weak compared to other dispersing males. Without any large predators around, there is a higher male population, and usually not enough space among the existing troops to sustain all of them.

In the second troop, there has been a large influx of males more recently. Bopple seems to be hanging onto his status as alpha, but there have been as many as nine males in a troop of about 50. The troop is almost constantly in chaos. Males need to be able to keep apart from one another, and with that number of males in a single troop, it is simply impossible for them to keep distance between themselves. As a result, they chase each other, they chase the females, and they fight. It isn't a pretty sight. Watching male baboons face-off against each other is exciting, but it does get old, and that sort of volatility doesn't make data collection easy.

For additional reading, and more rigor (though I don't know how outdated their findings are, check out Alberts and Altmann, 1995.

Deadbeat Moms

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:34:00 +0000

Why some fathers get left holding the baby.

Scientists have cracked a 140 year old mystery as to why, for some animals, it’s the father rather than the mother that takes care of their young. Researchers from the Universities of Bath, Sheffield and Veszprém (Hungary) found that role reversal was caused by an imbalance in the numbers of males relative to females.

Another paper published in Nature. This is exciting stuff, as the press articles say, this has been a mystery "140 years old", which is to say, as old as Darwin's work, since it has always been an irrefutable fact that the males of some species do sometimes help rear children. Many researchers have grappled with this problem over the past century and a half. Earlier work tended to appeal to ecological or life history explanations.

Ecological theories suggest that the physical habitat which the animals inhabit drives males to be involved in the rearing of young. A theoretical example (solely for the sake of discussion): an environment turns dry due to drought, resources are scarce, and if a male and mate succeed in producing live young, the male would be drawn to invest in the infant because the chances of successfully producing more progeny is severely diminished. His energy is better spent helping out.

Similarly, a life history explanation would suggest that as males age, their ability to compete with other males for mating rights with multiple females decreases. The alternative is to monopolize a female's time, and invest energy is making sure a small number of progeny reach adulthood. While these explanations may seem entirely plausible, the evidence simply does not support these theories.

Until now, thanks to the Liker et al's new theory. In the article's original title, the authors only claim to have answered the question in birds. It may be that no primate species are affected, that is, that role reversals in primates are not caused by an imbalance in sex ratio. Then again, there aren't many primate species in which the male ever takes over rearing for the female.

In many species, the males stick around, but do not get involved. In baboons, the males (and usually fathers) are ever present, but they don't engage in child rearing. They will interact with babies on occasion, but that is a far cry from rearing. Species in which the males play an active role in raising infants: owl monkeys and, of course, humans.

Humans are an interesting case, and not just because all my readers are human. When modern human males take over the rearing of children, is it caused by an imbalance in sex ratio? Probably not.
But then again, humans are not a good study subject for this sort of question; the environments we inhabit are not "ecological". However, our close relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, do not engage in role reversals (nor do other apes), so the particular type of sexual role reversal we've evolved may be unique.

Liker A, Freckleton RP, & Székely T (2013). The evolution of sex roles in birds is related to adult sex ratio. Nature communications, 4 PMID: 23481395

Lighter Fare

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 01:02:00 +0000

I don't know enough Japanese to understand what the narrator is saying. I'm not even sure what's going on, this doesn't look like a normal mating scene. The monkeys are probably acting weird because they are in a cramped space and the keepers have been trying to get them to mate for hours. There is clearly some creative editing taking place.

Also, these are mandrills, another member of the Papionini Tribe, but they are not baboons. And a final word of warning: this video is NSFW.

Keep It Down

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 18:54:00 +0000

Cheating monkeys try to hide their infidelity

Wild gelada monkeys change their behavior to avoid getting caught cheating on sexual partners. When the dominant leader male in a gelada monkey herd is away, females take up with bachelors, but they're discreet, making fewer sexual noises to avoid detection.

Original publication is here. I wish that 4 years ago, I'd been aware that this kind of work could get you a paper in Nature (even if the data in this paper have been under collection since 2009). According to the Nature article, geladas engage in extra-pair copulations (ECPs) i.e. when a female has intercourse with a male who she is not paired with. Pairs are usually established by the male following the female around all day and physically preventing any other male from mating with her. So ECP opportunities don't present themselves very often, but then again, there are many hours in the day.

About 10% of gelada copulations are ECPs. The number of ECPs goes up as the distance from the paired male increases, particularly beyond 20 meters. Exactly what you would expect. However, I found the large number of silent copulations surprising. Allow me to digress for a few paragraphs:

One day, I was up on the mountain with the second troop of baboons. The group found their way out of a tall pine forest, into a cultivated field where they could pick grain. Much of the troop was wary of entering the field, probably because the baboons recognized that it was an open, exposed space, which the forest was not. So a large portion of the troop remained in the woods, playing, grooming, socializing.

