Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/01/monkeys-can-discern-the-order.html
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grumble grumble nonsense
That’s probably a valuable ability in the wild, she says, because many animals need to monitor where group mates stand in the social pecking order.
no. they are able to reason about transitive order. that’s all the experiment shows.
transitive order could be good for all sorts of things. telling directions for all we know. without putting together experiments to verify or falsify the why, “theories” like that are far more telling about the scientist’s point of view than the subject’s
[ edit: the experiment and the result is cool enough on it’s own that the questionable social theories seem unnecessary ]
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A “liquid reward”?
(12h 40m until pub-o-clock and counting.)
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I almost always prefer drinking with monkeys to humans. Now you know why…
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We already know they can maintain one ordered list, which is the social hierarchy of their tribe.
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Ordering lists the only skill you need to be a programmer, or code monkey as we call it in the business.
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Did anyone control for the confounding factor that availability of liquids strongly influences the difficulty of implementing bubble sort?
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Nice to see non-human animals in a scientific context on BB rather than the usual slow-cooking recipes.
Of course thanks to cultural bias monkeys and apes are off the menus of us super smart sciency western people.
The cognitive abilities of chickens and pigs on the other hand still get swept under the rugs, because BBQ.
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Hoping Jordan Peterson doesn’t discover this study.
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And if they don’t have social lives…
“He would insult the Universe. That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order.”
― Douglas Adams
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That is one stoic monkey.
Why can’t it be both?
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I was gonna say, this has taken the sheen off of my finally learning JavaScript this week.
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It’s frustrating to think that all our relationships have been reduced to superficial value propositions, not just because of the society we live in, but that it’s been hard coded in us to give each other yelp reviews long before we lost our tails.
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i blame the patriarchy. a small group of white men who believed strongly in the… ummm… virtues (?) … of social dominance. they were (and somewhat still are) the gatekeepers of anthropology and archaeology, so that’s how a lot of research gets skewed.
i’d kind of hoped that all the “man the hunter out on the savannah”, alpha man, silliness had faded away, but it leaks down into the general public still. ( i’m looking at you paleo diet )
ha! yeah, we’re all a bunch of yahoos
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