On Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape

What follows are my notes from the lavishly photographed book by Frans de Waal (photos by Frans Lanting) called Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape.

Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape

43 "Bonobos wave, beg, wrist-shake, or make threatening gestures predominantly with their right hands. This is the first evidence in a close relative of ours that a communicatory capacity other than language may be associated with the left side of the brain. The similarity in brain specialization hints at a shared evolutionary history between gesturing and language." OOOOOO.

One interesting thing he note about their sexuality is about inhibitions: 100 "Some of these moral constraints exist for good reason, and I am not questioning them, but bonobo society may quite possibly provide insight into how our sexuality might function without them." Another example is that sex is often used more literally as a currency - sex for food, or favors, etc. which we tend to look down on in our society even though it is arguably just a present. :)

"Face-to-face intercourse was long thought to be uniquely human." Nope, Bonobos do it that way :) (Apprently, there was all kinds of moral high-ground associated with this position as a distinguishing factor in making human sex less animal, so much so that its called the missionary position because it was thought that this should be taught of savages when converting them. :)) Also, female orgasm was thought to be uniquely human.

This also reminds me of a part in there that I now don't remember where it was, but he talks about how they seem quite interested in each other's facial expressions and whether or not they are enjoying their sexual experiences because if one of them seems uninterested, they'll just stop.

"some feminist scholars believe that bonding among women is uniquely human" but bonobos definitely appear to bond more than even human women do. 115

134 He talks about the significance of bonobos and their capacity for overturning or rehtinking some long-held beliefs . . . including an alternative evolutionary history or relationship that traces female importance instead of "macho' evolutionary models derived from the behavior of baboons and chimpanzees" (and elsewhere, he talks about empathy in a similar way), "Secondly, bonobos thoroughly upset the idea that sex is intended solely for procreation." Related to this is a comment he made in the lecture about how, though sex might clearly evolved from a reproductive function, it can be used for many more things, so that homosexual relationships are no less natural than heterosexual ones . . . which I think goes against this naturalistic fallacy or whatever Jacob calls it which is really surprisingly prevalant in arguments against all kinds of things. And this idea that if it doesn't happen in nature, it goes against God or something even though this stuff DOES take place in nature. So then they just change the argument so that now nature is animal and therefore against God . . .

He talks about our species and how we "value stable partnerships"

He does say that nuclear families are uniquely human -- "for which no parallel exists in the great apes" at least (i'm not sure about other animals. He offers this whole interesting idea of how we became these kinds of family units, based on the fact that the more males were invested in their offspring, the more interest they had in controlling female reproduction, but the more they could be sure the offspring were theirs, the more the would stick around and help to care for young. He talks about the role of infanticide (throughout the book, actually) and in particular how chimps utilize that to make sure their own offspring live and to increase the reproductive cycle of females to replace the young they lost . . . and how bonobos basically operate under the "if any of these could be my babies and we are all potential fathers, its probably best not to kill any of them" and for humans we just limited female reproductive freedom.

On Drawing as language

As I go back through old things I have written, I came across a bunch more references to drawing and language, primal sorts of stuff, that I really should have recorded here before and seems extremely pertinent to some of the stuff I've been thinking about lately.

OK. So thinking about language as a REFERENTIAL system, (see quotes from Savage-Rumbaugh for this)
and then given this:

- P. 9 “Like all language, drawing is an information storage system. In fact, drawing was used to codify and store information for twenty-five thousand years before phonetic symbols came to represent spoken language.”
From that "Drawing From Life" textbook that Patrick uses . . . Drawing From Life – third edition. Clint Brown and Cheryl McLean, Thomson/Wadsworth Learning, Belmont CA

How does drawing itself relate to this language stuff? I think I talk about this elsewhere - the potential for drawing as an "information storage system" . . . but I think at the moment I want to look at some of the ways that LINE specifically has to do with this, with drawing and language and primal sorts of development. Because I was reading in a chapter about line in that Drawing from Life book, and came across the following interesting thoughts.

Talking about line, they point out that line is really an imaginary idea, its not actually a thing. which is kind of great. Like, it doesn’t even really represent a thing, it’s just a surface transcribed to paper. Other artists also say very similar things – that lines don’t exist in nature, that lines are invented to create an illusion. I like that this book talks about line as a powerful “conduit” for information. . .

