Excerpt from the article, "The researchers noted that female adult chimps made and used spears more often than adult males. The males relied more on their size and strength for hunting. Female chimps are almost always hindered by infants that ride on their backs or bellies, so spear hunting is far more effective for them than attempting to chase down prey."
This is similar to how human civilization formed. Areas of plentiful food have no need for farming or saving up food as wealth thus, it is only in places where food/resources are less plentiful did technological civilization develop.
So, might this not indicate that chimps are slowly but surely evolving toward a higher intellect, as a harsh environment selects against the dumb?
If there were no matriarchs capable of grasping a concept like hunting with weapons, instead of bare hands, 100 years ago, does that mean that they might unravel stone sharpening in 500 years?
The idea that human civilization might witness the true, literal evolution and flourishing of a second earthly intellect in species outside of humans is really exciting.
Maybe it's not evolution in action. Maybe chimpanzees of today are no smarter than 100 years ago. Maybe it takes 50 years of trial and error amongst social groups to learn such a skill, and then retain it across generations by teaching. Maybe tools like this have been invented and lost many times by various chimpanzee social groups over the past few centuries.
But it would still be really cool if this were representative of the emergence of a generation of apes, palpably smarter than those of, say, the 19th century.
I was watching a show about Orangutans recently and one of the things I thought was interesting was that orangutans in the wild are independent in the sense that they usually eat by themselves. But when they are put in captivity and they are around other orangutans they start to learn from each other and build off of each others concepts. In the wild when alone they stick with what they know, but when around other orangutans they learn from each other.
Chimps on the other hand eat and do other stuff with each other and are usually(if not always) part of a group and so they have more complex actions in nature just from learning from one another, picking up tips and building upon what they know.
If you ever want to have real fun, point this out to a doctrinaire feminist who is heavily invested in the idea that men are more violent than women because in the primordial landscape men did most of the hunting. I did this to a freind once, quite innocently, and she ended up so angry she could--in her own description--barely speak.
There is a whole literature in a particular brand of feminism (mostly associated with the radicals) that simply takes the association of hunting and interpersonal violence on faith, whereas in fact we're pretty sure men are more violent than women because of mate competition. The fact that we observe hunting behaviour amongst female chimps (who are less violent than male chimps) and female bonobos (who are far less violent than chimps, and no more violent than male bonobos, who also hunt) makes it clear that hunting behavior has nothing much to do with interpersonal violence.
This makes good sense from an evolutionary perpsective: killing a member of another species is a profoundly different kind of selective event than killing a member of your own species, particularly in a social primate like proto-humans where the individual you kill is likely to be closely related to you. The selective pressures on the two behaviours are almost completely disjoint, but to believe the feminist myth--or the equally silly pseudo-evolutionary anti-feminist myths that preceded it--you have to believe they are somehow related.
You make some interesting points, but there should be a norm against introducing a political topic on a non-political thread. There's a way to get to a political point from most non-political topics, but then every thread leads to a political fight.
I think it's especially important not to criticize a political point that no-one has brought up in the thread already. It's always tempting to address the worst arguments rather than the best ones, and there's more leeway to do that we we're not constrained by replying to something someone's actually said.
Early attempts to study stress hormones from aggression in large cats (e.g., lions and tigers) studied hunting behavior. The researchers puzzled over data that didn't make any sense to them for a long time before realizing that to a lion, killing that smaller mammal is like opening a box of cereal. That you really have to look at lion-on-lion violence to study aggression.
I would be interested to see testosterone distribution between male/females in other species of our monkeylike cousins.
I feel like I've seen many anecdotes by women who have transitioned to men (or are mid-process) who suddenly "get" many male behaviours once they start supplementing testosterone.
>There is a whole literature in a particular brand of feminism (mostly associated with the radicals) that simply takes the association of hunting and interpersonal violence on faith
This is a straw woman. I cannot think of any radical feminist for whom this is an important point. (You probably don't mean actually radical feminists, but just liberals with whom you disagree, but that's another point.)
