Mar 6, 2021 10:24 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 7, 2021 01:04 AM by C C.)
Homo sapiens: the water-saving ape
https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behavi...aving-ape/
INTRO : It’s an age-old question in evolution: how did humans become the dominant primate, able to venture out from tropical rainforests to the savannah and then populate the entire world? In other words, what makes us unique? Science offers many explanations, including our large brains, bipedal gait and ability to craft complex tools – but a new study suggests that we’re also more efficient at conserving water.
For humans, water is life: our bodies are 60% water and we need to drink 2–3 litres per day to replenish what we lose through sweat, urination and even breathing. And yet, according to an international team of scientists, humans actually use about 30–50% less water per day than our closest primate cousins.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, may have interesting consequences for our understanding of human evolution. An ability to conserve water could have allowed our hunter-gatherer ancestors to travel further from water sources in order to find food... (MORE)
Was the golden rule born in the mind of a monkey?
https://nautil.us/blog/-was-the-golden-r...f-a-monkey
INTRO: As economic inequality increased in many wealthy nations in recent years, a debate has developed around the question of whether inequality is bad for national economies—and bad for their citizens. A captivating video clip of monkey behavior (see below), taken from a 2011 TED talk by primatologist Frans de Waal, has become a surprising piece of ammunition in this discussion.
The video illustrates a famous 2003 experiment by de Waal and his colleague Sarah Brosnan. It begins with a capuchin monkey being rewarded with a cucumber slice for handing a rock to the experimenter. The monkey happily performs this task and collects her payment—until the monkey next to her is given a more desirable reward, a grape, for the same job. The first monkey then flings the unappetizing cucumber from her cage. In the study, the monkeys often refused to hand over a rock if they saw the other monkey get grapes while they themselves continued to get cucumbers.
Frans de Waal says that his research with primates shows that “instead of fairness and justice being intellectual products, something we have arrived at through reason, they are embedded in basic emotions, some of which are found in other primates,” possibly through a shared evolutionary history. “This is basically the [Occupy] Wall Street protest that you see here,” de Waal says at the end of the video clip. If his point about fairness is right, then arguments about inequality take on a biological imperative—greater equality can be seen as the “natural order” of things, and inequality as an inherently destructive force. As de Waal himself has argued in his The Age of Empathy, our capacity for building a stable society rests in part on knowing what kind of animals we humans are.
For a social-justice activist, the message from the monkeys may seem clear: Equal effort deserves equal pay, and any society that ignores this simple principle is messing with a deeply rooted instinct for fairness. But within the scientific world, far from settling the nature of fairness, Brosnan and de Waal’s classic study has prompted a stream of research that shows just how complex and fragile fairness can be in primate and human interactions.
If you watch the video of the capuchin monkeys (especially if it’s in the context of a blog post on income equality), it may seem obvious that the underpaid monkey is objecting to unfair treatment. But a sense of fairness may not be what’s driving the monkey’s behavior. Imagine that there was no second monkey in the experiment, just one monkey and an experimenter with a bowl full of cucumbers and another full of grapes. If the monkey were given the cucumber as a reward in that case, she might also object to it—not because it was unfair, but just because the cucumber doesn’t seem very appealing once the monkey knows there are grapes to be had. The monkey who rejects cucumbers may be less like a political protester and more like a two-year-old swatting away a proffered apple slice when a well-stocked candy jar is in full view... (MORE - details)
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Cynical Sindee: The problem with framing cronyism in the "social justice" bromide is that it does not revolve fundamentally around the teacher's pet categories that Leftarians para-religiously fixate on. Indigenous workers in companies and facilities of countries where native Africans, Asians, etc constitute the administrative level still experience being snubbed. White counterparts in Europe and North America have likewise complained for centuries about being victims of "good ol' boy" or "good ol' girl" networks.
These scientists are pre-conditioned beforehand by the socio-political environments they are embedded in to conceive "what's going on" with respect to data through those ideological filters they carry (like the insanely overused and universally applied to everything interpretation of "systemic racism" or "systemic bias"). They are, in essence, acclimatized lab rats themselves conducting studies on lab rats, entering both setup, conducting, and aftermath of an experiment with either implicit or explicit motivations rather than neutral objectivity.