“Physically, a line is nothing more than a two dimensional mark on a surface. But when that mark stands for something or traces the configuration of an object, it traps within its confines the conceptual essence of that object, holding it through time.” 62

. . . they talk about how line/mark making gave us “the capacity for literacy, the development of language as an information storage system” I LOVE THIS. This primacy of line, or . . . ancientness of line, some other word I can’t think of. . . I think this is an interesting link with the topics I’m interested in right now . . . like the development of language and representation and its relationship to my paintings and animals etc. Because if lines are essentially about boundaries - demarcation, edges, that is also really in a sense what a lot of these studies are about - delineating boundaries between species that may or may not really be there . . . as lines are created by perceptible changes. . . enough of a difference to indicate some kind of distinction . . . to allow for a label . . . that's what happens on our spectrum of species and taxonomy.

It's interesting what role drawing itself may have had in our cognitive development, in as much as we think that language affected our development as a species. Because if language gave us the power for "rational thought" and information transfer in a way that far surpassed prelingual communication, and written language allowed us to store information in unprecedented ways, thus allowing for the building upon on knowledge from generation to generation . . . how much did drawing, which came before "phoenetic" and written language, affect these qualities? How much did drawing itself pave the way for representational or symbolic language? I assume that if we have shown the capacity and tendency to draw for so many thousands of years, that it has had enough time to have had an evolutionary or biological effect on human development? I'm not actually sure about this, but I'd love to ask someone. In the meantime, wouldn't one have to say that the ability to view a drawing of something as a symbolic representation of something else -- a reference -- a symbol, be just as significant a development as the development of a language that does just that? Researchers talk about how significant representational or referential aspects of language are in the defining qualities of language. Wouldn't the ability to do that VISUALLY be a vital precursor? I'm just wondering. I really want to read more research on these ideas and the use of drawings in developmental studies.

Regardless, I think this connection is an important reason for me to return to drawing, rather than more "advanced" or at least recent, painting, for these pieces. That the drawings themselves, and the qualities inherent in the simplicity of lines, relates to his progress and this distinction between humans and non-humans. :\ Hmmm.

I also have the big question of . . . what is thinking like when you DON'T have language to organize your thoughts. I mean, to what extent does our use of language effect the actual structure of our inner lives. ? Is this a Steven Pinker question?

What role does drawing or visual communication have to do with this? I mean, visual communication could of course include gestures and motions, but drawing takes the next step and becomes this REFERENTIAL and representational system

Cute little side note - back in the day when dissection was first allowed for medical purposes by the University of Florence, "both artists and physicians attended" . . . a meeting of interests in science and art that I like and makes me think about all our shared interactions as fields similarly interested in understanding, depicting, and representing the natural world . . . :)

And here are two links that seem to have something to do with this idea of symbolic thought, lanugage, etc. from NPR.

When did we become mentally modern? (a really good one about symbolic thought)

Signing, singing, speaking: how language evolved

And this one: The Evolution of Symbolic Language

And another NPR article, called The The I-Self And Symbolic Language, from which I took the following:

URSULA GOODENOUGH
"Human beings are unusual, and probably unique, in that they carry the sense that they consist of two selves — a bodily self and mind/spirit self. The seemingly non-physical spirit is given various names, like consciousness, I-self, narrative self, soul, and subjective/private/first-person self."

"Most organisms, even many kinds of bacteria, have evolved ways to communicate with one another, but symbolic language is in a class of its own, as expounded in Terry Deacon's classic, The Symbolic Species. Briefly, symbolic language entails relationships between signifiers (e.g. words) and what's signified (e.g. objects or ideas), but what's special is the construction of a system of relationships among the signifiers themselves, generating a seemingly unlimited web of associations, organized by semantic regularities and constraints, that generate endless narratives, stored and retrieved via the collaboration of both procedural memory and episodic memory. It's really fancy — there's nothing like it on the planet and possibly the universe — and while bonobo apes can acquire some of its features with lifelong human interaction and instruction, most toddlers are de facto geniuses, and infants are thought to experiment with its features as they babble."

On foxes, domestication, dogs, and people with crazy hair

So, some important overview, gleaned from a bunch of different articles, about this rather famous and really interesting thing.