I think virtually any feminist would say that men are violent because patriarchal society teaches and programs men to be violent. It teaches boys that violence is an acceptable way of solving problems, interacting with others, etc., and even when violence is overtly discouraged (for example, in schools) it is often covertly encouraged (the pride a father displays in a son who hits back against a bully, the resulting respect on the schoolyard for that child, not to even mention video games, movies, and other cultural role models).
But maybe you've just read different feminists from me. What prominent radical feminists, or even liberal feminists, hold this viewpoint?
\tangents Are these chimps evolving intelligence? What conditions caused humans to evolve intelligence? Was it a rare, unusual event, or was it inevitable? I want to guard against the {anthro,ego,geo}centric-like view that we are the pinnacle of creation.
For our intelligence to evolve, there must have been an advantage to it, each step of the way, that offset the costs of gestating, growing, training and fuelling a larger brain. Looking at other animals, especially higher mammals, greater brain size and intelligence can have survival advantages. Although, considering the whole of life, most of it is not highly intelligent - bacteria, insects, fish etc still thrive as the majority.
There's a fascinating speculation applying Moore's law to the increasing complexity of life (see graph here http://io9.com/moores-law-predicts-life-originated-billions-...). This shows that it takes longer to evolve more complexity, though not that more complexity is necessarily better. I think it's fair to claim that humans are the most complex animals that have evolved so far... and that we are the ones to speculate on it because we just happened to be first (as in the Fermi paradox and fine-tuned universe). Therefore, we should expect other intelligent life to evolve on earth (perhaps from corvids, cetaceans - or even arachnids, some having extraordinary brain/body ratios); but it might take several million years, as that's what it took us. Complexity takes time.
Another view is that another intelligent species would have been the most dangerous threat to us possible. Humans certainly seem to have no problem killing other humans. We may have eradicated neanderthals, and other species in the human evolutionary line are also curiously missing today. Possibly, mammoths and mega-fauna were also increasing in intelligence? Perhaps we also set out to kill the most cunning and therefore most dangerous wild animals in general? Thus, delaying intelligence in competing species.
I think what's happening is that the news is reported to be that chimps make and use tools to hunt, when in fact, the new data seems to be about female chimps being much more likely to make and use spears than males.
> ...chimps that we can accelerate to near light speeds.
Isn't that the wrong way round? The first generation of chimps would return after hundreds of years [have passed on Earth] having barely appeared to have aged at all.
If you want to see the future, it is you who has to accelerate to near light speeds and then you will return to an Earth far in the future.
"A highly secretive and reclusive biochemist named Kidder produces inventions that transform human life, spanning every aspect of science and engineering. Unbeknownst to anyone, Kidder has developed a synthetic life form, which he calls "neoterics." These creatures live at a greatly accelerated rate, and therefore have a very short lifespan and produce many generations over a short period of time. This allows Kidder, by presenting them with a frequently changing environment, to "evolve" them quickly into highly intelligent lifeforms who fear Kidder and worship him like a god. Kidder can control his neoterics' environment, and thus force them into developing technology far beyond that of humans."
Haven't chimps already been evolving in tandem with our last common ancestor for millions of years? Why should they suddenly fast forward their evolutionary progress now that we are observing them?
If you accelerated your terrarium to a high fraction of c, time inside would appear (from our perspective) to slow down, not the other way around. What you want to do here is accelerate us to near light speed instead.
Does it really matter? Learning is pretty much always mimicking others, whether it is you learning from others before you or our ancestors mimicking their predecessors like Australopithecus, Neanderthal or others. That's essentially what evolution is, adopting characteristics of preceding organisms by various means.
Wouldn't we have to be the ones in the terrarium? Few years pass for the party zipping round at a large percentage of c, many years pass for those left behind on Earth.
The Bonobo society also exhibits female alphas and uses extensive sexual activities (including hetero/homo and "group") to maintain social bonds.
However, even despite the apparent "similarities" I question our anthropomorphic instinct to assign to or infer too much meaning from the behaviour of our primate genetic relatives.
One reason contributing to that choice is because how humans behave in societies is shaped by centuries of social, cultural and political discourse on the ways in which we behave.
I've read of theories that ancient man's brain development came so quickly because we learned to throw spears at prey. We nearly doubled our brain size in a very short time period (anthropologically speaking.)
