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"Monkey misery"

13 Comments -

1 – 13 of 13
Anonymous Mr. Pooh said...

Maybe the gals could make a buck by video taping the monkeys and selling it to the western media.

You didn't mention it Steve, but the monkeys sound a whole lot more productive than the husbands.

8/26/07, 11:56 PM

Anonymous mr. pooh said...

Or perhaps they could make a video comparison of the monkeys and of their husbands and then sell it to Oprah.

8/27/07, 12:03 AM

Anonymous SN said...

I read that the govt has banned the villagers from shooting or harming the monkeys, hence the need for famine relief.

8/27/07, 12:48 AM

Anonymous tommy said...

I've wondered why Africans were less altruistic than Arabs. Why, for example, do the leaders of high GDP African nations tend to horde their nation's wealth, like the rulers of Equatorial Guinea, while Arab leaders in nations like Bahrain and the UAE actually provide welfare states for their citizens?

I think three things can be said about group behavior in different climates:

1) Harsh environments, like the Middle Eastern desert or cold Northern Europe, encourage greater future time orientation (i.e. planning ahead). If you don't plan and conserve resources, then you die of thirst, heat exhaustion, starvation, hypothermia, etc. In such environments (a) the number of needs is greater, (b) those needs must be met more promptly, (c) temporary deficiencies in needs are more difficult to recuperate from, and (d) temporary deficiencies are likely to take a greater toll on groups.

2) Harsh environments demand greater contributions from each individual in the tribe. This requires that men actually get off their asses and contribute toward production and not just spend spare time lounging around or making war against the men of rival tribes.

3) Harsh environments encourage greater group altruism. When scarcities arise, you must rely on your neighbors and kin more to survive during hard times. (This seems to hold true not just for entirely different races but also ethnicities: Scandinavians are noticeably more altruistic than Sicilians.)

8/27/07, 3:11 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"(My wife suggests that Oprah, who has funded a school for girls in South Africa, might eventually spills the beans.)"

Ha ha ha..,.This can only come from someone FAR removed from traditional African society, you know the society which all the hobnobs including Bishop Tutumuch who "bask in their collective celebrityhood" swoon and fawn over.

African men take pride in their positions as heads of the households and not having to work. Not having to work is a sign of their status. African men who have to work are considered lower class, so the thing to do is get many wives and relax. It shows you are the man. Better yet to get a white wife that really brings the dough home; except trying to make her behave like an African wife is a little harder.

Many African women resent this chauvinism but it is a basic ingredient of African society.

My Pa once observed an African in Botswana who was chopping down a tree by making a fire around the stump, and then waiting for the tree to fall over. Whilst waiting he was snoozing at a safe distance. That's African work ethics for you. As far as he was concerned he's just being ingenious and not as stupid as Europeans with axes and saws and what not who are only stressing themselves out.

8/27/07, 3:53 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

freakin' highlarious- that's why i read Steve's blog. Sometimes it's the simplest answer. I love how the article mentions that farming is left to the women...and what are we to believe the men are doing...aeronautical engineering??
Dan R

8/27/07, 6:34 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bishop Mugabe? Is that Bishop Tutu or Robert Mugabe?

8/27/07, 9:38 AM

Anonymous Big Wave Dave said...

I recall a study done decades ago involving baboons that demonstrated their acute ability to discern gender and react accordingly. Again, it was crop raiding, and it was observed that the troop, which would scatter whenever the male farmer appeared, would, in the presence of just the wife, merely monitor her movements and continue raiding. The response was the same no matter whether she wore her own clothes or male garb. It was suspected that the baboons could tell (smell) the sex of the person from a great distance (a hundred plus meters, as I recall), and this was born out when they immediately scattered when the farmer appeared outfitted as a women (either a good sport or an African of British ancestry).

Baboons, lowly creatures that they are, have yet to learn what we humans have come to know, that being the folly of basing one's reaction on the gender of another. If we could somehow reeducate the baboons to the point where they would respond the same to both the farmer and his wife, then we could guarantee that the troop will stop engaging in sex discrimination and choose between always staying and eating, or always running in fear. Perhaps what we need is a judge to order them all to counseling, then we would have the satisfaction that comes with enlightening a fellow species, even if in doing so we doomed them to a certain death, either via the farmer's gun or by slowly starving.

8/27/07, 12:08 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Bishop Mugabe? Is that Bishop Tutu or Robert Mugabe?"

What's the diff? Tutu only went through the church hierarchy because the openly political route was too risky for him, pitting the blacks against the very efficient Apartheid security forces. Otherwise he is really a politician in purple robes. Mugabe apparently schooled in a mission station. Makes you have sympathy for the Afrikaans saying

"Sendeling ellendeling"

loosely translated

Missionaries are trouble.

8/27/07, 12:42 PM

Blogger C. Van Carter said...

More evidence the Flynn Effect has been working not just on us but on our primate cousins as well.

8/27/07, 1:29 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"More evidence the Flynn Effect has been working not just on us but on our primate cousins as well."

Train those monkeys to harvest the crops! Pretty soon African women will be sporting T-shirts that read: The more I know men, the more I love my monkey. (Present company excluded, no doubt.)

8/27/07, 10:07 PM

Anonymous Curious George said...

"2) Harsh environments demand greater contributions from each individual in the tribe. This requires that men actually get off their asses and contribute toward production and not just spend spare time lounging around or making war against the men of rival tribes."

This is a tempting theory, but how do we use it to account for the notorious difference in behavioral adaptations found among Chimps on the one hand and Bonobos on the other (Chimps are from Mars, Bonobos are from Venus)? And how do we use it to account for the difference in behavioral adaptations of non-human primates in Africa on the one hand and humans in the same area on the other. Since they inhabit the same area, presumably they are subject to the similar constraints and should demonstrate similar adaptations.

8/28/07, 3:00 AM

Anonymous tommy said...

This is a tempting theory, but how do we use it to account for the notorious difference in behavioral adaptations found among Chimps on the one hand and Bonobos on the other (Chimps are from Mars, Bonobos are from Venus)?

I don't see any contradiction. I'm not explaining differences in aggression between the sexes or most other differences in male/female behavior with this theory. (Many of those differences might be explained better by pointing out that we are more closely related to chimps than bonobos.) I'm just discussing resource production and how males spend their time. Since neither species is capable of even temporarily conserving many resources and each individual in a group must spend a significant amount of time obtaining food, it would seem pointless to try and extrapolate to chimps or bonobos.

It might be true that a reduced need for altruism in African societies could result in men who are more aggressive than men in harsher climates.

8/28/07, 9:04 PM

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