mohit | Shared With: Everyone - Dec 04 2007 | video, chimps, science, nature
click to playQuoted: Perhaps if they gave out beer instead of bananas as a reward for completing the task, the college students would have done better.
mohit | Shared With: Everyone - Dec 04 2007 | video, chimps, memory, science, nature
Pretty amazing. Make sure you check out the videos. Here's one of them:
http://download.current-biology.com/supplementarydata/curbio/17/23/r1004/DC1/mmc7.mpgQuoted: Clearly, the chimps have the number thing down. So the researchers added an element of spatial memory, as you can see in this movie. After the first digit is touched by the test subject, the remaining numbers are obscured. As that video makes clear, this didn't slow down the chimp significantly. As a final test (shown here), the chimp is only afforded a brief glimpse of the numbers; his success rate didn't budge significantly. In contrast, humans (specifically college students) had a hard time with this test, barely outperforming the mother and losing badly to the young chimp.
mohit | Shared With: Everyone - Apr 20 2007 | science, news, chimps, evolution
mohit | Shared With: Everyone - Mar 22 2007 | news, chimps, ethics, morality, evolution, science
Interesting. It *appears* that dogs console others as well...but no mention in the article.
Quoted: Dr. Frans de Waal argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.
...
To console another, Dr. de Waal argues, requires empathy and a level of self-awareness that only apes and humans seem to possess. And consideration of empathy quickly led him to explore the conditions for morality.

