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Stone-Throwing Chimp Back In the News With Better Plan
sciencehabit writes "Three years ago, a stone-throwing chimpanzee named Santino jolted the research community by providing some of the strongest evidence yet that non-humans could plan ahead. Santino, a resident of the Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden, calmly gathered stones in the mornings and put them into neat piles, apparently saving them to hurl at visitors when the zoo opened as part of angry and aggressive 'dominance displays.' But some researchers were skeptical that Santino really was planning for a future emotional outburst. Now Santino is back in the scientific literature, the subject of new claims that he has begun to conceal the stones so he can get a closer aim at his targets—further evidence that he is thinking ahead like humans do."
And yet we still keep him, and his relatives, in a cage.
Well yeah, if humans threw stones at people we'd put them in a cage too called "jail"
Humans who plan their aggressive dominance displays ahead of time also tend to receive longer periods of imprisonment as well(unless elected to suitably high office, or endorsed therefrom, of course)...
Except we call his relative's cages "cubes."
Now, excuse me, I need to go have my banana for lunch.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
He isn't just planning ahead, and then coming up with a new plan. He's being deceptive.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I would go and see this chimp if they would let me throw the stones back at him. Hell, I'd even pay good money.
Would you claim it is just instinct that causes cats to lurk on stairs, and they're not planning for when a person walks by?
I tried this at work but the custodial staff kept finding my little piles of rocks and removing them from my office. Sometimes it doesn't pay to plan ahead.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Santino was castrated. Seems zookeepers decided his planning ability was too advanced for their liking. Thing to remember for one intending to show advanced planning ability to more technologically advanced species.
Do be fair chimps are kinds of assholes in the wild. When they come across a groups of chimps smaller than them they slaughter them... if the same size or greater they put on dominance displays and they leave.
Instinctual behaviors are not considered planned behaviors. This is a unique display from the chimp in question that other chimps don't do, so it is not instinctual. Previous questions were if it was perhaps a learned behavior or that the initial gathering and stockpiling was unrelated to the use of the rocks to throw at zoo visitors. The fact that he seems to have recognized that he has a better chance of successfully attacking the visitors by portraying peaceful action and concealing his weapons gives much more evidence that this chimp is capable of advanced thought and planning.
Well yeah, if humans threw stones at people we'd put them in a cage too called "jail"
Usually the way that works is you throw the stones first and then get put in a cage. Not the other way around.
No. Cats are obviously evil genius masterminds who have plans stretching from the dawn of time until the re-awakening of the Great Old Ones. No instinct - just pure, unadulterated malevolence.
Yeah, we should send the little guy back to the Congo so the locals can eat him.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
My family was driving through Florida in the 60s and we stopped at some wretched “jungle zoo” by the side of the road. I ran ahead of the rest looking at the really sad caged animals and saw the chimp cage. It had ragged poly sheets hanging in front with big holes and tears in them with a chimp sitting quietly. As soon as I got close enough, the chimp sprayed me with a most foul mouthful of something bad and jumped down to a bucketful of nasty and sucked up another huge mouthful.
I wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree but even I knew to run like hell. This happened in full view of my family who promptly collapsed in hysterical laughter. The chimp knew exactly what it was doing and planned accordingly.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Oh no, that's not a banana.
-g
Or start leaving guns around in his enclosure until he learns how to defend himself and starts eating the locals
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
MY banana break is at 11:45, and we start throwing feces around 3:12 pm. Unless the hot receptionist is here, then we all run around with our chests puffed up...
BRB, I need to jump on daves desk and scream at him.
Just another day in Corporate america.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
He should be a gorilla warfare expert in no time!
Your honor, I'm a chimpanzee. Your scientists saw me stacking stones and then hiding them and so they sent me to law school. Your world frightens and confuses me! When someone sends me a text message on my iPhone I wonder, "are there tiny people inside typing it?" I don't know. But I do know this: when someone like my client slips and falls on the sidewalk in front of a public library, he is entitled to two million dollars in compensatory damages and two million in punitive damages. Thank you.
I live with two pit-bull terriers (both rescued strays), and unfortunately I must keep them in separate rooms because of a traumatic event where during play the one's jaw got caught under the other's collar -- They remember this episode, but confuse it with each hurting the other; Ever since they fight if left together unsupervised for a length of time.
