Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In this heartwarming video. a woman goes to a refuge in Florida housing chimps once used in lab research—chimps whom she saved and rehabilitated. Will they remember her? Here are the details:
After 18 years, chimpanzees Doll and Swing still recognize their old friend, Linda Koebner. From the award-winning film WISDOM OF THE WILD, this excerpt captures the emotional reunion between two former laboratory chimpanzees and the woman who helped them transition to a life without bars. Produced, written, directed and narrated by Allison Argo for PBS’ Nature Series.
Have a gander, and try not to tear up.
Now Linda has been told who the chimps are, and it’s not clear she would remembers them after 18 years without this knowledge. After all, both woman and chimps have changed. And do the chimps recognize her? It’s not clear, though it looks like it. Is there evidence that apes have memories that long? I don’t know.
What is clear is that Linda formed a deep and affectionate bond with these animals. And I wonder whether it was really necessary to confine these intelligent creatures in the lab and infect them with bacteria and viruses.
Here’s a similar but equally wonderful video with a man and woman reuniting in Gabon with gorillas they raised in England a dozen years before.
Reader Danish Meman sent some lovely photos, many in black and white, of animals in zoos. His notes are below, and I’ve given his IDs of the animals:
All of the photos presented here come from a larger set of photos taken at various zoos in the UK and USA. I know that people feel strongly about the existence of zoos and the treatment of animals within them, but I still think they serve a purpose. Most notably, they introduce adults and children to animals they might never get to see in the wild. For instance, I don’t have the resources or ability to venture to Africa to view lions and elephants in their natural habitats. Moreover, the best zoos are invested in conservation and education, which, hopefully, helps foster appreciation for the natural world and related careers.
As far as the photography goes I enjoy trying to capture the personality of these animals, which is why the majority of these photos are in black and white. I wanted to strip away everything else and make the animal the focal point of the viewer’s attention. My hope is for people to connect with the creatures in the photos and imagine a conversation, story or encounter with them.
In my case, I saw the animals live while taking these photos so I already have a story for each of them. For instance, I recall the African Elephant looking melancholy as it was led away from the crowds after being fed. Similarly, I remember how the chimpanzee smiled at the camera, at just the right moment, as it was playing with a flower. By contrast, I think the personality of the birds is contained in the colors of their feathers and how they brighten their surroundings.
For those interested, all the photos were taken with a Nikon D7100 and 18-140mm Nikkor lens. Also, the photos were taken at the Colchester Zoo (England,UK), Edinburgh Zoo (Scotland,UK), Jungle Island (Miami) and the Miami Zoo (Florida,USA). I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I enjoyed taking them.”
From BBC One program, “Spy in the Wild”, we learn that lemurs not only rub millipedes on their skin to deter insects (mostly mosquitoes who are repelled by the millipedes’ benzoquinones), but also seem to get high from chemicals in the ‘pedes. This isn’t just speculation: there’s research to support at least the insecticide part (see here). I’m not sure the lemurs really enjoy this “intoxication”: it may just be a psychological state that is a necessary byproduct of biting the millipedes.
Reader Carl Sufit sent us some underwater shots of cephalopods; his notes are indented:
I’ll start with some images from Bonaire, of my (and many others’) favorite Order(?), Octopoda(?)
Although they are generally nocturnal hunters, we do get to see them during the day, although they tend to retreat back into a tiny hole in the reef when confronted by divers. Occasionally I’ve seen one that seemed so intent on some task that it ignores the bubbling hulks nearby. This one, I assume a Caribbean Reef Octopus, Octopus briareus, kept leaving its lair in a coral head, and moving a meter or two down to a sandy area and grabbing some dead coral and bringing it back up. Setting up defenses?? No idea.
And I’ll throw in a cousin cephalopod, a Caribbean Reef Squid, Sepioteuthis sepioidea. They often shy away from divers, but occasionally they seem curious and I’ve actually been approached by them briefly.
And some mammals from Karen Bartelt:
I recently took a trip to Panama with the Sierra Club. One of the places we stayed was called to Canopy Tower, a former radar installation in the old Canal Zone. Now part of Soberania National Park, it’s an ecolodge and an excellent place to view wildlife. Though the focus of the trip was birds and butterflies, we did see a few mammals, including this Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth (Bradypus variegatus). The second pair of photos were taken days after the first two, so these may be two different animals. There were several sloths around, and it was wonderful to shoot across the canopy rather than up, as we were at about the same level. They seemed to not have a care in the world.
Canopy Tower:
There were also troops of Geoffroy’s Tamarin (Sanguinus geoffroyi) that came and begged for bananas. We heard howler monkeys, and also saw agoutis and capuchin monkeys, but my photos of these aren’t very good.
