you've had enough of two-hand touch
Mar. 28th, 2008 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kleenexwomanYesterday, we watched this movie in Anthro class about the behavioral similarities between primates and humans. I was particularly interested in a segment involving an aye-aye, in which the aye-aye used its long middle finger for just about everything, including as a radio transmitter. Wouldn't it be great if we had evolved from aye-ayes? But we didn't. We didn't really even evolve from chimps, we just have a very close common ancestor. We're like nth cousins, evolutionarily speaking. The point of showing the aye-aye was that aye-ayes have long middle fingers and have no need for tools, like chimps do, which is why chimps are so cool. Which is not to say that aye-ayes aren't cool, because they are very cool, but when was the last time you saw an aye-aye paint something that a very rich monkey enthusiast would pay $114,000 for? I ask you.
There was also a segment on macaques, and a troop of macaques in a Japanese tourist exhibit whose troop had gone from the usual number of about 40 to over 1,000 macaques because of overfeeding. It was sad. Normally, macaques in a troop all know each other, but that's impossible with 1,000 macaques, so the macaques had to learn to not make eye contact with any other macaques, only trust their family and a few close friends, gobble their food in a big muddy field and not share it, and be careful in case they got mugged and none of the other macaques would step up to help (and they don't). It's so sad. It's like the advice you get from people in small towns when you go to big cities, except that the lighter macaques aren't told to be especially wary of darker macaques. Maybe in a few thousand years.
Stuff chimps do: The chimp with the most friends, not the strongest chimp, will almost invariably be the troop leader. Chimps will spend years sharing the meat of lesser monkeys with their friends so that one day, when the troop leader dies, the other chimps will all go into a smoke-filled back room (crudely made out of leaves and dirt) and emerge with a little crown (also crudely made out of leaves and dirt) and put it on their friend's head. And then the younger, stronger chimp, who's fucking pissed that he didn't get that little monkey crown, will screech and jump up and down and rustle trees around so that he looks bigger, and will beat the shit out of everyone that crosses his path to parade his dominance.
Also, chimps that are not alpha chimps will learn this early in life, and will cultivate very close friendships with young female chimps, grooming them, sharing their food, playing with them, and then when the female chimps go into estrus, the friend-chimps will be around to mate with them before the alpha male catches wind of this. The teacher helpfully pointed out that human females don't go into estrus, and because they are vaguely sexually available all the time, they can damn well make up their own minds about whether they want to mate with the alpha chimp or the friend-chimp or the alpha female bonobo down the next ridge. The twenty girls in the class giggled. The three boys did not.
The teacher also laid upon us some fairly juicy gossip about Louis Leakey and Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. (Not telling.) But I love sordid gossip about famous academics and historical figures, it is so weird. I could give a shit about the sex lives of anyone in "People" magazine, but if you've contributed important ideas to the intellectual life of mankind and also had a threesome with a Nobel prize winner and a Modern poet? I am so there.
There was also a segment on macaques, and a troop of macaques in a Japanese tourist exhibit whose troop had gone from the usual number of about 40 to over 1,000 macaques because of overfeeding. It was sad. Normally, macaques in a troop all know each other, but that's impossible with 1,000 macaques, so the macaques had to learn to not make eye contact with any other macaques, only trust their family and a few close friends, gobble their food in a big muddy field and not share it, and be careful in case they got mugged and none of the other macaques would step up to help (and they don't). It's so sad. It's like the advice you get from people in small towns when you go to big cities, except that the lighter macaques aren't told to be especially wary of darker macaques. Maybe in a few thousand years.
Stuff chimps do: The chimp with the most friends, not the strongest chimp, will almost invariably be the troop leader. Chimps will spend years sharing the meat of lesser monkeys with their friends so that one day, when the troop leader dies, the other chimps will all go into a smoke-filled back room (crudely made out of leaves and dirt) and emerge with a little crown (also crudely made out of leaves and dirt) and put it on their friend's head. And then the younger, stronger chimp, who's fucking pissed that he didn't get that little monkey crown, will screech and jump up and down and rustle trees around so that he looks bigger, and will beat the shit out of everyone that crosses his path to parade his dominance.
Also, chimps that are not alpha chimps will learn this early in life, and will cultivate very close friendships with young female chimps, grooming them, sharing their food, playing with them, and then when the female chimps go into estrus, the friend-chimps will be around to mate with them before the alpha male catches wind of this. The teacher helpfully pointed out that human females don't go into estrus, and because they are vaguely sexually available all the time, they can damn well make up their own minds about whether they want to mate with the alpha chimp or the friend-chimp or the alpha female bonobo down the next ridge. The twenty girls in the class giggled. The three boys did not.
The teacher also laid upon us some fairly juicy gossip about Louis Leakey and Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. (Not telling.) But I love sordid gossip about famous academics and historical figures, it is so weird. I could give a shit about the sex lives of anyone in "People" magazine, but if you've contributed important ideas to the intellectual life of mankind and also had a threesome with a Nobel prize winner and a Modern poet? I am so there.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-28 07:41 pm (UTC)I want to take that class.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-28 07:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-28 08:59 pm (UTC)When was the last time anyone gave paint to an Aye-Aye?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-28 09:08 pm (UTC)also
Date: 2008-03-28 09:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-29 01:12 am (UTC)The thing about large colonies - I see that as both borne out by my experiences in a truly vast school, and as indicating that it would be far better if we made sure that despite the economic imperative to all cluster round the worst possible place to be (where everyone else is and where no one cares about anyone else) we should instead learn from the monkeys, since we behave exactly the same way, and make living at low densities economically viable by comparison with living at high densities.
Basically societal collapse is in very many ways a result of the growth of cities in the form that we know them in; thus we can infer that many of the things we either excuse or condemn in others are actually not 'them' at all, but a product of the insane conditions we require our race to live in.
I don't know whether the monkeys realise that a nice little place in the country would be friendlier, but we do (or at least those who researched the monkeys do), and we are doing nothing about it. I don't think that anything can be done to change us or the macaques; instead, we must change our environment for our own good; humans are far more capable of changing their environment than they are of changing their internal condition. That's why we've stopped evolving.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-29 02:53 am (UTC)GOD. Sometimes I HATE HUMANITY. When is the revolution going to come?