Contrast to scientists whose work is tied to technology and engineering, wherein interpretations and theories actually have to be effective or reflect reality productively, or else disasters and loss of expenses/profit occurs. The human sciences in contrast, border on seeming to reward their members for being sensitive and receptive to popular, shiny baubles rolling off the humanities conveyor belt. Or else the latter's influence on the SJW chatter of social media.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behavi...aving-ape/
INTRO : It’s an age-old question in evolution: how did humans become the dominant primate, able to venture out from tropical rainforests to the savannah and then populate the entire world? In other words, what makes us unique? Science offers many explanations, including our large brains, bipedal gait and ability to craft complex tools – but a new study suggests that we’re also more efficient at conserving water.
For humans, water is life: our bodies are 60% water and we need to drink 2–3 litres per day to replenish what we lose through sweat, urination and even breathing. And yet, according to an international team of scientists, humans actually use about 30–50% less water per day than our closest primate cousins.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, may have interesting consequences for our understanding of human evolution. An ability to conserve water could have allowed our hunter-gatherer ancestors to travel further from water sources in order to find food... (MORE)
Was the golden rule born in the mind of a monkey?
https://nautil.us/blog/-was-the-golden-r...f-a-monkey
INTRO: As economic inequality increased in many wealthy nations in recent years, a debate has developed around the question of whether inequality is bad for national economies—and bad for their citizens. A captivating video clip of monkey behavior (see below), taken from a 2011 TED talk by primatologist Frans de Waal, has become a surprising piece of ammunition in this discussion.
The video illustrates a famous 2003 experiment by de Waal and his colleague Sarah Brosnan. It begins with a capuchin monkey being rewarded with a cucumber slice for handing a rock to the experimenter. The monkey happily performs this task and collects her payment—until the monkey next to her is given a more desirable reward, a grape, for the same job. The first monkey then flings the unappetizing cucumber from her cage. In the study, the monkeys often refused to hand over a rock if they saw the other monkey get grapes while they themselves continued to get cucumbers.
Frans de Waal says that his research with primates shows that “instead of fairness and justice being intellectual products, something we have arrived at through reason, they are embedded in basic emotions, some of which are found in other primates,” possibly through a shared evolutionary history. “This is basically the [Occupy] Wall Street protest that you see here,” de Waal says at the end of the video clip. If his point about fairness is right, then arguments about inequality take on a biological imperative—greater equality can be seen as the “natural order” of things, and inequality as an inherently destructive force. As de Waal himself has argued in his The Age of Empathy, our capacity for building a stable society rests in part on knowing what kind of animals we humans are.
For a social-justice activist, the message from the monkeys may seem clear: Equal effort deserves equal pay, and any society that ignores this simple principle is messing with a deeply rooted instinct for fairness. But within the scientific world, far from settling the nature of fairness, Brosnan and de Waal’s classic study has prompted a stream of research that shows just how complex and fragile fairness can be in primate and human interactions.
If you watch the video of the capuchin monkeys (especially if it’s in the context of a blog post on income equality), it may seem obvious that the underpaid monkey is objecting to unfair treatment. But a sense of fairness may not be what’s driving the monkey’s behavior. Imagine that there was no second monkey in the experiment, just one monkey and an experimenter with a bowl full of cucumbers and another full of grapes. If the monkey were given the cucumber as a reward in that case, she might also object to it—not because it was unfair, but just because the cucumber doesn’t seem very appealing once the monkey knows there are grapes to be had. The monkey who rejects cucumbers may be less like a political protester and more like a two-year-old swatting away a proffered apple slice when a well-stocked candy jar is in full view... (MORE - details)
- - - - -
Cynical Sindee: The problem with framing cronyism in the "social justice" bromide is that it does not revolve fundamentally around the teacher's pet categories that Leftarians para-religiously fixate on. Indigenous workers in companies and facilities of countries where native Africans, Asians, etc constitute the administrative level still experience being snubbed. White counterparts in Europe and North America have likewise complained for centuries about being victims of "good ol' boy" or "good ol' girl" networks.
These scientists are pre-conditioned beforehand by the socio-political environments they are embedded in to conceive "what's going on" with respect to data through those ideological filters they carry (like the insanely overused and universally applied to everything interpretation of "systemic racism" or "systemic bias"). They are, in essence, acclimatized lab rats themselves conducting studies on lab rats, entering both setup, conducting, and aftermath of an experiment with either implicit or explicit motivations rather than neutral objectivity.
Contrast to scientists whose work is tied to technology and engineering, wherein interpretations and theories actually have to be effective or reflect reality productively, or else disasters and loss of expenses/profit occurs. The human sciences in contrast, border on seeming to reward their members for being sensitive and receptive to popular, shiny baubles rolling off the humanities conveyor belt. Or else the latter's influence on the SJW chatter of social media.