Do Primates have culture?

Sozobe and Piffka --

You've done it -- I'm hooked now! Your links, Piffka, are bookmarked and will be examined as soon as I can. And "Signs of the apes, songs of the whales" is on my reading list. (PS: I think it's a great idea to put this into a children's book! Children are such natural scientists, and I think you can't start inspiring them too early.) Piffka, I don't quite get why watered-down, grammar-free ASL is a "limbo" for the apes involved, and that this limbo raises ethical issues. Would you mind expanding?

Rufio --

I disagree that studying humans is always the best way of finding out more about our own kind. I frequently find that travelling abroad teaches me a lot about German culture. There are things I don't notice about Germany because I can't imagine that things could be any different, and the only thing to find about those things is to explore places where they are different. Why shouldn't the same logic apply to ethology?

Yes, Acquiunk - but can you summarise what you think is the right track?

Mind expanding is my specialty, Thomas.

First of all, as far as I am concerned, anytime we take wild animals out of their natural habitat, we are putting them in a kind of limbo since I believe that all life has soul. Once we've got them in our cages, I believe we need to treat animals with even more respect than we would in the wild. For example, it is important to give them medical treatment and to see to their emotional as well as their physical needs. I am not anthropomorphizing; I don't think that life needs to be human in order to deserve respect.

"Talking apes" are therefore "covered" by my general belief, but their special circumstances put them in another class altogether. If we teach apes to sign ASL to the point that they trust their handlers and are able to express their wants and needs, then we've developed a sort of under-race. They have an artificial communication which they've been taught, but they can only "talk" to a tiny group... their handlers who have been specially trained and perhaps to a small number of others of their race who have also been taught.

The human race currently has small groups of long-lived, partially-rational apes who are costly to maintain and cannot be easily adopted out. In addition, because of their new veneer of "culture," these animals don't assimilate with other non-ASL-expressive apes. It is reported that those apes who were put into non-speaking troupes are visibly disturbed and apparently "frustrated" when they attempt to communicate with these "naive" members of their race. In fact, that is the most likely reason Washoe was able to teach Louli her version of ASL. He was young and she constantly signing to herself, to her toys... later to Louli. She seemed driven to communicate.

Koko is another example of an animal driven to communicate. Koko has a vocabulary of 1000 words. Her live-in companion, Michael, knows 600. They "sign" to each other as well as to their handlers. Koko used to try to "sign" to her kittens; I think she has finally given up. Some of her favorite words are "apple." "red," and "up" but some of them are more telling of a rich, emotional life, including:
Ask, Because, Devil, Frown, Jealous, Love, Mother, Shame, Polite, Sorry, Stupid, Unattention, Visit, & Want.

From the reports I have read and from my visits to Washoe, I have seen these animals don't care for humans. We frighten them by our presence & engender aggression in them far beyond what is seen in zoos. Koko and her companion have signed that they do not like strangers and want them to stay away. They don't want to be looked at, nor do they like answering the questions of strangers.

So where are we? ... with anti-social, idiot children whose IQ's can be measured at the level of toddlers, who cannot be farmed-out because they are, after all, large biting, grappling creatures. They are expensive to maintain and it is difficult to keep a continuation of care for them with the same handlers.

Few people believe that they can take a dog and pass it from one family to the next to the next to the next. It isn't fair to the dog and they rarely thrive after the second or third home. How much less ethical is it to treat a partially-rational ape so callously?

How very well-considered, Miss Piffka.

Interesting - one can well see why they do not like strangers! And being looked at. Of course, looking directly at another individual for more than a moment is a sign of aggression for apes

Of course, this makes the whole zoo thing more ethically difficult - we now know how they feel about it! Yet - captive breeding programs may be al that will keep some species alive.

Additionally, it is important to be able to preserve as diverse a "gene pool" for any given species as possible--hence the shipment of animals from one facility to another for purposes of breeding. But it is a sad circumstance, nonetheless.

Re: truth
[quote="dlowan" Ah? I am interested in both fields - with several grains of salt - but tell me - what do you think is the "right track"? In as much detail as you can bear, with links, if possible!!!!!! (pretty please? Only if you want to, of course...)[/quote]

This is a difficult question because at the moment, advances in genetics as put everything up in the air. As a general observation the environment we (Homo sapiens) as a species adapt to is culture, which is of out own creation. So and variation in our genes in the last 2.5 my that encouraged an increased dependency on learned behavior would be advantageous and that is what researchers should be looking for. Remember also that natural selection works on the individual (genotype) not the genes(genotype). There for it is a individual who is more adept at learning and using that learning who is going to be more successful. Those are the individuals who's genes will spread, not necessarily those males who get the most women. Natural selection and by extension evolution is a numbers game not a brawn game.

Take a bow Thomas, so very very true.

Acquiunk --

Perhaps a couple of examples of research you think is on the wrong track would be enlightening. Being pretty familiar with biology but not with what the psych folks are making out of genetics, it would help me see what you're getting at. (Not sure about dlowan, tho.)

Where is somebody barking up the wrong tree?

Seconded, Patio. I am not aware of anyone saying it was necessarily a brawn game, for instance....?