Bopple, the young and inexperienced alpha male, ventured into the fields. For all of that day, he had been following Nikki, a high ranking female in estrus. Bopple had left her side for this excursion. We were standing at the edge of the forest, so we could watch the animals in the trees as well as those who had stepped into the field to forage.

I heard a female copulation call, which is nothing unusual. But then Bopple came running. He jumped onto a large boulder at the edge of the trees and stared intently at the bushes, from which issued the call, for about a minute. Eventually he relaxed, but stayed up on the boulder, perhaps continuing to keep an eye out. Nikki was nowhere to be seen, for many minutes after.

Nikki engaged in an ECP, and she was smart about it. Bopple didn't take revenge immediately, at least not within a 5 minute window. He might have done so later; he's a male baboon, so beating up on females is a common occurrence. I don't think he could have attacked the offending male, since (as far as anyone knows) there was no information to identify the individual. Displacement aggression would be much more likely.

Geladas are not baboons, even though they are sometimes called "gelada baboons" and are closely related to true baboons. They are part of the same "Tribe" (a non-traditional taxonomic rank that sits between Family and Genus): Papionini. Macaques are also in this Tribe, so the similarities between Species may not be strong. Since doing background research in preparation for this article, the differences between baboons and geladas have never been more apparent to me.

In a previous post, I found an audio sample of a chacma baboon copulation call. Have a listen. Then, watch this video. Copulation calls have been the subject of much study over the years and findings are myriad, but I have never heard baboons copulate as quietly as these geladas. I would not have dreamed this was possible, since it looks like geladas are going through exactly the same behaviors when they mate. According to the Primate Info Network, when in estrus, female geladas usually only mate 2 to 5 times a day. From personal experience and from published evidence, I would be comfortable saying that female chacma baboons copulate at least a hundred times a day.

From this, I infer that the copulatory behaviors of geladas are quite different from those of baboons (or any other species), and if their copulatory behavior is different, odds are that their deceptive behaviors will be different as well. Geladas are a strange species, what with the red swellings on their chests and almost entirely grass based diet. Plus, all gelada vocalizations are quite different from chacma vocalizations, not just copulation calls. I am normally critical of any hypothesis that argues that baboons are the species of choice for studying social mechanism and hominoid evolutionary biology, and since geladas have become a new standard for studying social cognition, I am skeptical of them as well. Compared to baboons, macaques, and apes, we do not know a great deal about gelada cognition. We just haven't been studying geladas for long enough.

le Roux et al have made a good start. This is "the first study to systematically document tactical deception of a primate living in a natural environment", and the importance of that should not be understated. There are two obvious directions to go from here: fill out our understanding of gelada behavior and replicate this research in other species. The first will happen, it is happening in Ethiopia right now, but it will take a while.

The second is more difficult, but in my personal opinion, more important. Unlike the Ethiopian highlands where "there is simply no place to hide", the Bush or Fynbos, the natural habitat of chacmas, affords plenty of opportunities to copulate in secret. Nevertheless, I am all too aware of how difficult study primate concealment behaviors, for readily apparent reasons. I have heard many extra-pair copulations while among the baboons, but I don't know that I have ever seen one. On the other hand, I wasn't looking for them. I don't think it would be exceptionally difficult to do dedicated full-day follows of each monkey in a pair. Someone just has to do it.

le Roux, A., Snyder-Mackler, N., Roberts, E., Beehner, J., & Bergman, T. (2013). Evidence for tactical concealment in a wild primate Nature Communications, 4 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2468

They All Look The Same

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:21:00 +0000

A few weeks have passed since Iran claimed to have sent a monkey to space and back. It did not take long for skeptics to point out that the two monkeys look nothing alike. I can't begin to explain why Iran wouldn't do a better job staging their publicity photographs. My mind has been occupied with (in my opinion) a more interesting question: Why is it easy to distinguish between individuals of some primate species, but not others?

I've spent time with a number of primate species, but in terms of sheer hours of exposure, chacma baboons and rhesus macaques take the top two slots. I know both these species very well. Yet, rhesus macaques are easy for me to distinguish between, while chacma baboons are exceptionally difficult to identify. After spending a few hours with some macaques, I can reliably tell you their name and personality, mostly from looking at their faces. After spending hundreds of hours with the same baboons, I could not tell them apart, at least not based on their faces. They really do all look the same. Its more effective to look at the pattern of tears on their ears, and the shape of the callosities on their rumps. Its quite humbling, actually.

A similar phenomena exists in humans, known as the Cross-Race Effect. Or, as the All Look Same effect. In humans, the difference is based on race, but its not racism. How much of the effect can be explained by nature versus nurture is a matter of contention, but has everything to do with an individual's upbringing, who the individual spends time around as they grow up.

