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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?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @03:33AM
> 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
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.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @07:33AM
> 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.