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posted by martyb on Saturday September 05 2015, @10:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the must-have-watched-'King-Kong' dept.

Cool. Calm. And oh, so calculated. That's how a chimpanzee living in the Royal Burgers' Zoo in the Netherlands set out to swat an aerial drone that was filming her group. In an article in the journal Primates² published by Springer, Jan van Hooff and Bas Lukkenaar explain it as yet another example of chimpanzees' make-do attitude to using whatever is on hand as tools.

The incident happened earlier this year, on 10 April, when a Dutch television crew was filming at the zoo in Arnhem. The idea was to use a drone to film the chimpanzees in their compound from different close-up angles. The drone already caught the chimpanzees' attention during a practice run. Some grabbed willow twigs off the ground, while four animals took these along when they climbed up scaffolding where the drone was hovering. This behavior is not frequently observed among these chimps.

Filming started when the next drone flew over. It zoomed in on two chimpanzees, the females Tushi and Raimee. They were still seated on the scaffolding holding on to twigs that were about 180 cm (ca. six feet) long. Tushi made two long sweeps with hers -- the second was successful in downing the drone and ultimately broke it. Before and during the strike, she grimaced. Although her face was tense and her teeth were bared, she showed no signs of fear. This suggests that she quite deliberately and forcefully struck at the drone, rather than fearfully or reflexively.

Fascinating. Evidence that drones do indeed provoke a response in the monkey ape brain, which could explain the drone antipathy felt by many humans. But what is it, a response to hovering insects or predatory birds?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Sunday September 06 2015, @12:42AM

    by TrumpetPower! (590) <ben@trumpetpower.com> on Sunday September 06 2015, @12:42AM (#232813) Homepage

    Sheldrake is a crank. Were the phenomenon he describes reproducible, it would overturn the Standard Model of Particle Physics and earn him a near-instant Nobel Prize. That nobody else can reproduce his claims...well, it's no different from any other pseudoscience bullshit artist scamming people by wearing a costume shop lab coat.

    Might as well cite Shirley MacLaine as an authority on astral projection or describe how Uri Geller bends spoons with the power of his mind. Or maybe we'd be better off consulting Ms. Cleo for psychic counseling at the low, low rate of just $5 / minute?

    b&

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @12:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @12:53AM (#232817)

    it would overturn the Standard Model of Particle Physics

    Why?

  • (Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday September 06 2015, @01:49AM

    by RedBear (1734) on Sunday September 06 2015, @01:49AM (#232834)

    I expected that kind of reaction. All I said was that it was thought-provoking. And I thought it was very interesting when during one of his lectures someone asked about precognition and he said, very clearly, without any hedging whatsoever, (paraphrasing) "No, we've done precognition experiments many times but never found any statistically relevant experimental evidence for precognition or predicting the future."

    Sheldrake simply doesn't strike me as being in the same class of cranks as psychics, astrologers and spoon benders that are just out to flim-flam people for money. That doesn't mean I accept that he's correct, it just means I am unwilling to dismiss his ideas out-of-hand. Especially the stuff about animals knowing when their socially-bonded people are coming home. I've seen that kind of thing myself. We used to have a dog that would suddenly get antsy, get up and go sit and wait by the front door long before there could have been the remotest possibility of hearing my father's vehicle coming back from town, miles away. I didn't think much of this at the time, but in retrospect it happened quite frequently and reliably. I can't just dismiss it as me misremembering what actually happened. Outside of Sheldrake's ideas, I have never seen or heard anything else approaching a scientific explanation for this phenomenon that is experienced by many pet owners.

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    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @02:02AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @02:02AM (#232841)

      I expected that kind of reaction.
      ...
      "No, we've done precognition experiments many times but never found any statistically relevant experimental evidence for precognition or predicting the future."

      And yet you just precogged Trumpet's response!

      A nut who disbelieves someone else's nuttery is still a nut.

      We used to have a dog that would suddenly get antsy, get up and go sit and wait by the front door long before there could have been the remotest possibility of hearing my father's vehicle coming back from town, miles away.

      It is called time of day. Your father works a regular work day, he comes home at a regular time, the dog learns that pattern just like any other pavlovian response. The times he gets it wrong you don't notice because nothing actually happened, it's confirmation bias.

      I have never seen or heard anything else approaching a scientific explanation for this phenomenon that is experienced by many pet owners.

      Now you have. If you are a nut, you will forget you just read it.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by RedBear on Sunday September 06 2015, @02:58AM

        by RedBear (1734) on Sunday September 06 2015, @02:58AM (#232861)

        It is called time of day. Your father works a regular work day, he comes home at a regular time, the dog learns that pattern just like any other pavlovian response. The times he gets it wrong you don't notice because nothing actually happened, it's confirmation bias.