The monkey face recognition effect must be different because I didn't grow up spending large amounts of time around rhesus monkeys. So, I turned to genetic diversity for ideas. The more diverse a species is, the easier it should be to identify within the species. It stands to reason that the species which is much easier to identify (rhesus macaques) would have higher genetic diversity.

Research started off easy. The rhesus macaque is three times as diverse but more closely equivalent in damaging coding variation as compared to the human. That is about as straight forward an answer as I have ever seen in the title of an academic publication. Okay, so what about chacma baboons?

Baboon diversity is not as well understood. Rhesus monkeys are widespread, plus they're the animal of choice when it comes to biomedical research. Baboons are also widespread, and favorites of field researchers. But you don't see them as much in labs, so genetic testing is not a routine procedure. Nonetheless, I found an article which addresses my questions.

Quantifying diversity is a not a simple matter. From data collection to bio-informatic analysis, it can be a bumpy road. I don't know why exactly Newman et al. chose to quantify diversity with the mean percent pairwise difference in haplotypes, but it happens to be pretty easy to explain. To use the metric, you take your data, a set of DNA samples from individual monkeys, and compare each individual's DNA to everyone else's within the same species. You count the number of differences observed between individual base pairs at the same places in the DNA sequences. Then, convert that number into a percentage, and finally, average all of the comparisons between individuals. That's the author's measure of within species diversity.

The diversity found in rhesus macaques was 4.2%. In chacma baboons, it was 0.9%. That is a considerable difference. These numbers are only given a small mention in this part of the paper, so I don't know the margins of error. Nevertheless, these finding support the hypothesis that baboons are harder to distinguish because there is really is less distinguishing information available; less diversity within the species.

However, there are some extenuating circumstances. The baboons I interact with in Cape Town are from a small population, in fact, a subspecies of chacma baboon, Papio ursinus ursinus. Now their diversity is cut down even further, possibly by an order of magnitude or more.

Most of the rhesus macaques I've spent time with were in captive colonies. There are many rhesus sub-species; no one knows the pedigree of colony monkeys, another dirty secret of the biomedical community. But, my best guess is that they came from rhesus populations as wide spread as you can imagine, so the diversity in colonies is likely to approach 4.2%. I have interacted with wild groups of rhesus macaques, but only for short periods (hours), not for months as I have with the baboons. Are they more difficult to identify than the captive monkeys I know? Yes, they are, but not as difficult as wild baboons.

Which raises a follow-up question: What is the right way to quantify how easy it is to tell members of a species or sub-species apart? My gut feelings aren't going to hold up under scrutiny. Appropriate paradigms already exist: show people (or monkeys) a series of faces, some new some repeated, and ask them if they've seen each one before. As I've heard many Professors say (to myself and others around me), "you could get a thesis out of these experiments."

Yuan, Q., Zhou, Z., Lindell, S., Higley, J., Ferguson, B., Thompson, R., Lopez, J., Suomi, S., Baghal, B., Baker, M., Mash, D., Barr, C., & Goldman, D. (2012). The rhesus macaque is three times as diverse but more closely equivalent in damaging coding variation as compared to the human BMC Genetics, 13 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2156-13-52
Newman, T., Jolly, C., & Rogers, J. (2004). Mitochondrial phylogeny and systematics of baboons (Papio) American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 124 (1), 17-27 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.10340

Lord of the Swell

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 01 May 2012 00:33:00 +0000

I was reading a piece by Jesse Bering in Slate the other day, about the innate biological associations between behavior, cognition, culture, and the color red. This is a subject of some interest to me, which is why I clicked on it in the first place; usually I stick to the stuff he writes for Scientific American. Jesse Bering also tends to write articles that are quite long for pop-science, so if I clicked on every link within the text of the article, I'd lose days to one of his pieces.

Exceptions must be made, of course. This time, after finding myself clicking on an enticing link which happened to include "erupting" and "baboon's rump" in a single sentence, I was redirected to... my own blog. This blog. (this page, to be precise).

Now that I have finally "made" it, and become the foremost internet authority on baboon swellings, I guess I will have to keep this place kept up a little better, lest I lose my hard won title. Unfortunately, I do not have any swellings news or insights at this time, but I do have an excellent article to present on baboons and visual symbols, the latter of which I've come to know quite a bit about in the last couple of years.

Monkey See, Monkey Do. Monkey Read?

