Week 12 Flashcards
Primates
Reliance on vision rather than smell – loss of wet, naked nose and whiskers of other mammals and reduced relative size of olfactory brain – colour vision – stereoscopic 3D vision Encephalized – large brain relative to body size Five separate digits and fingernails Mainly omnivorous
Humans as hominoids
Darwin: we are descended from African apes?
Today there is little doubt he was correct
– Chimpanzees share 99.4% of tested protein
coding DNA base pairs (Wildman, et al., 2003)
– We are more closely related to chimpanzees than
chimpanzees are to gorillas
But we are not descended from chimpanzees
– We merely share a common ancestor
Darwin’s Problem
Physical evolution
– Continuity of anatomy, nervous and vascular systems
Evolution of mind
– Continuity of mental capacities?
– Darwin’s prediction:
“In the distant future I see open fields for far more
important researches. Psychology will be based on a new
foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each
mental power and capacity by gradation.”
- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859
Progress?
Continuing controversies about gradation
– What precisely are the mental powers of other primates?
– What precisely are uniquely human traits?
Two biases in the literature
– Emphasizing discontinuity
• to justify personal/religious beliefs about humanity’s special status
• to justify human treatment of animals
– Emphasizing continuity
• to show that Darwin was right and humans are part of nature
• to show that the animal one is working with has a capacity
Difficulties with identifying absence of a mental trait
– Absence of evidence versus evidence of absence
Importance of making progress: Comparative analysis can
inform us about
– The evolution of the human mind
– The genetic and neurological basis of higher cognitive capacities
Animal consciousness
To feel
– If same neuronal equipment to detect damage and
shows same behaviour as humans, then likely
feels pain much like us (e.g., Bateson, 1991)
– Experimental evidence
• Rats typically prefer sugar water over water containing
analgesic, but rats with chronologically inflamed joints
prefer water containing analgesic
– Animals with different neuronal systems?
To think?
– Animal intelligence
Intelligence in animals
George Romanes – Comparative psychology – The argument by analogy & anecdote The principle of Parsimony – Lloyd Morgan’s canon – The Clever Hans phenomenon
Intelligent apes?
‘insight’ (Köhler, 1917)
Insightful problem solving
Picking appropriate length tools even
when problem is out of sight (e.g. Mulcahy et al.)
Ape tool use in the wild
Tool production in one place to use at another – Chimpanzees: e.g., ant fishing, water sponge, toilet paper, hammer & anvil (Boesch, 1994) - Also Gorillas and Orangutans
The Machiavellian hypothesis of
the evolution of intelligence
Social intelligence as the prime mover The association between neocortex ratio and group size
Primate social intelligence
Group living Grooming Social hierarchies Keeping track of third party relations Tactical deception
Cooperation
Working together
Social learning:
Imitation & imitation recognition
apes imitating there trainers
Social inheritance
Chimpanzee culture?
Communication
Language
– Max Mueller (1860s and 70s)
• No other communication system is open-ended like
human language
– The simian tongue
• Richard Garner (1890)
– Playback studies with Edison’s Phonograph
– Animal language as fiction
» e.g. Lofting (1920): Dr Doolittle
– Re-discovery of the playback approach in the
1980s
• Marler et al: Vervet monkey alarm calls
– leopard, eagle, python, cat, baboon, human
– deception?
– No evidence of non-human syntactical
languages (next week…)
