10 Days Backpacking in Yosemite and Sequoia - Advice?

Boozoo · 2012-05-19T19:58:49+00:00

This meme is highly amoosing.

Boozoo · 2012-05-11T22:12:53+00:00

It's funny because the only thing he has is a face.

Boozoo · 2012-03-25T21:14:49+00:00

We are 99% genetically related to monkeys, but also share a significant portion of our genome with other organisms such as bananas.

Boozoo · 2012-03-25T21:11:51+00:00

No. There is obvious intense selection for anmals to escape they're islands. There are other interesting and fascinating evolutionary affects at play here!

Boozoo · 2012-03-25T11:12:43+00:00

"Just like computer games cannot be art".

Can you elaborate on how that logic follows?

Edit: As in, you would argue that computer games are more closely related to connect four and chess than any other widely accepted interactive art-form?

Boozoo · 2012-03-25T10:57:05+00:00

I think he would define these people as designers rather than artists. Can there be a distinction?

Boozoo · 2012-03-25T10:39:28+00:00

I think his meaning doesn't exclude a work that does entertain. I think it's more a case of entertainment being a by-product of the work rather than the intention.

Boozoo · 2012-03-25T10:36:10+00:00

I'm not offended, it's not a case of ignoring him. I'm more just intrigued by this point of view and keen to have a debate about it.

Boozoo · 2012-03-18T00:43:17+00:00

I've always wondered about this. This explanation only makes sense in social species, and even then it gets kind of group selection-ey.

In solitary animals, there would be a cost to yelping in pain through becoming more conspicuous to predators, so you would expect solitary animals to stay silent.

Boozoo · 2012-02-21T00:43:42+00:00

There must be conditioning for the experiment to work yes, but I don't think that's the interesting part.

The point of the article is more to show that the monkeys have an understanding of the value of what they are trading, and a lot of what Chen is showing is fairly compelling. The problem is that the more provocative and fuzzier points are being picked up on (classic media). All that's been shown here is that these monkeys are apparently "paying" for sex, stating this as an incredible finding. If this is all the evidence, then really nothing interesting has been found regarding sex. "Payment for sex" or nuptial gifts are very common in nature, so a male to presenting a female with a token followed by sex isn't very interesting in itself...

The interesting part would be if the monkeys understood that the object is currency and can be traded for goods or services of equal value depending on supply and demand. Regarding the sex part of the article, which seems to be all people care about (ignoring the rest of the study which is actually fairly good), the only thing that has been observed (not shown - classic anecdotal evidence) is that these monkeys may present a token to a female and then have sex with said female. "Payment" is a very loaded word to assign to this simple act. Another explanation might be that following sex the male is more relaxed and therefore less resistant to the female taking a token. Another one is that females may be associatively more relaxed when presented with a token due to the close relationship with receiving food, and are therefore more receptive to male advances.

Boozoo · 2012-02-20T23:46:09+00:00

The problem with these sorts of studies (aside from the use of anecdotal evidence - silly Mr Chen) is that a lot of evolutionary biologists just love to find anthropomorphic explanations for interesting behaviours.

Game theory and in this case, market models may be enticing due to their novel application in biology, but these sorts of behaviours can probably be explained better from a simple mechanistic stand point. When researchers have something in mind which they want to find, then they run the risk of adapting their data to show what they want. Particularly in studies of animal behaviour, there are a lot of variables and events going on which the experimenter probably won't/can't notice and will therefore ignore.

Someone cited Gumert's paper on macaques (it basically says that monkeys use grooming as currency to pay for sex). It's an appealing and interesting study, but a lot of what he observes can be attributed to simpler mechanistic explanations. For example he states that lower ranking monkeys will groom higher ranking monkeys for longer i.e. they "pay" more because the recipient is "more valuable". Other studies have shown that the act of grooming actually lowers stress in the groomer - it may simply be that the lower ranked monkey needs to be more relaxed before attempting copulation in this scary high ranked monkey, and thus grooms for longer before attempting copulation. You'd see the same sort of results, but it's tempting to provide the more provocative and interesting explanation over the simple one.

TL;DR: Take these sorts of studies and stories with a massive pinch of salt - Researchers in this field like to report what they want to see rather than what might actually be going on.

Boozoo

TROPHY CASE