Monkeys banging on typewriters might never reproduce the works of Shakespeare, but they may be closer to reading Hamlet than we thought. Scientists have trained baboons to distinguish English words from similar-looking nonsense words by recognizing common arrangements of letters. The findings indicate that visual word recognition, the most basic step of reading, can be learned without any knowledge of spoken language

They taught baboons to recognize words! More specifically, the baboons learned to recognize collections of characters, and it looks like they also learned how to extrapolate and apply their rules for what can and cannot be a word to some they'd never seen before. What this does not mean is that the baboons associated meaning with words, and to avoid confusion, we should not say that the baboons were able to read. These animals were able to look at complex stimuli, and say if they made sense as a collection, based on a model they had learned. That's it.

Tsk tsk, Science. Good thing I know better by now.

Make sure to check out the accompanying video to see what the baboons are actually doing, plus, it gives an explanation of how their setup works with a zoo like enclosure, which is pretty slick. This is a pretty crazy experiment, mainly because I wouldn't have though it would work. You could answer the same kind of questions with something less limited than English words, but since it worked, I can't really complain. I've been trying to think of criticisms e.g. how the monkeys could be using an alternate strategy to get the same results, but so far I haven't come up with anything parsimonious.

Reading is not like other outlets in linguistics. Much of primate research looks at vocalizations, in order to find and identify the roots of human linguistic structures. These days, its all about finding the progenitors of syntax, since its been clearly established that semantics meanings are something apes can learn, even if their vocabularies are limited compared to ours.

Macaques can do it too, and while macaques have different strong points in intelligence compared to baboons, this kind of experiment plays more to their strengths than it does baboons'. This is exciting because macaques do have the ability to connect abstract symbols with semantic meaning (in preparation). The best example comes from Matsuzawa's chimps, and I've been shown videos of them matching colors to Japanese kanji, along with more advanced tasks, but those videos do not appear to be publicly available yet.

Here's the original article on Science if you want to take a look. Also, ResearchBlogging is down, what's up with that?

In other news, just finished the excellent English translation of Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red. Coincidence?

Rise of the Apes

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:55:00 +0000

In other news, I viewed Rise of the Planet of the Apes the other weekend, and was generally impressed. Primatologists are supposed to be supportive of the movie because it did away with any remaining need for ape actors, by demonstrating that CG apes are just as effective. Inaccurate portrayal of these species must be viewed as a lesser evil, in this light.

"Rise" does a number of good things when it comes to showing off primate behavior, but when it goes wrong, it goes wrong. The scene where Caesar "asks permission" was almost offensive. Not only is this open palm gesture not a natural behavior as indicated, but it doesn't make any sense, behaviorally. Chimps do not ask permission, not in any explicit sense. This error betrays a gross misunderstanding of primate cognition.

Yet, the most unrealistic part of the movie was Caesar's appearance. I understand what they were going for: they wanted to make Caesar look more human, and make his emotive gestures jive with human movie-goers. His sclera are white, his snout is short, and his features are generally softened. Unfortunately, this aesthetic decision sent Caesar into the uncanny valley. He doesn't look like a chimp, and he does not look human, either. He looks unnatural. He was still my favorite character, though.

The other ape characters, like Rocket the alpha chimp, looked remarkably real, more real than I was expecting. The days of ape acting are over; anyone still using live apes in film and photo has no excuse other than greed.

Despite some of the things I've sad, the Oscar for Visual Effects should have been awarded to "Rise" - Hugo's gears and flying papers do not stack up. Maybe they were more challenging from an engineering perspective, but the fact is that the psychology of getting people to believe that human-like creatures are real is a far more impressive accomplishment.

The Language of Consciousness

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 03:35:00 +0000

Thanks to the wonders of Leap Day, I can now make this post before the end of February. Tis a Leap Day Miracle. I've been doing a lot of writing lately, mostly the dry sciencey kind, but I've had time for some fun stuff on the side, so I have no excuse for not writing more here.

Today, I have a news story for you, which reveals an interesting finding: that chimpanzees are thinking about what other chimps know when they open their big mouths.

Chimpanzees consider their audience when communicating

Researchers found that wild chimps that spotted a poisonous snake were more likely to make their "alert call" in the presence of a chimp that had not seen the threat. This indicates that the animals "understand the mindset" of others.

read more...

My criticisms of the paper as they are of the news article, but seeing as the news article is what most people read, it may be of greater lasting importance.

Let me begin by saying that I am not the world's biggest fan of ape language research. In a nutshell, I believe that apes don't need to be using our version of language to communicate in a complex manner. Much of this is the fault of the news media, since the best way to connect with a lay audience is to relate findings to topics the audience is intimately familiar with. Few topics are as strong as language, in this regard.

Entirely absent from this article is any mention of Theory of Mind, which is more what this research is about than language. This is an important finding because it suggest that chimps have mental models of what other chimps know. The soft vocalization in the presence of the snake suggest that they may even model what non-conspecifics, i.e. other species, are aware of.