I just returned from a lecture by Philip Lieberman on the FOXP2 gene and the neural bases of language. Liberman noted that there is a close connection between fine motor control and human langauge. The bases for this is found in the basal ganglia but it is spread throughout other components of the brain and it is not confined to one area of the brain like Broca's area. He further noted that the brain is not a computer and logarithmic based models of human cognition do not work. Thus there is no Universal Grammar as Chomsky, Pinker, Baker and others have proposed. The basis of syntax can be found in other primates, most notably chimps. But they can not develope these capabilities efficiently as we can. Why? Well for one thing our neural circuitry is different, and more complex ant this is connected to our fine motor control abilities, particularly in the face and throat. As I said perviously much is up in the air now as advances in genetics have opened up who new areas of research but there are some directions that are clearly wrong and simplistic. I my opinion evolutionary psychology is the most egregious in this regard. Here are two examples of what is in my opinion the wrong approach.

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html

http://www.evoyage.com/Whatis.html

Oooh!

I want to find out more about the Philip Lieberman stuff. (The further grad school recedes into the distance, the further out of the loop I am...)

A Tangential Interlude
I agree that our understanding of language will never be correct if it is simplistic or ignores brain chemistry.

I attended a series of lectures about bird song last year which described an extremely complex mechanism for the development of song display by individual birds. Song birds, as you may know, have two kinds of vocalizations, bird-calls which are heard throughout the year and bird-songs which are territorial, sexually exclusive, and have population variations. The whole song must be learned before a certain age or the juvenile bird will never "get it." Since without the proper song the bird is unlikely to hold territory, attract a mate and reproduce, it may be its single most important lesson, both as an individual and as a species.

Bird song must be taught by an equally "ready" songmaster. Without going into great detail (for which I'd have to find & decipher my notes), it has been found at great individual "sacrifice" to many, many songbirds (whose brains needed to be examined and manipulated) that the ability to teach and learn bird-songs is dependent on flooding specific areas of the brain of both the teaching bird and the learning bird with an array of hormones and brain chemicals in a specific order. Often one hormone triggers another. As this hormonal soup builds up, changes in the physical construct of the brain occur, ie. certain brain areas grow & subside in the songmaster & song-learner for the duration of the teaching period. In addition, certain physical changes in the song-production organs develop in the learning bird. The production of hormones can only occur under specific circumstances... there are a number of variables included the age & sex of the bird, the ambient temperature, hours of daylight, available food, population density, etc. The research of which I write was made on one type of songbird and it is quite likely that while generalizations can be made, other species of songbirds have other systems that are more or less similar.

One of the more interesting facets of this kind of study is that it takes an individual songbird to teach a song (once started, the songmaster must stay the course) and it takes healthy progeny to be of a certain age to learn it. As developmental psychologists have noted, children have certain ages where they are ready to learn language. It is also understood that some people lose this ability, or at least lose much of a younger person's flexibility to learn a new language. It is suggested by the bird research that this ability is at least partially dependent on hormones and other brain chemicals whose production is age-dependent. It is also likely that there are real differences in the human (and primate) brain which make it able to accept lifelong learning.

One thing I learned from this tangential dwelling on songbird communications is that it is all much more complicated than we might imagine. Another it that it may turn out that the flexibility humans have seemingly developed to accept teaching from more than one source and throughout our lives is one of our most valuable traits.

Man, seeing how complicated just a few tiny little aspects of fruit fly development are, I can't imagine having a detailed understanding of the development of any species' brain in the near future. It's one thing to find a chemical, quite another to understand what it's doing at the cellular level. Development biol bugs me out.



Acqui --

What strikes me in my perusal of those couple of links is the apparent focus on evolution as a "problem solver." I understand why they want to focus on things that "work," but it always seems to me that there are a lot of interesting bits of biochemistry and behavior that aren't efficient, that really don't work that well. Paragraphs like this irk me a bit...



Again, I understand their desire to compartmentalize behavior, but... but... I dunno, it just doesn't feel right, like they're trying to hypothesize a mechanism without many observed details. I mean, how can we presume to tackle the problem of how something like the previously-mentioned Wnt/Frz pathway in the mice is affecting their behavior as adults when we can't even figure out what localizes the usual product of this pathway (beta-catenin) in the development of a Xenopus larva? I mean, it's all well and good to know something is in the genome, but without knowing the context of its expression, how much can we really infer?

Seems like a simplistic and speculative field to me, on my first reading -- but, then, university-bound anthropologists are involved, and I've grown highly suspicious of some of these folks recently. Not sure if this is what you're getting at or not, but it's what I take away from a quick reading.

Those are not anthropologists, they are psychologists and, in my opinion, their first (of many) problems is that they have too narrow of research focus.

John Tooby, co-Director of the Center for Evol Psych at the UCSB site you linked, is from their Anthro Dept.

Don't get me wrong, I fully support the study of people -- just seems that it's a bit early to integrate the microscopic and human/social worlds, as much as I love private speculation...

Tooby... you said Tooby...

(Reading with interest, specially that birdsong stuff, so cool, nothing intelligent to add, though.)

Sozobe -- if you're interested in the songbirds there is lots of info out there, here, for example is a guy in Boston drumming up students looks like... Biomedical Engineering at the Hearing Research Center, Boston U.

http://www.bu.edu/hrc/faculty/kamal_sen/

Yep, that one I know about.