It's the 1950's, Siberia. Fox farmers wanted to develop foxes that were easier to handle, for fur production. The long story short is that the results of this experiment were entirely useless to the fur industry, for reasons that shall become known by the end. But what was discovered in terms of genetics, domestication, and human slash dog history is really pretty fantastic. Dmitri Belyaev, whose brother had gone to concentration camps and died there, managed to survive and was given this task (though apparently, Darwinian or Mendelian genetics was "out of favor" in Russia at the time since "Lysenkoism" was the official state position so he had lost a previous research position, and this continued study of genetics was somewhat disguised as physiological research). Side note: I think it is a very sad and odd coincidence that this research, dealing with selective breeding and Darwinism, is undertaken by a man whose brother died in concentration camps, what with the very disturbing extremes of social Darwinism . . . yeah.

The method for choosing the right foxes to breed, by the way, was as simple as Belyaev sticking his gloved hand out in front of the foxes and seeing which ones snapped at him and which ones exhibited curiosity or cowering. The docile ones were bred together, and so on. Surprisingly, behavioral changes were noted in only 10 generations (which differed, I think, from the prevailing idea of how long domestication would really take. In fact, Ray Coppinger also points out the significance of these studies in their break with Darwinism's insistence that change is gradual and incremental, since a constellation of traits has been more or less selected for all at once, in a relatively short amount of time.) (Soviet Scientist Turns Foxes Into Puppies)

Belyaev's rationale is described this way: "Belyaev believed that the key factor selected for domestication of dogs was not size or reproduction, but behavior; specifically, amenability to domestication, or tameability. He selected for low flight distance, that is, the distance one can approach the animal before it runs away." (Silver foxes - Wikipedia). Me: I love that it's called "flight distance" . . . it sounds so scientific.

Over the course of 60 years and 45,000 foxes, strikingly different animals emerged . . . playful foxes with floppy ears, white patches on their fur, smaller bodies, wider skulls, blue eyes, and the tendency to bark, whine, and wag their tails. "Some of the foxes even began to answer to their names," says the narrator in an unattributed Nova special. The tail-lengths became "unpredictable" and some were curly. The significance of this is underscored by a little comment made by Ray Coppinger from Hampshire college in a PBS Nova episode called "Dogs and More Dogs (2004)" (narrated by John Lithgow, by the way):

"It's not a matter of selecting for them because they're not there to be selected for. That variation isn't there [in the wild type]."

(The article where I found these embedded youtube videos can be found here.)

The significance of these findings were amazing. First, it sort of solves this mystery of where all these traits came from if we can't find them in wild wolves. I also learned, from a Discovery channel special, that since then, they have done experiments where they get a tame mother to raise kits from the aggressive pool, and vice-versa. Apparently, the mother's disposition has no effect on the young, and genetics overrides their behavior. Still, the mystery of how all these traits are related was unclear.

They found that adrenaline levels were far lower than normal in the more tame foxes, and realized that adrenaline is also related to a whole host of other hormones, including the production of melanin (coloring).

Anthropologist Brian Hare (mentioned in a few articles, and below, and who, as is the wonderful tradition of people with evocative last names, has the kind of hair style that would warrant mentioning -- see right) says in a Horizon episode called "The Secret Life of the Dog" that when selecting for tameness, we are essentially selecting for juvenile behavior. Infants and juveniles are far less aggressive than adults, he says, and we are sort of freezing them in time.

The curious notion of pointing
More recently, these foxes were used to investigate the unique ability of dogs to follow human gestures, like pointing (talked about in some previous posts and articles).

In a recent visit to Novosibirsk, Dr. Brian Hare of the Planck Institute used the silver foxes to probe the unusual ability of dogs to understand human gestures.

If a person hides food and then points to the location with a steady gaze, dogs will instantly pick up on the cue, while animals like chimpanzees, with considerably larger brains, will not. Dr. Hare wanted to know if dogs’ powerful rapport with humans was a quality that the original domesticators of the dog had selected for, or whether it had just come along with the tameness, as implied by Belyaev’s hypothesis.

