Do Primates have culture?

our

deb

Ain't that just too cool!

Wonderful to see the dried-up old logical-positivism paradigm falling away, even if it has taken so long.

Er, can you elucidate how this dispenses with that paradigm?

Yes. Which language would you like it in?

Let's do English.

It wasn't all that long ago when suggestions that other animals had 'culture', or could 'think' were criticized as sentimental anthropomorphism, and that we could probably make no scientifically-rigorous statement about animal internal states, and say only that they 'behaved'. With your training, you'll see the connection to Behaviorism here, and then with the logical positivist movement which preceded it (particularly in America, I believe).

I remember reading a wonderful piece in the New Yorker about 20 or so years ago written by a woman who had spent her life training horses. She was clearly one of those individuals who has a uniquely gifted natural raport and affinity with her animals. The degree of unique relationship she developed with these individual creatures, surely possessing 'personality', was the striking feature for me of the story and it was the central point of her interest as well. No small added benefit how well she wrote and communicated the story.

She wrote too about the problems of thinking/writing about animals. As well as a trainer, she was a biologist and brought the trained rigor of that study. And she railed against the reigning paradigm of the times in scientific discussion of animal internal states.

But slowly this old rigid confine of animal studies fell away...and it wouldn't be a difficult case to argue that this falling away came at precisely the same period when so many women began to enter the study of animal biology.

Hmmm.

Thing is, many still deny any language and culture to hanimules. They would dismiss all this stuff.


I wonder if there are any left who still deny them suffering?

you jest? a huge number is the sad answer



I can't remember if I've already written this but I saw a very touching programme on elephants some time back.

The matriarch passes on all the knowledge of the herd, where to go in the dry season for scarce water etc etc as the chimps in the study mentioned pass on their knowledge, but what was the really touching bit was when they passed the skeleton of a previous matriarch.

her bones lay white in the sun but each year as they retraced that particular route to watering hole and greenery, they paused and stood rocking gently while turning the bones over in their trunks, quietly and reverently, It really was incredibly sensitive and spiritual.

They are also using elephants to track the ivory poachers. Their sense of smell is apparently infinitely more powerful than a dog. They tracked through moving streams, where the poachers had passed by some time before.

Ah, have you seen the work of that marvellous woman who is studying them? I forget her name...

That may well be one of the films about her work.


What she is revealing is wondrous.


Ah, I think I mean Cynthia Moss?


And here is an interview with her:

Interview with Cynthia Moss


More about her:

http://www.elephanttrust.org/cynthia_moss.htm



http://www.fieldstudies.org/pages/1811_cynthia_moss_elephant_research_project.cfm

Well, as I said, it's a changing paradigm, but it sure is changing. It was the late 80s when I did primate studies with Galdikas at SFU and even then, what was being granted as regards primate internal states was far more expansive than what had been the view earlier. And of course logical positivism isn't the only impediment...there's judeo/christian theology in the mix too.

Re suffering...my daughter just returned from working at a fishing lodge up in the middle of Alaska (Jimmy Carter and Tiger Woods were guests in previous seasons) and the reigning notion among all the staff at the facility was that fish can feel no pain. Handy notion.

Grrr....

I HATE that religious separation twixt nature and us. Gimme paganism etc, if you have to have a religion.


Apparently fundamental christianity is a problem with conservation, too.

As usual with cults, the world is ending soon, so why bother conserving it?

All of the fundamentalists seem to believe that God Created Man, then mere woman and finally the rest of the world.

Man is in charge and can do no wrong.

Hmmm are there fundamentalist pagans?


heehee....

Fundamentalist heathens, yes.

Fundamentalist pagans? Possibly, but not necessarily in breeding pairs.

Fundamentalist pagans are probably Pagan Babies (memories of the fifties..)

<steps up to soapbox. moves to straighten tie. hasn't got tie.>

I think we do ourselves a great disservice by denying our kinship with other animals, as well. We can learn so much about how we behave by looking at other animals -- but that's impossible if we put up a barrier 'twixt us and them. Even a lot of folks who will admit emotional experience to animals go on to state that our own experience is somehow different...

Which it is, I suppose, but so is the experience of a chimp different in some degree from that of a gorilla, and a gorilla's from a macacque's, and a macacque's from a dog's, and a dog's from a lizard, and so forth. But the commonalities are there, especially with other social mammals, and to fail to see ourselves in them -- to fail to anthropomorphize, I suppose -- is to fail to see a great part of our selves. Perhaps the greater part of ourselves...

<steps down from soapbox>

I like your soapbox.

Well, that is all obvious to me. If half awake me sees this stuff, where is everybody else?








I let you prove it..

I am a fundamentalist pagan. I bow to no human or civic authority, like wild sex a lot, and sleep each night in the hollowed out carcass of a fat Republican.

Beats sex in the hollowed out carcass of a fat Republican and wild sleeping.

Well, we have proven that homo sapiens, amongst the primates, has no culture!