It was thought that it resulted from developing a sense of lay calculus by throwing the spears. One anthropologist I heard speak said he thought that would mean major league pitchers are the pinnacle of human evolution. :)
Of course, that gentleman consumed more psychedelics than anyone I've ever known, so I'm not so sure.
More to the point, what if this is the beginning of a very fast evolutionary change?
I should start writing the script of "skynet vs the planet of the apes" with the last day's news.
On a serious note - a recent theory that in a heat sink ocean and energy source life evolving is inevitable, and we have multiple species able to get to intelligence ... the fermi paradox becomes more urgent to be solved.
It's 2015. We have seen again and again the Black Rights Movement, Women's Rights Movement, various Third Word Rights movements, and the Animal Rights Movement interrogate and challenge, again and again, the ways in which human cultures assign value to various categories of living beings.
And here we are, saying
> OMG monkeys using "tools" as defined by humans! Golden ponies and red chameleons!!
[+] [-] qiqing|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duaneb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crimsonalucard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamblorrr|11 years ago|reply
If there were no matriarchs capable of grasping a concept like hunting with weapons, instead of bare hands, 100 years ago, does that mean that they might unravel stone sharpening in 500 years?
The idea that human civilization might witness the true, literal evolution and flourishing of a second earthly intellect in species outside of humans is really exciting.
Maybe it's not evolution in action. Maybe chimpanzees of today are no smarter than 100 years ago. Maybe it takes 50 years of trial and error amongst social groups to learn such a skill, and then retain it across generations by teaching. Maybe tools like this have been invented and lost many times by various chimpanzee social groups over the past few centuries.
But it would still be really cool if this were representative of the emergence of a generation of apes, palpably smarter than those of, say, the 19th century.
[+] [-] resdirector|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlieflowers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KamiCrit|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rickdale|11 years ago|reply
Chimps on the other hand eat and do other stuff with each other and are usually(if not always) part of a group and so they have more complex actions in nature just from learning from one another, picking up tips and building upon what they know.
[+] [-] tjradcliffe|11 years ago|reply
There is a whole literature in a particular brand of feminism (mostly associated with the radicals) that simply takes the association of hunting and interpersonal violence on faith, whereas in fact we're pretty sure men are more violent than women because of mate competition. The fact that we observe hunting behaviour amongst female chimps (who are less violent than male chimps) and female bonobos (who are far less violent than chimps, and no more violent than male bonobos, who also hunt) makes it clear that hunting behavior has nothing much to do with interpersonal violence.
This makes good sense from an evolutionary perpsective: killing a member of another species is a profoundly different kind of selective event than killing a member of your own species, particularly in a social primate like proto-humans where the individual you kill is likely to be closely related to you. The selective pressures on the two behaviours are almost completely disjoint, but to believe the feminist myth--or the equally silly pseudo-evolutionary anti-feminist myths that preceded it--you have to believe they are somehow related.
[+] [-] michaelkeenan|11 years ago|reply
I think it's especially important not to criticize a political point that no-one has brought up in the thread already. It's always tempting to address the worst arguments rather than the best ones, and there's more leeway to do that we we're not constrained by replying to something someone's actually said.
[+] [-] qiqing|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Frondo|11 years ago|reply
I suspect you didn't really mean to connect those two, but it sounds kinda mean-spirited.
[+] [-] peteretep|11 years ago|reply
I feel like I've seen many anecdotes by women who have transitioned to men (or are mid-process) who suddenly "get" many male behaviours once they start supplementing testosterone.
[+] [-] dang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedks|11 years ago|reply
This is a straw woman. I cannot think of any radical feminist for whom this is an important point. (You probably don't mean actually radical feminists, but just liberals with whom you disagree, but that's another point.)
I think virtually any feminist would say that men are violent because patriarchal society teaches and programs men to be violent. It teaches boys that violence is an acceptable way of solving problems, interacting with others, etc., and even when violence is overtly discouraged (for example, in schools) it is often covertly encouraged (the pride a father displays in a son who hits back against a bully, the resulting respect on the schoolyard for that child, not to even mention video games, movies, and other cultural role models).