        Wow. In typical dogmatic skeptic fashion, you find an ultra-simplistic reason to dismiss my observations. You immediately assume that I am a complete moron, incapable of understanding that a dog might have a sense of time or be habituated to a schedule. The problem with your typical dogmatic skeptic oh-so-superior you're-so-dumb faulty assumption is, my father had no such regular workday. In fact, his times to go to and from town were quite random. The amount of time he would spend in town would be quite random as well. Neither he nor I nor the dog would have any way of knowing when he would decide to return home. Many days he didn't even go to town at all. He didn't even own a cell phone, so there was no calling or texting before returning. There is no apparently valid simplistic explanation for the dog's behavior. The dog would get up and sit by the door 10-15 minutes before my father's vehicle would show up in our driveway, no matter the time of day or how long he'd been gone. In other words, the dog appeared from all observational evidence to know when her human started on the way home, and would go sit by the door during the time it took to drive all the way from downtown to our house. No more, no less. Outside of that time period she would show no particular interest in going and sitting by the front door. And don't give me any crap about hearing the approach of one vehicle amongst other traffic from miles away through woods and closed doors and windows. That's another simplistic explanation the dogmatic skeptics always try to cling to. Beyond a mile in open air that's totally nonsensical.

        Sheldrake of course controlled for this sort of simplistic causal possibility (owner returning at regular time of day) in his studies. He's not a moron either. He controlled for several other possibilities as well, such as the sound of the vehicle the owner drives and the distance and direction of travel away from the home. But go ahead and keep dismissing the idea out-of-hand, because it's quite obviously impossible. It's impossible because you say so.

        When you just say "confirmation bias" without your own proof, you're just calling everyone an idiot. It's both rude, and unscientific. Confirmation bias exists, but you can't use the phrase as a club to simply dismiss everything anyone else has observed or experienced. Be a skeptic, don't be a dogmatic skeptic.

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        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @03:06AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @03:06AM (#232863)

          > Neither he nor I nor the dog would have any way of knowing when he would decide to return home.

          So, your father is going to town for non-work reasons, but you have no idea why he was going to town?

          Or you did know and thus you had an expectation of the time he would return and the dog picked up on it and when he didn't pick up on it you didn't notice that absence because confirmation bias.

          Here's the thing - what you are postulating is the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. That's going to get you derision without enormous levels of proof. So far all we've got are your own curated memories of events that didn't even rise to the level of experiments much less controlled experiments.

          • (Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday September 06 2015, @04:23AM

            by RedBear (1734) on Sunday September 06 2015, @04:23AM (#232885)

            Yes, I frequently had no particular idea when or why he would be going to town or therefore when he might decide to come home. You would be hard-pressed to design a more randomized study (of a single subject, obviously). And I had no idea about Sheldrake's ideas at the time, so confirmation bias is a particularly bad explanation. There was no particular reason for my observation at the time or my subsequent memory of the dog's behavior to be colored in one way or another. This was by the way not when I was a small child either, nor so long ago that my memories would have any particular reason to be warped by time.

            You should really think about why it's so important to you to assert that my observations can't possibly be accurate.

            The laws of thermodynamics make perpetual motion machines and over-unity engines apparently impossible in our universe. No one has ever shown otherwise, nor would I ever believe in such things without a mountain of irrefutable direct evidence. But unless you also want to say that quantum entanglement is nonsense (Einstein's instantaneous "spooky action at a distance"), I see no particular scientific reason why the effects Sheldrake describes are in any way as impossible or silly as the idea of a perpetual motion machine. That is where we will have to disagree.

            There are also the many documented stories of pets traveling long distances to return home, as well as the occasional dog who somehow tracks down his owner in a place the dog has never visited before [huffingtonpost.com], after any scent trail would be long gone. When you reach a certain concentration of such unexplained events [brainz.org] you can't keep dismissing them all as "confirmation bias" (or lies). And the typical explanations that skeptics come up with are in most cases unworkably silly and very obviously just based on an automatic assumption that what was observed to happen couldn't possibly have happened without a conventional explanation. There simply isn't any known explanation for how the hell a cat successfully travels 1,300 miles across Siberia to end up right back at its own home three months after being lost, unless there is some sort of effect like quantum entanglement going on. Not understanding how the effect is caused or what exactly it is does not preclude us from successfully observing the results. Unless you're willing to dismiss all these stories out-of-hand you have to at least admit there is something odd going on with the abilities of human-bonded pets.

            Keep an open mind but don't buy any perpetual motion machines, that's what I always say.