Finally, we have last night’s moon, photographed by reader Nicole Reggia with a hand-held camera propped against a tree, and a 150-600 mm Tamron zoom lens:
As I’m in a rush preparing to leave (and Wildlife Photo posts take a while to put up), so let me be lazy and post three tweets sent by the estimable Matthew Cobb, who follows Twi**er. They are all animal-related, so they fit here.
Since I’m not taking readers’ wildlife photos with me, if you send some when I’m gone, they’ll likely be posted almost immediately. But be sure the photos are good!
First, this one. Now the resemblance to a jumping spider is conjectural, but it sure looks like one to me. The question is this: the predators who presumably avoid this butterfly because of the markings must have had some experience encountering jumping spiders (otherwise they wouldn’t learn to avoid them—or have evolved to avoid them). But the predators on butterflies are often birds, and these aren’t attacked by jumping spiders. Your quiz question: if this is indeed an evolved mimetic pattern, what would be the selective pressures that could produce it?
Dressed for Halloween? The markings on the back of this gemmed satyr appear to mimic a jumping spider. Photo by Bryan E. Reynolds. pic.twitter.com/X2aQeoUk8k
Here’s one jumping spider for comparison. The prediction, of course, is that there must be a jumping spider with nasty effects on some butterfly predator living in the same area as the gemmed satyr. According to Wikipedia, the butterfly, (Cyllopsis gemma) is a nymphalid found in the SE US and NE Mexico.
Now, for a certain case of mimicry, have a look at this photo. Nope, that’s not a bee but a MOTH (note the antennae).
The log right in front of the painted stork in the photo below is resting on a crocodile. It is an inadvertent (as far as I can tell) camouflage. The crocodiles did not seem all that interested in the storks, and the storks flapped out of the way whenever a crocodile sidled up.
But no, I don’t think so—or else it’s parody that isn’t good because it’s so close to seeming real without a hint that it’s farcical. The author, Christina Cauterucci, was also a PuffHo editor (surprise!), and I can’t find any evidence of a scientific background.
At any rate, most of us know two things. First, chimps and bonobos, the latter now regarded as a species distinct from the common chimpanzee (former P. paniscus, latter P. troglodytes) are our closest living relatives. They’re equally closely related to humans, with our joint common ancestor living about 6 million years ago. The two chimp diverged from their own common ancestor about 2.4 million years ago.
Second, the social systems of the two chimps—bonobos were formerly called “pygmy chimps”—are quite different, with bonobos having a greater diversity of sexual behavior, more female/female bonding, and a pervasive use of sexuality as social glue. (Some have argued that in the wild, rather than in zoos or enclosures, the difference between the species is not as great, but let’s accept it for the time being.)
Another fact: we have no idea, given this divergence, what the behavior of the chimps’ common ancestor was like, nor, of course, do we have behavioral information about our own common ancestor with the chimps. Sadly, though, people have drawn moral lessons from chimps, saying that we should be more “bonobish” than “chimpish”, although there’s nothing in the evolutionary tree—or in science itself—that suggests such an “ought”. If we want to change our behaviors, it’s just dumb to try to find animal models and then say, “We should be like them.” What’s the point?
Yet that is exactly what Cauterucci does in her piece. She has a feminist ideology that she wants to see accepted in modern society (and I don’t disagree with her), but then projects it onto the bonobos, seeing them as “true feminists”, and then reverse-engineers this projection back onto humans as an “ought.” But there’s no need to draw any moral lessons from primates, even from our closest relatives. If we want to promote women’s equality, we can do it by applying rational arguments and empathy to modern human society, with no need to look to other species as models.
But Cauterucci can’t resist, and goes to ludicrous lengths to promote bonobos, diss chimps, and even goes so far as to promote what I see as misandry in humans. But let’s look at what she wrote—the kind of stuff that made me think this was a parody.
Bonobos, the Central African apes known for their libertine sexual behavior, have taken the advice of Madeleine Albright to heart. “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” the former secretary of state has often said, most notably at a February Hillary Clinton rally to great public censure from female Bernie supporters. If she’s right, female bonobos have earned a plot of prime real estate in heaven: They regularly band together to put aggressive males in their place, going so far as to bite off penises or toes if need be, all in the name of sisterhood.
A recent New York Times piece chronicles the many bonobo behaviors we humans should try to emulate, and they make women’s self-defense classes sound like Beanie Baby tea parties. In what might be the best anecdotal lede in Times history, four male bonobos “display their erections,” excited by the “exceptionally pink and swollen” rump of a fertile female, while catcalling her and rattling the branches on her tree. Three older, more senior female bonobos descend on the lecherous males; together, the four females manage to capture one of them. “He was healthy, muscular and about 18 pounds heavier than any of his captors,” the Times recounts. “But no matter. The females bit into him as he howled and struggled to pull free.” He eventually escaped, but didn’t come back to his bonobo community for weeks. Upon his return, missing the tip of one of his toes, he avoided his peers.
