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Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:34:00 EST

To Suggest That We Can Learn Anything About the Simian Nature from a Study of Man is Sheer Nonsense

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:15:00 EST

ScienceDaily summarizes a paper from PNAS:

Socially-learned cultural behaviour thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzees colonies, scientists at the University of Liverpool have found.

Historically, scientists believed that behavioural differences between colonies of chimpanzees were due to variations in genetics. A team at Liverpool, however, has now discovered that variations in behaviour are down to chimpanzees migrating to other colonies, proving that they build their 'cultures' in a similar way to humans.

The paper itself is available only to PNAS subscribers, but the abstract is open to all.

The Ire of the Tiger

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:06:00 EST

In my column last week, I cited the recent fatal tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo as an example of blame shifting, because it seemed likely that one or more of the men who were mauled did something to provoke the tiger. Since then new details have reinforced that impression:

1) A witness told the San Francisco Chronicle she saw the two men who survived, Kulbir and Paul Dhaliwal, taunting the lions at the big-cat house where the tiger escaped. Notably, she said Carlos Sousa Jr., the 17-year-old who reportedly died after distracting the tiger from the Dhaliwal brothers, thereby saving their lives, did not participate in the taunting and seemed embarrassed by his friends' behavior.

2) The police saw an empty vodka bottle in the front seat of the car the Dhaliwals took to the zoo.

3) ~~Paramedics told~~ ~~the Chronicle they overheard~~ Sources told the Chronicle that paramedics overheard Kulbir Dhaliwal instruct his younger brother, "Don't tell them what we did."

The Dhaliwal brothers, who have retained a lawyer and almost certainly plan to sue the zoo, still have not given a complete account of the attack, even to police. Since it failed to build a wall high enough to keep an agitated tiger from escaping, the zoo is not blameless. But whoever agitated the tiger enough to provoke such an unprecedented attack should not receive a windfall as a result.

[via Overlawyered]

Brother, Can You Spare a Banana?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:46:00 EDT

In yesterday's New York Times, science columnist John Tierney notes that the gesture of the upturned palm, "signifying 'Gimme,'" is "one of the oldest and most widely understood signals in the world." He claims it's "activated by neural circuits inherited from ancient reptiles that abased themselves before larger animals":

The palm-up gesture is what the anthropologist David Givens, director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Wash., calls a "gestural byproduct" of the circuits in the brain and spinal cord that protected vertebrates hundreds of millions of years ago.
Confronted with a threat, ancient lizards would instinctively bend their spine and limbs to press their bodies closer to the ground, protecting the neck and head and signaling submission to a larger animal. This crouch display is the opposite of the high-stand display, the aggressive posture of a stallion or a gorilla raising its chest and head to appear larger.
The human remnant of the crouch display is a shrug of the shoulders, which lowers the head and rotates the forearms outwards so that the palms face up. Conversely, the high-stand display persists in humans as a rotation of the forearms and palms in the opposite direction, producing the domineering palm-down gesture used by a boss slapping the conference table or an orator commanding quiet from his audience.

I'm no anthropologist, but I always thought the palm-up gesture came from holding out your hand so that the person from whom you want something can put it there. That, at least, is what I have in mind when I ask someone for some cash or the salt. Isn't it more plausible to suppose that the metaphorical meanings of the gesture evolved from its use by creatures that hold things in their hands than to think we're echoing the submissive displays of lizards?