            --
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            ... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
            • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @05:10AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @05:10AM (#232893)

              > And I had no idea about Sheldrake's ideas at the time, so confirmation bias is a particularly bad explanation.

              My use of the term "confirmation bias" is completely unrelated to your use of the term. To put it simply, once you think there is a pattern you start looking for confirmation of that pattern. The very fact that you remember a pattern of behaviour proves you were at enormous risk of confirmation bias. Couple that with the fact that they weren't even experiments much less controlled, double-blind experiments and it practically guarantees that confirmation bias is at the root of it.

              > You should really think about why it's so important to you to assert that my observations can't possibly be accurate.

              A couple of idle posts on a message board indicates minimal importance. You might as well accuse me of being highly invested in eating bugs because I made a couple of favorable posts on the edible insects story.

              As for why I believe what I do? It's because never once in the history of humankind have similar claims ever survived rigorous inquiry. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me millions of times, shame on me.

        • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @03:33AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @03:33AM (#232871)

          > In typical dogmatic skeptic fashion

          That's an interesting turn of phrase. It is interesting that it is practically Sheldrake's own words. He's got a real bug up his ass about dogmatic skeptics. So much so that he's created a very elaborate website [skepticalaboutskeptics.org] "dedicated to countering dogmatic, ill informed attacks leveled by self-styled skeptics" That's the kind of thing I would expect from a frustrated sociopath, angry that people don't respect him and more interested in the politics of persuasion than sound science.

          • (Score: 3, Informative) by RedBear on Sunday September 06 2015, @05:11AM

            by RedBear (1734) on Sunday September 06 2015, @05:11AM (#232895)

            That's an interesting turn of phrase. It is interesting that it is practically Sheldrake's own words. He's got a real bug up his ass about dogmatic skeptics. So much so that he's created a very elaborate website "dedicated to countering dogmatic, ill informed attacks leveled by self-styled skeptics" That's the kind of thing I would expect from a frustrated sociopath, angry that people don't respect him and more interested in the politics of persuasion than sound science.

            When some "skeptics" do nothing but cling to ridiculously simplistic explanations that are unsupported by any evidence of their own in order to automatically reject observed evidence because it doesn't fit their viewpoint, it's dogma, just as much as religious dogma is dogma. He has a point, as far as I'm concerned. The objection you came up with was ridiculously, insultingly over simplified and exactly the kind of objection that the established dogmatic skeptics always throw out as an automatic rejection of the possibility that a dog might have the ability to know when its owner is returning home from an otherwise unexplainable distance.

            It's still hard for me to believe, but until as recently as 1966 it was still fairly widespread scientific dogma that plate tectonics was absolutely ridiculous. Scientists everywhere rejected the idea out-of-hand. Anyone who suggested that continents were moving around was considered a complete nut. Then we did enough long-term scientific measurements in enough different ways and enough different places that finally the scientific dogma broke down, and I've lived all my life in a world where most people are quite certain that yes, continents are actually moving around, floating on semi-liquified magma. There's still plenty of mindless, unscientific dogma in the scientific world, and among people who refer to themselves as skeptics. Anything coming from outside the established mainstream of the scientific world should always be met with skepticism, but all too frequently it is met with mindless, dogmatic skepticism rather than thoughtful fact-based skepticism.

            Come up with a better objection next time, or heaven forbid an actual reference to a study that disproves the hypothesis, and I won't refer to you as a "dogmatic skeptic". It is after all a disprovable hypothesis. Just set up cameras to record the daily behavior of a couple dozen dogs and have their owners come home at random times in random ways (car/taxi/bus/walking) from random locations, triggered by some automatic computer program, and see if there's any significant correlation between the owner deciding to come home and the dog deciding to go and sit by the front door. It's a pretty simple experiment.

            --
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            ... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
            • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @07:33AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @07:33AM (#232922)

              > plate tectonics

              You are doing that false equivalence thing. Yes, many scientific advancements were famously contrary to the commonly accepted theories. But for every one of those theories that over-turned well-established consensus there have been millions of theories that were total bullshit. The fact that Sheldrake's theories are also contrary to the common understanding is not in any way a point in his favor, to put it mildly that is.

              > Come up with a better objection next time

              Experiments with sound procedures (e.g. double-blind, etc) and good statistics (large sample sizes, no short-cuts, consistently applied procedures, etc) that can be repeated by researchers that are neither affiliated with Sheldrake nor particularly friendly to his hypotheses. Sheldrake calls that dogma, everybody else calls that science.

              > Just set up cameras to record the daily behavior of a couple dozen dogs ....

