Chimps help us understand how human-like societies evolved?
|May 16, 2014||Posted by News under Human evolution, News|
Despite the fact that they never did it themselves?
Like if I was gonna tell you how to win Olympic gold, wouldn’t you first want to know my international ranking?
None of that counts in today’s ridiculous pop science media. Getta loada this:
From New Scientist (where else?) :
After Leakey’s death a chimp called Humphrey became alpha male, but he was weak and faced pressure from two brothers from the south, Hugh and Charlie. The other chimps began to follow either Humphrey or the brothers. The battle began.
My grandpa used to break up such fights between bulls (by driving a team and wagon between them, which tended to confuse them). But he never thought of it as politics. Note that the names quoted are given and recognized by humans, not chimps.
Over four years Humphrey’s group destroyed the brothers’ group, and the seven rebel males died or vanished. Groups of males would slip into rebel territory and savagely beat a single chimp.
Marquess of Queensberry, call your office.
It was possible to predict which group a chimp joined by looking at their preferred social contacts before the split, says Feldblum. This social fragmentation resembles human societies, he says, pointing to “an iconic study in sociology”, Zachary’s karate club, which showed how tensions among members of the club led it to split into two. Here, too, it was easy to predict how the group split.
Nothing like a savage beating to revise one’s social diary, to be sure.
That means chimp societies might help us understand how human-like societies evolve. More clues might come from New World spider monkeys, the only other primate that seems to behave similarly, says Anthony Di Fiore at the University of Texas at Austin. “There must be some ecological reason why they have converged on the same pattern of social organisation [as humans].”
Readers, can you beat this? Can you find something in the pop sci lit (that does not involve space aliens) that is as stupid as this? This now passes for science thinking?
Is it too late to ask them to lose the pom poms? Really too late?
The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (human evolution)
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