Most animals flat-out cannot do this. Even in primates, the ability is hotly debated. Baboons, for instance, elaborately model other baboons' relationships with members of the troop, but modeling of immediately state-of-mind is not something we have a lot of evidence to support.

The ability to comprehend that others exist in the same capacity as one's self is one of the major stepping stones to achieving consciousness. Humans have this ability, but it has been doubtful that any other species comes close. The mirror self-recognition test, one of the most difficult to pass and hotly debated tests in animal cognition, only evaluates an animal's ability to recognize its own unique existence, much less the existence of other minds. These recent findings suggest that the chimps have abilities that go far beyond self-recognition; it is very exciting work.

The Tooth Fairy

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 22:14:00 +0000

Good, here is the post, left intact on my other computer. I said I would keep this update at least once a week. Once a month, however shameful that rate may be, is something I can stick to. So now I've technically got October and November covered. But it doesn't help matters that there hasn't been a great deal of interesting news coming out of the monkeyworld, either, so I can't even write half-strength posts about that. Regardless, here is an entry that is quite overdue.

Life as a male baboon is short and brutish, as it is for so many males in the wild. And females, when you often think about it. But usually not as short.

The bottom line is that males fight a lot, and when they fight, almost all of the damage they do to one another is with their massive fangs. But teeth don't last forever, just like male rank in the troop never lasts. After years of raking each others' flesh and bones with their canines, not to mention the added wear from, you know, eating, the canines will be lost.

Usually it doesn't happen all at once. I haven't had a chance to witness this process much, but usually the tip ends up broken, and then the main shaft will break off, and finally the entire tooth will fall out.

This isn't a great picture, but it is an amusing one to be sure, and as informative as we need. I unfortunately do not have any pictures from my own baboons because no one I know has a quality camera and the particular attention or desire to snap shots of the old males' canine-less maws. However, the above picture of a gelada serves the purpose well enough. He's mid yawn in this picture, and you can't see his remaining teeth yet, but you can already easily tell that they're missing. Look at how the skin stretches, and is pulled inward; if there were teeth there, the skin would be a comparatively flat surface, but without the large canines, the skin is pulled into the empty space to lessen the tension as the monkey yawns.

Among the troops, there are many old males who look like this. Old Chester and Betrand are missing all of their canines, and Mortimer is almost there. I suppose Morty must be a bit younger than I initially thought, since a chipped, yellowed, but intact lower canine remains in his mouth. None of these baboons will ever be on the top of the pile ever again, but they're still extremely dangerous, and have more than enough strength to take on any baboon female out there.

Fights aren't the only thing that ends the lives of monkey teeth. I know a few middle-aged rhesus macaques who've barely faught a day in their lives, but some of them are missing canines as well. Furthermore, there is a troop of baboons further down on the cape which roams near a bread factory. They frequently raid said factory, and the result is extremely bad baboon teeth, thanks to the large amounts of processed carbohydrate in the bread.

I mention the topic of teeth because recently, Aaron came out of a routine fight, and one of his upper canines was missing. Not too long ago, I noticed that Aaron's teeth were not as bright and shiny as we had previously thought. They were not visibly marred, but quite yellow. Further reason to believe that while Aaron is still a strong baboon in his prime, he is not as young an we once thought.

Rather than being on the upswing in terms of strength, Aaron has begun his decline, which is a scary prospect for a male baboon. There will be many more challenges to Aaron's authority, and the end of his reign is now in sight.

On that note, Happy Solemnity of All Saints.

Post Averted

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 02:15:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

I had a post all ready, and I kind of deleted it all and Blogger saved over. I don't even know how it happened, I couldn't seem to even undo the deletion. Kind of a crappy deal. And I was feeling pretty bad about not posting, even though my RSI has not been treating me well of late.

There is a chance that the post survives on my other computer, in which case I will post it tomorrow, otherwise I may wait until Wednesday or Friday to rewrite the thing. Sorry.

At least in the formal archive, there will be no blank entry for the entire month of October.

Rural Legends

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:54:00 +0000

One day, about a year ago, I heard a colleague recalling a tale from the north of the country, about how the baboon up there would raid the local farms, and at times, they would not only take food with them, but puppies. I inititally assumed the puppies were being dragged along to be eaten, despite the fact that baboons do not hunt. I was quickly corrected, for according to the story, the puppies were subdued by the baboons, for as long as necessary, until they behaved as if they were born baboons.

The idea was that the baboons were basically forcing the dogs to ethologically imprint on them, causing the dogs to identify with the baboons as members of their own species, other dogs. What is odd is that the puppies, at least those in the video, are not terribly young, which is usually a requirement for successful imprinting. On the other hand, humans can adopt puppies who have been raised by a mother for some time. The likely key is that the dog is a domesticated species, altered to allow for easier taming and imprinting. Konrad Lorenz had no such advantage when he trained his geese.

