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POPSEarly Human Ancestors Not Like Chimps When Darwin first published “Origin of Species” and later “Descent of Man,” detractors declared that they “didn’t come from monkeys.” One cartoon of the day (late 1800s) showed Darwin as an ape. I guess it now looks like apes may have descended from US!
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POPSphoto: Grief More: After a hunter killed her mother, Dorothy was sold as a “mascot” to an amusement park in Cameroon. For the next 25 years she was tethered to the ground by a chain around her neck, taunted, teased, and taught to drink beer and smoke cigarettes for sport.In May 2000 Dorothy—obese from poor diet and lack of exercise—was rescued and relocated along with ten other primates. As her health improved, her deep kindness surfaced. She mothered an orphaned chimp named Bouboule and became a close friend to many others, including Jacky, the group’s alpha male, and Nama, another amusement-park refugee… Sanaga-Yong was founded in 1999 by veterinarian Sheri Speede (pictured at right, cradling Dorothy’s head; at left is center employee Assou Felix). Operated by IDA-Africa, an NGO, it’s home to 62 chimps who reside in spacious, forested enclosures. :cry:
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POPSUC Berkeley scientists unveil skeleton that shares chimp, human features More: she is not "the missing link," a transitional creature between today's chimps and humans. This concept has been abandoned: We did not evolve from living champs or apes, but shared a common ancestor. Nor is she this long-sought "last common ancestor." That's because she's too young; chimps and humans are thought to have diverged between 5 million and 10 million years ago. Then we went our separate ways, each taking different evolutionary trajectories. But she's important because she is the closest we have come to this unfound "last common ancestor." She belonged to a new type of early hominid that was neither chimpanzee nor fully human.
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POPSReframing Darwin THE anniversary of Darwin's birth in 1809 and publication of Origin of Species in 1859 is connecting past to present, science to art, philosophy to biology, just as firmly as Darwin linked chimpanzees to humans. Evolution is being presented to us by all kinds of writers, artists and scholars in widely different registers.
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POPSHow the Irish were viewed in Victorian times
"These ideas were not confined to a lunatic fringe of the scientific community, for although they never won over the mainstream of British scientists they were disseminated broadly and it was even hinted that the Irish might be the elusive missing link! Certainly the "ape-like" Celt became something of an malevolent cliche of Victorian racism. Thus Charles Kingsley could write I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw . . . I don't believe they are our fault. . . . But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much. . . ." (Charles Kingsley in a letter to his wife, quoted in L.P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts, p.84). Even seemingly complimentary generalizations about the Irish national character could, in the Victorian context, be damaging to the Celt. Thus, following the work of Ernest Renan's La Poésie des Races Celtiques (1854), it was broadly argued that the Celt was poetic, light-hearted and imaginative, highly emotion
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POPSChimps do get "AIDS," study finds at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. At Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania researchers collected observational data and, from chimps that had died, tissue samples. Feces and urine tests pinpointed which living chimps were SIV positive. SIV is spread via bodily fluids, during sexual contact and probably during birth, Lonsdorf said. The virus may also spread through biting and fight wounds, she added—"which will be the topic of further study over the next several years." At the outset of the study, there was little sense that anything was wrong with the SIV-positive chimps, said Lonsdorf. Then the researchers began noticing the much higher death rate among the SIV-positive chimpanzees. And infected females, it turned out, were much less likely to give birth. When they did, their babies had a very low chance of survival. Hope for Fighting AIDS in Humans? "We can learn a lot about disease mechanisms by studying the same disease in different species''.
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POPSMonkey see, monkey do... "These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality. De Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society's moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals." Natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people, he writes in "Primates and Philosophers," with "a compass for life's choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality."
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POPSReal Pangs Of Regret? "The latest data comes from brain scans of monkeys trying to win a large prize of juice by guessing where it was hidden. When the monkeys picked wrongly and were shown the location of the prize, the neurons in their brain clearly registered what might have been, according to the Duke University neurobiologists who recently reported the experiment in Science. “I think animals do experience regret, as defined as the recognition of a missed opportunity,” Dr. Brosnan said. “In the wild, these abilities may help them to recognize when they should forage in different areas or find a different cooperative partner who will share the spoils more equitably. No one knows, of course, exactly how this sense of regret affects an animal emotionally. When we see a dog slouching and bowing, we like to assume he’s suffering the way we do after a faux pas, but maybe he’s just sending a useful signal: I messed up."
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