The one dog, TC (named after the street T.C. Jester where she was found), likes being in the larger part of the house, and would rather not be in the den. So, when I say that "It's time to switch the dogs", and try to put her in the Den, she runs to the back door instead, as if she needs to relieve herself. She knows that the dog in the house usually ends up in the den when the outside dog is let back inside -- to keep them separated.
If while coming back inside she realises that I'll be putting the other dog outside -- making her more likely to be the dog in the den, then she's resistant to coming back inside... She not only thinks ahead, she's worked out several plans to achieve her goal. If TC knows its her turn to have run of the house, then none of this is an issue, she goes in and out without a care, knowing that it's the other dog that'll be relegated to the den -- Even if she sees the other dog going out when she comes in, she's not reluctant to come inside because she's not planning on being put in the den.
Furthermore, I'm beginning to run out of ways to say "Walk" and "Car" -- The dogs love riding in the car, and have learned that "C.A.R." means car, "Truck" and "T.R.U.C.K" is also out, can't say or spell "go" without them getting excited to leave -- Currently I've taken to saying, "Vamonos en el Auto" which is me butchering Spanish (never formally studied it, but I've run out of French and English words), because they've also learned "coche"; However, TC has started to pick up on this too -- You can see her perk up and look between the parties as if she's sussing out whether or not we'll soon be leaving. Names of vacation places, such as "Kerville" must be avoided at all cost -- I sometimes attend the Kerville Folk Festival for a week or so and have the neighbour care for one dog at the house while the other is in a kennel (to ensure separation), TC gets distressed when Kerville is mentioned -- She picks it up even in the middle of rapid speech with other parties. TC normally loves to get the leash so we can go for a walk, but Mention Kerville at all and she runs away from the leash for several days. She's planning not to be the dog in the kennel.
Humans are so damn chauvinistic. There's no such thing as "sentience" -- That's some made up Bullshit right there. There is only varying degrees of awareness and intellect depending on the complexity of the neural network. Bigger network? Smarter. That's all there is to it.
When (not if) machine learning neural networks surpass the complexity of the human mind by leaps and bounds: I sure hope they're understanding enough of our primitive nature, and don't treat us lesser minded humans as we treat the apes and other creatures with proportionally less neurons. Note that I didn't say I own the dogs...
"This is a cat. He doesn't hate you because you're black, brown or yellow, or because you're a homosexual, or a Republican, or a Democrat. He hates you because he's a cat."
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Dogs always know what time it is. If they could speak they would tell you: "It's now" - that is, they can't really plan ahead. They can plan for the moment, within the limits of their working (short -term) memory. And they can internalize lessons from long-term experience and modify their behavior, such as not stealing food off the table after getting punished several times for it. But they have no capacity to reason about what might happen in the more-than-immediate future and decide what to do based on that. For example, the dog that won't steal food in front of you, may very well steal it when you are out of sight, never realizing that you will know what took place and get mad at it, but acting very guilty when you return to the room because it will only then realize it is in trouble.
Elephants, on the other hand, based on my own anecdotal "evidence", anyway, appear to be able to plan ahead as well as the chimp in TFA. When I was involved in the gutting and remaking of the building housing elephants, giraffes, etc. at our local zoo, the architect pointed out to me the brown spots on the wall behind the visitor's gallery. It turns out that the poor, bored animal was throwing its' dung at the visitors. The interesting part, though, was that when the zookeepers realized this, and cleaned up the poop before the visitors arrived, the elephant started planning ahead and hiding their excrement on top of the barrier poles so it would be available to throw at the gawkers (the poles were more than 8 feet high and large enough to conceal the dung from the zookeepers). This apparently amused the elephant, as it was done to the squealing delight of all the visiting schoolchildren - those that weren't hit by the shit, anyway.
I support the right to arm bears.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
You should be punished for that.
Quick! Start throwing stones!
First let's find one of us who hasn't done anything wrong. Then we'll let him throw the first stone.
Quite right, proper nouns especially are exempt. Could you Xerox your thesis on the subject for me, or should I Google it?
All living languages continuously evolve through such abuse, and no doubt the early adopters always look like idiots. No sense getting upset about it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.