He found that the fox kits from Belyaev’s domesticated stock did just as well as puppies in picking up cues from people about hidden food, even though they had almost no previous experience with humans. The tame kits performed much better at this task than the wild kits did. When dogs were developed from wolves, selection against fear and aggression “may have been sufficient to produce the unusual ability of dogs to use human communicative gestures," Dr. Hare wrote last year in the journal Current Biology.

Dr. Hare believes that wolves probably have the same cognitive powers as dogs, but their ability to solve social problems, like picking up human cues to hidden food, is masked by their fear. Dogs, after their fear is removed by domestication, see humans as potential social partners, not as predators, and are ready to interact with them.

(From Nice Rats, Nasty Rats: Maybe it's all in the genes from the New York Times).

The same Horizon episode, "The Secret Life of the Dog" from which Dr. Hare's comments about selecting for juvenile traits comes goes on to explain that the enormous amount of variation we get in dog breeds today probably did come from direct human selection, of course, but that the initial domestication from wolves to dogs was probably the result of this selection for tameness. In other words, he said, at some point people were like "I like the one with the curly tail" and then they tried to get more. So probably at first, we were not interested in "morphological" traits but behavioral ones. I felt like that was a good clarification to make -- that it wasn't that selective breeding was NEVER for physiological or morphological traits, but just not at first.

This is some really old, pixelated video from Cornell (http://cbsu.tc.cornell.edu/) that shows the foxes doing amazingly cute and wonderful things. I saw this video in higher res as part of another documentary/special on the foxes, but can't seem to find it alone in any better quality. This is exactly what I'd want to show on a little video screen next to or on top of a drawing. :)

Here's another video, I think from Cornell, which simply shows a fox in a cage being very friendly and tail-wagging. Maybe it would make more sense to use something like this.

And one that is essentially the same, but showing a lady happily getting the fox out of the cage (and also, this fox turns around on its feet, which is great.)

And then this video, which is part of a Discovery channel show, which is kind of fantastic. Something that i love about this video is the music, especially this sort of magical music that they play when the foxes are being kind and friendly. I love this sort of enchanting thing. I wonder if I could find some music that is similarly enchanting, put it with no-sound video . . . or use other enchanting music with my proposed Sesame-street puppet things.

Vast and more sinister applications

One article in the Guardian said, "It's eugenics, but with foxes, which is less bad. "

(From Nice Rats, Nasty Rats: Maybe it's all in the genes from the New York Times).

People's comments on blog articles reveal how quickly the conversation can move to, often unintentional or unwitting, dangerously racist comments. On one blog, the relationship between melanin and aggression (and thus skin color) comes up, though after a bit of arguing, someone comes up with a rational, level-headed response the nips further master-race talk.

Pets

Another interesting aspect of this story is the fact that these foxes are now sold as pets (expensive ones, I guess). At first, the idea of taking a wild animal and trying to make it a pet seems to have very negative connotations. However, it's interesting to note a couple of things in this case. One is that, given the issue of diminishing funds for research in Russia, the sale of these foxes is actually a good way to support continued research. Scientists from around the globe have expressed concern that, should disease or a disaster befall the Russian population, these animals could all be wiped out in one fell swoop. Many have tried to get some of the foxes for their own research in other countries, arguing it as a way to protect the genetic material for future study. And finally, I was thinking to myself that really, these animals have been bred to enjoy human contact, are especially social, playful, and active. So they are probably happiest as pets, and what else would you do with them all?

There is a great video from the Discovery Channel show (The Ultimate Guide: Dogs) that shows a silver fox as a pet, playing with a dog (which is great on so many levels)

Various side-notes

The same experiments have been undertaken in Siberia with rats, otters, and mink.

And, someone in the comments section of one of these articles suggested the following: "What I don’t understand is why they called it a ’silver fox’ instead of a ‘fog’ which would have been much funnier I think you have to agree." Kind of great.

Some references and links

The article which re-brought all of this research to attention can be found online at American Scienctist: "Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment", which was written by the mentee of the original researcher. I also have it in PDF form . . . with lots of nice photos.

And then, of course, the Radiolab episode New Nice that, as usual, probably started me thinking about this in the first place. Way to go, Radiolab! :)

Here are some videos of the different fox behaviors: Videos.

Here is a transcript of the Nova show about dogs, which hopefully someday I will actually watch if I can find it online. :)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=evolving-bigger-brains-th