Take away the toe-biting (maybe), and this is exactly how human women could and should deal with rapists, abusers, and serial sexual harassers: Scare them away by any means necessary, expel them from the safety of an enabling social system, and ostracize them until they prove themselves reborn as humbled feminists.
“Take away the toe-biting (maybe)??” It’s indeed possible that male bonobo’s sexual behavior has common roots with that of human males, but we needn’t construct societal oughts from the way that females behave. I, for one, think that biting off the fingers and penises of catcallers is a bit extreme. And can we really see randy bonobo males as the primate equivalent of “rapists, abusers, and serial sexual harassers”? If you’re willing to say that, then you’re going the route of evolutionary psychology, but adding a veneer of human morality to it. Think about how you’d characterize male ducks or fruit flies! For ducks certainly have a “rape culture” more violent than do chimps.
In fact, humans have police, laws, and courts to deal with this behavior, so we needn’t resort to penis- and toe-biting. In that difference lies much of Cauterucci’s fallacious analogy.
Then comes the chimp-dissing:
The sad thing is that bonobos are equally close relatives to humans as chimpanzees, but we look to the latter far more often for clues about the roots of our species. Bonobos are light-years ahead of chimps in their sexual evolution. [JAC: this is completely bogus: one species isn’t “more evolved” than another. That kind of hierarchy was debunked a century ago. Each species is evolutionarily adapted to their environment] As the Times notes, they kiss with tongue, give one another oral pleasure, have sex while facing each other, and use their opposable thumbs for what our maker intended: making sex toys. Chimps just poke boring old sticks into termite mounds. They also have far stronger bonds between males than between females (the opposite of bonobos), kill their babies with relative frequency (bonobos never do that), and make females mate with every single eligible male (unlike bonobos, who practice some ape-like form of affirmative consent).
So why have we chosen chimps as our nearest and dearest genetic relatives? Seems like the evil machinations of a patriarchal, sex-negative, infanticidal rape culture to me. Of course, bonobos do condone adults having sex with bonobo children, a behavior humans have rightly discouraged. But chimpanzees are murderous aggressors. No species is perfect.
That second sentence sounds like pure parody, but I don’t think it is. I wonder what Jane Goodall would have to say about it. But seriously, no biologist now looks to chimps rather than to bonobos to trace the roots of our species. Historically, the common chimp was the subject for such work (Goodall being the most important researcher); but since we realized that there were two species of chimps with divergent social systems, nobody I know favors one above the other as the “evolutionarily accurate” wellsprings of our behavior.
As for dragging patriarchy, sex-negativity, and “rape culture” into animals, well, that’s pure anthropomorphism. And I point out again that either Cauterucci is just seeing cultural analogies here without any genetic basis, in which case there’s nothing to learn about the roots of human behavior, or she’s seeing genetically based similarities in behavior, in which case she’s adumbrating a form of evolutionary psychology—evolutionary differences between human males and females—that Leftist feminists often reject. (I myself think that a fair amount of modern human behavior—particularly sexual behavior—does have evolutionary roots, but I also think that we can transcend our biological heritage when it’s inimical to modern society.) Her suggestion that bonobos are “light-years ahead of chimps in their sexual evolution” suggests that Cauterucci does see a genetic basis in their divergent behaviors.
At any rate, Cauterucci is wrong to say that chimps are our modern paradigm of behavior, that they are “idolized” above bonobos, and that we should model our society on bonobos. Yes, of course women deserve to be free from harassment, and treated as legal and moral equals to males, but do we need to look to bonobos to effect that? Bonobos don’t have any sense of intellectual feminism, which is a purely human concept. Cauterucci suggests, in fact, that their “feminism” is evolved and not chosen. At the end of the piece, in fact, one gets a sense that Cauterucci glories in the male-bashing of bonobos, which of course isn’t something that our species should indulge in, either:
A California primatologist told the Times that bonobos “should give hope to the human feminist movement.” I would argue that the trend toward ironic misandry in modern pop feminism indicates that we’re already halfway to bonobodom. Imagine what glee a high-ranking bonobo female would take in eating her daily helping of insect larvae from a mug labeled “male tears.”
I can’t see why bonobos should give any hope to feminism—any more than common chimp should give hope to the men’s rights movement. This is what you get when you have a toxic combination of an ideological agenda combined with an ignorance of biology. (That, by the way, accounts for the frequent dismissing of evolutionary psychology by the regressive left).
But maybe Cauterucci is just pulling a big Sokal-esque scam on us, and Slate has bought it. And perhaps I’ve just wasted my time. You tell me!
But if it is a parody, it’s deceived a lot of people who read it as real, and given them misleading messages about evolution and the naturalistic fallacy.
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