The Monkey Matters Blog

One of the perks of being a graduate student is the ability to claim to your non-student friends and family that you are both employed and on vacation two full weeks into January. Of course, vacation is a subjective term–the work never really subsides and will surely pile up if neglected. Still, it all beats working in an office (ironically, I write this sentence from my office), which is why it is tactful to shut your mouth and act busy this time of year.

Winter break is also a great opportunity to escape the ivory tower and speak to people who have not been self-selected to have any interest in your research. While this can result in awkward and humbling situations, my recent experience has instead been extremely positive and has affirmed for me my impression that lay listeners are actually very interested in the kinds of questions that we pursue as primatologists. Among my favorite questions recently posed to me: “Are monkeys smart enough to take over the world?” (maybe).

As a New Yorker, I naively assumed upon moving to St. Louis that I would be able to get by just by walking and taking public transport. One semester later, finding a car has made it to the top of my winter agenda. It was riding a taxi on my way to a car dealership that I had my most memorable anthropology discussion yet. After the driver found out that I was an anthropology student, instead of the customary “you do what?” followed by uneasy silence, his eyes lit up and he proceeded to recount to me emphatically his opinions about Margaret Meade, the Leakey family, and Piltdown man, among others.

At first taken aback by all this, I found myself delighted first, to find myself in the presence of somebody so interested in what we do as anthropologists and second, that I was being viewed, perhaps opportunistically, as a source of information on inquiries such as “Why are chimpanzees so goddamn strong?” and “Why are Samoans gigantic people?”

Eventually, we made our way to the topic of baboons. Did I know, he asked, about the leopard who, when confronted with a baboon infant bundled within her fresh kill, took it upon herself to care for the infant? Was this not proof of a morality not so different from our own? Not having heard of this, I told him it was not possible, a leopard encountering a baby baboon eats the baboon. To not do so is against her nature, will not happen, cannot happen.

The cab driver seemed sure about this and we agreed that it was worth researching with a simple YouTube query. What we did not agree was that the best course of action was for him to whip out a half-broken touch screen cell phone and perform the search with his eyes mostly on the screen. An uneasy minute passed before the “a-ha!” I watched what he handed me (he watched the road):

After all my cynicism, my certainty, I was wrong and my friend the cab driver was right. I have had over a week to digest the video and it is still as shocking as it was the day I first watched it. Shocking not because the behavior surprised me, but because I think that it shows an important point about what we do as behavioral scientists. However we construct our models, however we evaluate our hypotheses, we cannot ignore that our subjects are unique individuals with unique personal histories and chance encounters are continually occurring that can shake up our opinions and perspectives. As scientists, it is our charge to be skeptical, systematic, objective (and even more so when listening to colored commentary such as in this video). As observers of nature, however, telling the story of the lives and interactions of our animals might be just as important of a responsibility. Emerging from this may be the occasional offbeat story that might just blow our minds away.

As the taxi driver dropped me off at the car dealership, he thanked me for the conversation and told me, in a cryptic tone: “You can learn a lot from a cab driver.”

I think so.

I am writing these sentences from the Lambert International Airport in St. Louis, a small while after witnessing a pilot buy breakfast for everybody in sight at the airport Dunkin Donuts. It’s truly Christmas Eve at the airport terminal and the perfect opportunity to update my egregiously neglected blog. For those who noticed the lack of recent activity, sorry! For everybody else, picture four months or so of deeply rich and insightful blog entries from my first semester of graduate school and stay the hell away from the archives.

Did my last entry really come before the semester even began? The last few months have rocketed by. It is difficult to encapsulate an entire semester in a short summary and boring to regurgitate detail after detail. To spare you the information (and myself the effort) here is a short sample of thoughts and events from Fall 2010.

It’s been an eventful semester in the anthropology world, with a few stories widely discussed by mainstream news sources and the blogosphere. Most recently, analyses of ancient DNA from the “Denislovans,” the most recently described archaic hominin lineage and the first to be designated  principally on the basis of genetic evidence, found 4-6% contribution of Denislovan DNA to modern-day Melanesians. For those who follow this sort of thing, this is from the same German team that sequenced the first Neanderthal genome and found some Neanderthal genetic contribution to modern-day humans. I will reserve judgment until I peruse their paper (published in Nature, doi: 10.1038/nature09710), but this “archaic contribution” finding is looking to be a theme early on as we begin to turn up more and more sequence data from early hominins.

In other news, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) leadership recently opted to remove references to “science” from their mission statement in a stated objective to cast the field of anthropology in a broader and more “public” light. Perhaps predictably, this story erupted and unearthed old questions about the meaning of anthropology and the meaning of science. Given some time to digest this news, I think that reaction to this story was probably overhyped. The AAA leadership are probably not (I hope so, at least) “anti-science” and their actions probably followed the recognition that, while some anthropology is deeply tied to science, not all anthropology is. While the logic behind their actions is debatable–and I certainly have my reservations about it–I think that this should (and will) act as a wake-up call to both sides of the argument to reexamine their work and how it relates to the unified discipline of anthropology. Expect to see a greater presence of physical anthropology and other science-minded anthropological disciplines next year, when the AAAs meet again.

This one received less press, but I was excited to see the first published paper (published in American Naturalist, doi: 10.1086/657443) from a unique partnership of primatologists involved in long-term (22-45 years) behavioral studies involving seven primate species. Life history data from all studies were pooled into a single comparative database and analyzed. This is an exciting wealth of data and I hope to see this approach applied in the near future to a greater number of species and topics.

On a very unrelated note, here’s a collection of illustrations that I drew up during a week of persistent internet connectivity issues (evidence of desperation in a PhD student left with a working computer and no work to do). Enjoy! Call for boarding now. Enjoy your holidays, everybody!