The Red Notebook

BBC: Orangutans use ‘charades’ to talk

No they don’t.

This sort of anthropomorphising in popular science news stories really irritates me—especially when, as in this case, the anthropomorphising is being done by the scientist involved:

“When the keeper gave the orangutan the really nice food, understandably, that was the end of it,” explained Professor Byrne [an evolutionary psychologist]. “But when the keeper pretended to fail to understand the original gesture and gave the wrong food, the orangutans stopped using the gestures they had used before and started using some different gestures,” he explained. “And when the keeper half understood and gave the orangutan part of the treat, the orangutans started to repeat the same gestures that they had used, but they would repeat them even more enthusiastically.”

Professor Byrne likened it to a game of charades. He said: “Part of the skill is to do the miming and the gesturing in the cleverest way – but also you are paying attention to what your team is guessing, and you tailor what you do next to what they are doing.” Effectively, the orangutans were able to take into account the states of knowledge, ignorance and partial knowledge of the keeper and react, said Professor Byrne.

Setting aside the fact that the orangutans’ behaviour is nothing like a game of charades, can anyone explain how this tells us anything about what is going on inside the minds of these great apes? In what way does their behaviour differ significantly from that of a dog that is being teased with a treat? If the dog begs in some way and you ignore it, it tries something else; if you give it some of the treat, it begs some more, getting more excited if you pretend to ignore it; if you then give it the remainder of the treat, it soon realises and stops begging.

I am pretty sceptical of evolutionary psychology as a whole. This sort of experiment simply bolsters my scepticism.

New Scientist: Why bonobos make love, not war

… Pygmy chimps or bonobos are both literally and metaphorically our kissing cousins. If you know them at all, it is probably as the most highly sexed of all the apes, but they are also considered by many to be our closest living relative—closer even than the common chimp.

This is incorrect. Bonobos are not more closely related to us than are chimps, nor vice versa; bonobos and chimps are equally closely related to us.

As the (subscriber only) article goes on to explain:

Somewhere between 6 and 8 million years ago, our ancestors split from the line that would become today’s two species of chimps. Then around 2.5 million years ago, bonobos and common chimpanzees went their separate ways.

Two generations ago, my immediate Carter ancestor (my father) split from the line (his brother’s) that would become my two cousins. Ignoring our maternal lines for the sake of the analogy, to say that I am more closely related to one of my cousins than the other is ridiculous, as they shared a common ancestor (my uncle) more recently than they shared a common ancestor (my paternal grandfather) with me. The same argument goes for chimps, bonobos and humans: if bonobos are our kissing cousins, then chimps are their (less affectionate, equally closely related to us) siblings.

The rest of the article is, however, very interesting. It argues that living in areas with more abundant, nutritious, protein-rich plants meant that there were not the same selective pressures on bonobos to evolve/devise methods of food prepartion—including, perhaps, the use of tools. Instead, the plentiful supply of food has made bonobos’ feeding time more of a social activity than a competitive one, which could explain their more peaceful and sociable (to put it mildly) lifestyles.

It’s a nice idea, but I’m not sure how you could test it.

I appreciate I’m probably being a bit unfair quoting from a brief news article, but is this a total non-story or what?

BBC: Study uncovers ‘chimp cross code’

Experts studying chimpanzees while investigating the evolution of human social behaviour have uncovered their ability to safely cross roads.

They said the discovery has shown chimps’ ability to cope with the risk of man-made situations…

It found the dominant adult males took up protective positions in the group when it was tasked with crossing roads…

The study has built on prior research showing that adult male monkeys took similar action to reduce the risk of being attacked by predators when travelling towards potentially unsafe areas, such as waterholes.

Kimberley Hockings, who worked on the study, said: “Road-crossing, a human-created challenge, presents a new situation that calls for flexibility of responses by chimpanzees to variations in perceived risk, helping to improve our understanding about the evolution of human social organisation.

In other words, what they appear to be saying is that, when presented with an unusual and/or potentially dangerous situation, dominant male chimps and monkeys take protective positions in front of and behind the group. An interesting, if pretty unsurprising observation.

But why do the people carrying out the study think that road-crossing presents a new situation that calls for flexibility of responses? Aren’t the chimps simply giving a perfectly normal response when presented with a potentially risky situation? And why on earth do they think this is going to teach us anything about the evolution of human social behaviour? Don’t loads of other animals (elephants, for example) do exactly the same thing?

I’m sure we can make certain inferences about the evolution of human behaviour by studying chimps, but I can’t help feeling people read far too much into such studies. Why not study the chimps for their own sakes, rather than trying to bring in pretty tenuous links to human behaviour?