You hear a lot of crazy things about baboons from some of the locals, that they eat farm animals by night, or cast magical curses on innocent townsfolk, so at the time, I assumed that the yarn about dogs being raised as baboons was just another tall tale. What baboon would sit on top of a dog for years until it wised up?

I'm not one to contradict video evidence, though. In the future, perhaps I will be able to know better: though I originally heard the story from an unreliable source, it was corroborated by the aforementioned colleague, who I trust. He hadn't seen any such cases first-hand, but the evidence he'd been presented with was convincing enough for him. The truth of the phenomenon makes it no less impressive. Monkeys, baboons included, are often quite impatient, and I am honestly shocked that baboons around the continent have the forethought and will to tame their own dogs.

I look forward to reading a scholarly paper on this process any day now.

Missing the Point

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 06:25:00 +0000

Project Nim, the hot new film about the life and times of Nim Chimpsy, famed ape language subject, has been out in select theaters for a few weeks now. The press has been abuzz about the film, and its been received remarkably well by critics and viewers alike. Someone is my position was bound to hear a lot about it before I ever got around to seeing it, but see it I did, and now that I have, I can say a few words about how troubling a film it is.

When the director, James Marsh, was interviewed on a recent episode of The Bat Segundo Show, he repeatedly stated things like "that isn’t the film that I think would work for me" or "(that film isn't) the one I’m interested in making" when asked why he left out any mention whatsoever of other key players like Washoe and Nim's namesake, Noam Chomsky. But wait a moment, Mr. Marsh who's story is this, yours or Nim's?

Our society has entered a bountiful era of docu-dramas: The Kennedys, John Adams, The Tudors, and Frost/Nixon, just to name a few. We are inundated by colorful depictions of "history," some of which vary wildly from the known facts. I believe that in this new epoch of docu-dramas, now more than ever, films that call themselves documentaries have a responsibility to viewers, a responsibility to constructively inform.

Marsh makes it clear that his intent is to tell a story, a very particular story about the entity that was Nim. The other characters, the humans, don't really matter. They're in the movie because they need to be, without them there could be no telling of Nim's story. Once they no longer have a place in telling the story, they have no place in Marsh's movie. What results is the depressing tale of one misunderstood chimpanzee who made scientific history, but honestly got off pretty damn good compared to the vast majority of research animals. Is it accurate? The film manages to be scientifically accurate, but that isn't saying much, considering that Marsh's technique for ensuring scientific accuracy is to only include as much scientific history in the movie as is absolutely necessary.

Let us now return to my prompt, and I admit right here, that I am missing the point. If its neither about the people and how they were changed by Nim, nor the science and how it changed our understanding of our place in the world, nor the animal rights angle, then just what is a person supposed to think about after watching Project Nim?

I've been told that my "What can we learn from this? How can we act on what we learn?" mentality is part of my lot as a member of Generation Y. I've never found that to be an explanation why one shouldn't try to learn how to improve and not repeat past mistakes. Its not as if my generation was the first in a hundred years to overquote George Santayana.

These are the questions I must ask: "What are we to take away from this? What are we supposed to learn about the world around us, and in turn ourselves? How are we intended to change, as enlightened by this documentary?"

Marsh's films do not lend themselves to his approach. The problem first appeared to me when I saw Man on Wire, Marsh's first documentary film. Marsh does some ingenious stuff with style and cinematography, but the entire experience left me wanting. Look at other critically acclaimed, modern documentaries which focus on small group, like King of Kong (or Darkon, Murderball, The Woman Who Married the Eiffel Tower, and plenty of others). King of Kong is a narrative, and a compelling one at that. It also has no trouble taking the time to tell you about the people, the communities who make these stories possible, how these groups have come to exist (and persist), and why they mean something.

Man on Wire fails spectacularly at this aspect. Marsh is excellent at manipulating his audience in order to draw them into the immediate story (though personally I never managed to care that much), but in the end it falls flat. Marsh shows us an entire team of underground tightrope walkers, but who are these people? What kind of person was drawn to that ideal in the 70's? Where are they now? What did that experience mean to them in the context of the rest of their lives? Man on Wire failed to actually address the most important part of a documentary: Why should anyone care about these brief events from the 70's? What's the impact? What's the point?

I admit that I am a little bit bitter because if Project Nim were more like King of Kong, about the people who are living in a post-Nim primate research world, it would be about people like me. Instead, Project Nim is about a few people, some of whom are still involved in the primate cognition world, as they were almost 40 years ago. And its not actually about them, either! Its about Nim, except that never does Marsh ever consult any real primate ethologist to try and understand what Nim actually would have been going through during these experiences. Marsh implicitly criticizes the human in the movie for personifying Nim and not treating him like a chimpanzee, yet Marsh himself makes no effort to rise above these personifications.