              Yeah, I'll get right on that, because it is so important to me to disprove yet another crank who is more interested in selling books and operating a website designed to appeal to true believers than he is in convincing professional scientists to reproduce his work. Sheldrake walks like a crank and quacks like a crank, that is more than enough for me to forget his name by the time this story scrolls off the front page here.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 06 2015, @04:21AM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 06 2015, @04:21AM (#232884) Journal

      Cows come to the barn at milking time. All livestock comes to the barn at feeding time. Animals have a sense of time, whether that sense is accurate or not - and those milk cows are often times quite accurate.

      Dogs? Dogs are somewhat more intelligent than some other animals. Maybe the dog was taking a cue from some other occurence that happened on a regular schedule. And, since dogs have better senses of smell and hearing than most people, you may very well be unaware of that regular occurance.

      There are a lot of explanations that don't depend on precognition, or ESP, or whatever.

      If some member of the household, or even a near neighbor, had very regular bowel movements, Rover smells that, and associates the bowel movement with the imminent arrival of the master. Mystery solved.

      • (Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday September 06 2015, @06:15AM

        by RedBear (1734) on Sunday September 06 2015, @06:15AM (#232907)

        Cows come to the barn at milking time. All livestock comes to the barn at feeding time. Animals have a sense of time, whether that sense is accurate or not - and those milk cows are often times quite accurate.
        Dogs? Dogs are somewhat more intelligent than some other animals. Maybe the dog was taking a cue from some other occurence that happened on a regular schedule. And, since dogs have better senses of smell and hearing than most people, you may very well be unaware of that regular occurance.
        There are a lot of explanations that don't depend on precognition, or ESP, or whatever.
        If some member of the household, or even a near neighbor, had very regular bowel movements, Rover smells that, and associates the bowel movement with the imminent arrival of the master. Mystery solved.

        As I explained to the AC that keeps posting, the leaving and returning times were about as random as it gets, and involved no communication with me or any near neighbors pooping or any cows or any other possible rational explanation that would explain how the dog would know that someone 5 miles away in town, with sound-absorbing forested hills between him and us, just randomly decided to drive back home through downtown traffic to an isolated home outside of town.

        Yes, there are a lot of very common, overly simplistic explanations that are not backed up by any observed evidence that would explain what was observed. Except they don't apply, and don't explain anything, and it's very easy to control for most of those possible simplistic explanations in an actual controlled experiment. Dogs have good hearing and sense of smell, but they aren't PowerPuff Girls.

        The simplest explanation is usually the best, but I have to agree with Sheldrake's assertion that around this particular subject people have a remarkably strong tendency to believe that their own quickly imagined and often quite unworkable "explanation" (like a dog supposedly hearing a vehicle suddenly turning and approaching from miles away in the middle of traffic) trumps any observed evidence and unequivocally proves the observed evidence cannot possibly be correct. Which is not skepticism, but dogmatic rejection of an idea because it "can't" be true.

        One of the kind of glossed-over assertions of the skeptics is that dogs just randomly get up now and then during the day and sit staring at the front door as if they are waiting for someone to come home, stay there for some unspecified time and then go away from the door, and that the observer just magically forgets every single time the dog did that and nobody ever showed up, while magically remembering every single time the dog did that and someone showed up. None of that is supported by any observed evidence. Dogs don't do that, and human memory isn't that unreliable.

        As I said, "confirmation bias" exists and must be controlled for, but it can't be used as a club to just completely disregard everyone's observations. Especially when the observer was originally not even looking for any sort of pattern to begin with.

        --
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        • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday September 07 2015, @12:29PM

          by wonkey_monkey (279) on Monday September 07 2015, @12:29PM (#233254) Homepage

          Yes, there are a lot of very common, overly simplistic explanations that are not backed up by any observed evidence that would explain what was observed.

          The simplest explanation in this case is that none of us know what actually happened, because you didn't keep notes of every instance or non-instance of this activity. All we've got is your recollection, which is as unreliable as any other human's memory (which is a surprising amount).

          None of that is supported by any observed evidence.

          There is no evidence. There's an anecdote.

          Dogs don't do that, and human memory isn't that unreliable.

          Yes, it is. It's crazily unreliable. Given ten minutes and a Photoshopped picture you can have people honestly "remembering" visits to countries they've never been to. What do you think the intervention of 10 or 20 years is going to do?

          That's why scientists like to take notes and run statistical analyses.

          (ironically, I used to have a perfect example of the unreliability of my own otherwise not-too-bad memory - but I can't remember it)

          Finally, there is one other simple explanation. You could be lying (I'm saying this only as devil's advocate). This is - currently - a simpler explanation than any involving hither-to undetected supernatural activity.

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