Chimps and God

[Michael Reilly]

This story is currently blowing my freaking mind. "Mysterious Chimpanzee Behavior May Be Evidence of 'Sacred' Rituals"

I have been struggling with (or against) atheism for a long time. Man, this just nails it down, doesn't it?


[Edited to repair link. - R]

[Recusant]

Until Bruno de la Pole weighs in with his expert opinion, I'm going with simian percussionists.

[OldGit]

Blimey, Michael, it's good to see you back!

[xSilverPhinx]

I'm not convinced that it's evidence for chimps performing sacred rituals. Just seems like a leap to me.   

[Crow]

Man, this just nails it down, doesn't it?

In what way?

[chimp3]

This video of stone throwing chimps reminds me of the monolith scene at the beginning of 2001 : A Space Odyssey.

[Ecurb Noselrub]

I'm not convinced that it's evidence for chimps performing sacred rituals. Just seems like a leap to me.

Agree. To say these chimps have a concept of God is a real leap.  More like an anthropomorphic projection by the researchers, if you ask me.

[hackenslash]

Snip...

Great avatar. Bernini really knew how to make the hard stuff look soft, didn't  he?

[Crow]

Snip...

Great avatar. Bernini really knew how to make the hard stuff look soft, didn't  he?

Amazing, a lot of sculptors of the movement could either get skin or the fabric correct but rarely both, like Corradini and his veils which were fantastic whereas his skin work was often flat. Bernini on the other hand understands the balance of both and manages to inject energy throughout. Here is a larger crop, How he used the materials to replicate the different materials. I often don't enjoy his works as a whole but in crops it is excellent. I'm not much of a Baroque fan I usually prefer the mundanity of works of Duane Hanson or the surrealism of Ron Mueck.

[Sandra Craft]

I was thinking it might be a game.

[Biggus Dickus]

Until Bruno de la Pole weighs in with his expert opinion, I'm going with simian percussionists.

Recusant, this is only the latest fitness craze to hit the simian culture, rock throwing and stacking. (Not surprising since the genesis of the modern shot put can be traced to pre-historic competition with rocks, and of course later became known as "Stone put' in Scotland, and "Steinstossen" in Switzerland)

Which is good news for us higher primates, since the previous fitness craze was "Poo Flinging", or as they call it in Oklahoma "The Cow Chip Throwing Contest".

Slight side-track here:Believe it or not my Father (Seriously a true story) once won an award for longest "Chip" throw. (Pop was a horseshoe champion, and he was at the State Fair one year when he entered the "Chip Throwing" contest...no one was even close to his throw. Probably the record still stands to this day. Of course my mother didn't think it was that big of a deal, she said, "After all of the "BS" you've tossed around your whole life it's no wonder you did well in the contest"

I'm not convinced that it's evidence for chimps performing sacred rituals. Just seems like a leap to me.   

I also think it's a big leap to think it's some type of sacred ritual, especially anything spiritual. Neuroanotomical correlations between chimpanzee's and the flinging/throwing of objects (Whether or not they be poo) is in fact a sign of high-order brain development. Research has shown that that chimps for example who threw more, and with greater accuracy had more developed motor cortices and significantly better communication abilities than inaccurate and non-flingers.

Good study here, "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B]Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B" Published 21 November 2011

Another interesting bit, since the motor cortex in these chimps also had more connections between it, and a region of the brain known as the Broca's area, connectivity could have played an important role in the evolution of higher-order brain development in humans.

The researchers in the study above write:

It is suggested that during hominin evolution, after the split between the lines leading to chimpanzees and humans, there was intense selection on increased motor skills associated with throwing and that this potentially formed the foundation for left hemisphere specialization associated with language and speech found in modern humans.

Interesting stuff...good thread.

[Michael Reilly]

My thought upon reading this story was that--for whatever reasons the chimps were engaging in this behavior--it could shine a bit of light on the origins of religion. Who knows why they started doing this? A chimp flings a stone at random, it hits a tree, and he is rewarded somehow. He is now more likely to repeat the stone-throwing behavior, and associate it with something positive. Others follow suit. Soon a lot of chimps are doing something weird to a tree, thinking that the tree has the power to reward them.

I once heard Richard Dawkins talk about the idea of agency: intelligent beings are hard-wired to look for the source of a phenomena since it's in our best survival interest to do so. What made that noise? Where did that go? What put that there? Etc. Perhaps the propensity to search for agency is related to events like the chimps throwing rocks, and placing rocks into, a tree. They are 'smart' enough to make an association of some time.

I don't know, peeps. My two anthropology classes are a long way in my past, but this story just hit me as being important.

(Happy to see you all again, BTW!)

[chimp3]

I believe the tree spirits are training a whole new line of Druids. We have proven unworthy since abandoning animism. This "ritual" is actually task segmentation. First , train them to pile up rocks inside the tree. Eventually train them to put virgins in the tree and pile the rocks up in big circles. I know I will be proven correct in 250,000 years or so.

[Icarus]

I reckon it is possible that the chimps are engaging in the Simian equivalent of Golf, or perhaps practicing to get a big league baseball contract.