Gah, the frustration mounts the more I contemplate the movie. Anyway, those are my stylistic gripes with Project Nim. Now for the ugly part.

There's some dirty, nasty deceptions of the involved humans by Marsh. I'll only point out one, but I think it is the most egregious. Marsh implies very stongly that when Nim was taken to LEMSIP, Dr. Terrace, the project leader, did nothing whatsoever to aid Nim in his plight. In fact, Terrace spearheaded the effort to have Nim released, bringing the issue to the media's attention and publicly challenging LEMSIP. Terrace offers this and other concerns in an article recently published in the LA Times.

Don't take my word for it, the situation is documented in Elizabeth Hess's book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, and the particular passage is available for your reading enjoyment thanks to Google Books (provided the correct pages are up on the rotation). Hess is by no means easy on Terrace, but she gives credit where it is due.

One should note that this is the book which the movie is supposedly based on. Marsh knew what actually happened, he must have, yet he deliberately omitted that part of the story and presented Dr. Terrace in exactly the opposite light. No one in this story is an angel, but they're still people and they still have lives. Marsh refuses to apologize for any of his protrayals.

I'm not an expert in Nim's history though, so I've no idea just how much else Marsh twisted in his presentation of this history. It doesn't matter much, I simply can't condone this level of blatant misrepresentation, and it taints the entire film.

Project Nim is an interesting film to watch, in spite of the fact that it is not a very good movie. It does provide a window into the life of one very real ape, and no amount of misportrayal, deludedness, and lack of direction can make the classic, pure footage of Nim being Nim less remarkable.

I have no idea what's going on

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 16:09:00 +0000

The picture says it all. I've had all these good things to write about come up, and then BOOM this new grant socked me right in the bean machine and my life instantly shattered into little pieces of madness. In short, I have too much stuff to do, and my hands are sore from all the writing.

In truth, the submissive behavior this (zoo) baboon appears to begin by presenting his butt, a standard submissive behavior, but then everything shifts into nightmare world territory when he lifts the leg, starts screaming at the humans, and does the weird hand thing. I've seen the hand thing before, but in macaque monkeys. And its only this one guy in the colony who will sometimes rest his hand near his tail when he is being groomed from behind. He's a bit of a jittery monkey overall, but not totally neurotic; he's much calmer than that baboon is under similar circumstances.

Then again, its also a juvenile, so his behavior is difficult to analyze. There must be something ethologically relevant to "hand-to-butt" behavior, though. I've seen it too many times in too many species. Its related to the presentation behavior, which is in turn derived from the female copulation stance. Females don't have the luxury of being able to scratch their butts during copulation; there's an awful lot of force involved, and the female's frame needs all the support it can get to absorb it all. Where would the added hand gesture have originated? Oh look, I found at least one recent, directly relevant article discussing this subject.

Well look at that, complex thought is still possible in my mind afterall. I'm too curious not to write up a synopsis of these findings regarding the copulation position, and I do have a much needed vacation coming up.

Where You're Not Quite On Top

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 17:11:00 +0000

This paper has been making the rounds, unsurprisingly, given its featured status in Science and the fact that it was picked up by the New York Times.

Baboon Study Shows Benefits for Nice Guys, Who Finish 2nd

From the wild to Wall Street, as everyone knows, the alpha male runs the show, enjoying power over other males and, as a field biologist might put it, the best access to mating opportunities.

The beta is No. 2 in the wolf pack or the baboon troop, not such a bad position. But conversationally, the term has become an almost derisive label for the nice guy, the good boy all grown up, the husband women look for after the fling with Russell Crowe.

It may now be time to take a step back from alpha worship. Field biologists, the people who gave the culture the alpha/beta trope in the first place, have found there can be a big downside to being No. 1.

I don't mean to imply that the paper is bad by asking this, but how exactly does the New York Times decide what to write up in their science section? I suppose a great deal of it must be author dependant, like this one by Nicholas Wade, which was clearly a topic which he would choose to write about.
The paper is a great media story, too, since it addresses a controversial issue, and manages to get into the human element of the back and forth rhetoric between Stephen Jay Gould and... well, a lot of people in paleoanthropology.

Enjoy the read. It covers a lot of old and new ground about what may and may not cause stress among primates from all walks of life, who have achieved varied levels of success. If you're trying to figure out how stressed you are and what personality type you are, you're probably still better off getting some old fashioned tests.