But maybe you've just read different feminists from me. What prominent radical feminists, or even liberal feminists, hold this viewpoint?
[+] [-] Spockulus_Rift|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hyperpallium|11 years ago|reply
For our intelligence to evolve, there must have been an advantage to it, each step of the way, that offset the costs of gestating, growing, training and fuelling a larger brain. Looking at other animals, especially higher mammals, greater brain size and intelligence can have survival advantages. Although, considering the whole of life, most of it is not highly intelligent - bacteria, insects, fish etc still thrive as the majority.
There's a fascinating speculation applying Moore's law to the increasing complexity of life (see graph here http://io9.com/moores-law-predicts-life-originated-billions-...). This shows that it takes longer to evolve more complexity, though not that more complexity is necessarily better. I think it's fair to claim that humans are the most complex animals that have evolved so far... and that we are the ones to speculate on it because we just happened to be first (as in the Fermi paradox and fine-tuned universe). Therefore, we should expect other intelligent life to evolve on earth (perhaps from corvids, cetaceans - or even arachnids, some having extraordinary brain/body ratios); but it might take several million years, as that's what it took us. Complexity takes time.
Another view is that another intelligent species would have been the most dangerous threat to us possible. Humans certainly seem to have no problem killing other humans. We may have eradicated neanderthals, and other species in the human evolutionary line are also curiously missing today. Possibly, mammoths and mega-fauna were also increasing in intelligence? Perhaps we also set out to kill the most cunning and therefore most dangerous wild animals in general? Thus, delaying intelligence in competing species.
[+] [-] tsotha|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalke|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonlucc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nicholas_C|11 years ago|reply
If only we could simulate evolution millions of years and see how chimps evolve.
[+] [-] rlpb|11 years ago|reply
Isn't that the wrong way round? The first generation of chimps would return after hundreds of years [have passed on Earth] having barely appeared to have aged at all.
If you want to see the future, it is you who has to accelerate to near light speeds and then you will return to an Earth far in the future.
[+] [-] Someone|11 years ago|reply
"A highly secretive and reclusive biochemist named Kidder produces inventions that transform human life, spanning every aspect of science and engineering. Unbeknownst to anyone, Kidder has developed a synthetic life form, which he calls "neoterics." These creatures live at a greatly accelerated rate, and therefore have a very short lifespan and produce many generations over a short period of time. This allows Kidder, by presenting them with a frequently changing environment, to "evolve" them quickly into highly intelligent lifeforms who fear Kidder and worship him like a god. Kidder can control his neoterics' environment, and thus force them into developing technology far beyond that of humans."
[+] [-] ZanyProgrammer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fchollet|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wahsd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dghf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|11 years ago|reply
Look around. I see no reason a primate so similar to humans would not continue to evolve along the same lines.
[+] [-] throwaway192301|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] humanarity|11 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82GUjPConiE
The Bonobo society also exhibits female alphas and uses extensive sexual activities (including hetero/homo and "group") to maintain social bonds.
However, even despite the apparent "similarities" I question our anthropomorphic instinct to assign to or infer too much meaning from the behaviour of our primate genetic relatives.
One reason contributing to that choice is because how humans behave in societies is shaped by centuries of social, cultural and political discourse on the ways in which we behave.
[+] [-] fredrivett|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chisleu|11 years ago|reply
It was thought that it resulted from developing a sense of lay calculus by throwing the spears. One anthropologist I heard speak said he thought that would mean major league pitchers are the pinnacle of human evolution. :)
Of course, that gentleman consumed more psychedelics than anyone I've ever known, so I'm not so sure.
More to the point, what if this is the beginning of a very fast evolutionary change?
[+] [-] venomsnake|11 years ago|reply
On a serious note - a recent theory that in a heat sink ocean and energy source life evolving is inevitable, and we have multiple species able to get to intelligence ... the fermi paradox becomes more urgent to be solved.
[+] [-] vladtaltos|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xingcoa|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pXMzR2A|11 years ago|reply
And here we are, saying
> OMG monkeys using "tools" as defined by humans! Golden ponies and red chameleons!!
Get over it already.