Monkeys with money and guns

Mandrill

Chapter 10 Japanese macaque

page 154: female assisted by a male to whom she grants privileges. In The Serpent's Promise, Steve Jones writes:

A male macaque was once observed to mate forty times in a day, which was more than the champion stud among thousands of men interviewed by Alfred Kinsey for his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male managed in a week.

page 162: More on The Descent of Man at Five Books. Frans de Waal develops the point. As a recent review puts it

Mr de Waal’s central concern is to attack the idea that what humans call morality stands apart from, and above, anything found in the “lower” animals. Most people, he notes, accept that their bodies evolved from those of man’s predecessors, but the conceits of religion and philosophy make it much harder to accept that the same is true of human minds and behaviour, no matter how good the evidence.

page 166: Machiavelli's own beliefs [may be] better reflected in his Discources on Livy. Would Isaiah Berlin agree? 

Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality—the hypocrisies of ordinary life—but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values...Yet he is, in spite of himself, one of the makers of pluralism, and of its—to him—perilous acceptance of toleration.

page 168: [a] book less amenable to sectarian interpretation. Sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing are central to the Hebrew bible, notes Stephen Pinker in chapter 1 of The Better Angels of Our Nature. [1] For example:

In Deuteronomy 20 and 21, God gives the Israelites a blanket policy for dealing with cities that don't accept them as overlords: smite the males with edge of the sword and abduct the cattle, women and children. Of course, a man with a beautiful new captive faces a problem: since he has just murdered her parents and brothers, she may not be in the mood for love. God anticipates this nuisance and offers the following solution: the captor should shave her head, pare her nails and imprison her in his house for a month while she cries her eyes out. Then he may go in and rape her.

page 164: a high value on...fairness. See monkeys stay away from mean people.

page 168: endangered species. A recent UNEP reports notes that nearly 3,000 chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans are illegally killed or stolen from the wild each year. A story today on the plus side: there may be more habitat for an endangered cao vit gibbon on the border of China and Vietnam than feared.


Footnote [1]. A reported fall in violent crime in Britain looks like data that supports Pinker's central thesis.

This is the eleventh in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

Wise monkeys

Nineteenth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 10: Japanese macaque

page 154: Dario Maestripieri has published three books since Machiavellian Intelligence (2007) including Games Primates Play (2012), which is also the title to this blog.

page 158: Mikhail Bulgakov. No such short story exists, although Bulgakov did write a novella called The Heart of a Dog (1925) in which the testicles and pituitary gland of a man are transplanted into a dog.

page 160: The Judge in...Blood Meridian says:

It makes no difference what men think of war...War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

page 160: Mao Zedong. See this review of Tombstone by Yang Jisheng and four other books.

page 160: behaviourism. David Deutsch thinks that behaviourism is still being applied, mistakenly, in computer science:

Thinking of an [artificial general intelligence] as a machine for translating experiences, rewards and punishments into ideas (or worse, just into behaviours) is like trying to cure infectious diseases by balancing bodily humours: futile because it is rooted in an archaic and wildly mistaken world view.

page 164: the now-famous 'mirror neurons' Taking a contrary view, Gregor Hickok says there are Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans. (Thanks to Roman Krznaric for drawing attention to Hickok's paper.)

page 165: cooperative urges. E.O.Wilson sees it like this:

...risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue. So it appeared that humans are forever conflicted by their prehistory of multilevel selection. They are suspended in unstable and constantly changing locations between the two extreme forces that created us. We are unlikely to yield completely to either force as an ideal solution to our social and political turmoil. To yield completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would dissolve society. To surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots — students of insects call them ants.

See also Paul Seabright and Mark Pagel. Paul Gilbert says "the recognition that both our evolved minds and our social context shape us, and that we have less control over our minds than we think, is to me a call to compassion."

page 167: steadily less violent over time. For evidence see, e.g., the Science special issue on conflict.

page 168: half of extant species of [primates] are in imminent danger of extinction. Here, for example are two reports - 1, 2 -  on the fate of gorillas

page 168: orangutan. An introduction to threats here. Campaign organisations here and here.

page 169: cuckoo clocks and no Italian Renaissance. John Gray looks here at the claim that artistic creativity thrives on the conflicts that go with being ruled by tyrants.