On post-ejaculatory wiping

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 03:33:00 +0000

Stop monkeying around and pass me a leaf

Chimpanzees in Budongo Forest in Uganda regularly employ leaves as 'napkins' to wipe their penis after sex, researchers discovered

The authors of a study called High Frequency of Postcoital Penis Cleaning in Budongo Chimpanzees do not beat about the bush. "We report on postcoital penis cleaning in chimpanzees," they write. "In penis cleaning, leaves are employed as 'napkins' to wipe clean the penis after sex. Alternatively, the same cleaning motion can be done without leaves, simply using the fingers. Not all chimpanzee communities studied across Africa clean their penes and, where documented, the behaviour is rare. By contrast, we identify postcoital penis cleaning in Budongo Forest, Uganda, as customary."

My first thought: What about masturbation?

The Guardian doesn't mention it at all, but the paper does... once. Its little more than a passing acknowledgement, however, all mentions from there on out are specific to coitus, and the data included in their tables follow suit.

Masturbation is a behavior distinct from copulation. The two end in orgasm for the male, but the resemblances end there. The two activities serve entirely different purposes: coitus is for reproduction and social purposes, masturbation (in males) is for monitoring and controlling ejaculate output.

Which is not to say it is impossible that the two activities could have overlapping purposes. That's where this study starts to come into play, or could come into play. But, the paper chooses not to examine masturbation activities in this context. I'm not sure quite why, to be honest.

Take to the baboons: I've seen them almost always finger clean after they pluck the rooster, but I cannot think of a single copulation which involved cleaning. Granted, copulations are much messier affairs, but its the female who dart after sex. The male generally follows leisurely behind for a few paces, or sits down and starts grunting. That'd be an interesting behavior to compare to across species, and in the case of masturbation, it really should not be difficult at all to gather data.

Unless chimps aren't into jerking off as much as most other social primates. I really think I would have heard about it if that was the case.

A final aside: it would be great to see some, you know, significance statistics for the data in this paper. Otherwise, fun read!

Thanks to Pfeng or Retrochef or whatever she prefers to call herself these days for the tip on this paper.

O’Hara, S., & Lee, P. (2006). High Frequency of Postcoital Penis Cleaning in Budongo Chimpanzees Folia Primatologica, 77 (5), 353-358 DOI: 10.1159/000093700

When you look into the monkey, the monkey looks into you

noreply@blogger.com (Diapadion) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:37:00 +0000

Monkey steals camera to snap himself

A macaque monkey in Indonesia took a camera from a wildlife photographer before snapping himself in a variety of poses.

The black macaque, one of the more eerie looking monkeys around. I say this a lot, but there's something about those eyes. However, one must remember that while these two pictures are quite a sight, there are probably seventy more of the monkey rubbing his fur against the lens. I'd really like to see all of those, actually.

The picture I've selected is almost certainly an example of aggressive behavior, however. It would be easier to tell with a few more frames, but the bared teeth and the lifted eyebrows. This monkey is looking into a dark, reflective lens, and does not realize that this mirror image is him. He believes it is a different monkey, at least something that is being threatening right back at him.

This reminds me of an idea we had among the researchers. We were out there all day, and as I have noted, the baboons have a particular liking for cars. Since the baboons would swarm over a car, whether new or old, we've been able to witness some interesting behaviors. A slightly reflective windshield does not differ much from a camera lens, and if the monkeys looked into the windshield, one could assess whether or not they were self-aware based on their reaction to seeing their own image.

This also could have yielded an extra effect over the range of ages. A car is sort of like a trophy for certain baboons. The adults give a damn one way or the other about the cars as long as they aren't trying to run the troop over. The largest of the juveniles, even subadults, quickly lay claim to the highest point on the car (the roof), leaving the hood, side mirrors, trunk, and bumpers for the smaller baboons to ensconce themselves on.

The mirrors and windshields created interesting effects from what I did observe on the side. For the young ones, the mirrors were clearly frightening, so there's no theory of mind there. I never determined if the older males reacted in the same way, as they messed around with the mirrors much less. The potential exists for something bigger, however. Put some big mirrors under the windshield, and watch all the monkeys react. You could even introduce a laser pointer to the experiment and to take a kind of mirror recognition approach.

I do not think that an experiment like that would yield positive results, though. A little evidence exists that macaques can pass mirror self-recognition tests, but the majority of research has indicated that they cannot. Baboons might be a different story, but baboons are even more socially adept than macaques, which means that their intelligence is focused on understanding conspecifics, but not necessarily themselves.

Properly controlling this experiment would be kind of a nightmare, but it might have been well suited enough for a pilot study. The large sample size and strong spread of individuals in different age groups is a major strength of working with baboons in general. To my knowledge, not much longitudinal work has been done in wild baboons where the focus has been on the juvenile years. This is a time where social bonds are more malleable, and less clear to everyone. It would be great to better understand social and cognitive development during these formative years, but I freely admit that several lifetimes of work would probably be required to lay the foundations of this research.