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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: 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.

    --
    ¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
    ... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
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  • (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.