Showing posts with label chimpanzee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chimpanzee. Show all posts
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Chimps Beat Humans on Memory Tasks
Young Chimps' Photographic Memory Better than Adult Humans
"In a memory competition of man versus chimp, Japanese researchers found that chimpanzees performed better than humans.
"No one could imagine that chimpanzees -- young chimpanzees at the age of 5 -- have a better performance in a memory task than humans," Kyoto University researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa said in a statement.
In the first test, the chimps successfully counted sequentially from one to nine in return for a peanut or other tasty reward.
In the second test, researchers flashed just some of the nine numerals, then blocked them. The chimps remembered, with mixed success, where each numeral was -- in the right order, even though some were missing.
Though far from perfect, the results surprised the Japanese researchers, who reported their results in the journal Current Biology.
See a video here and here
One chimp, Ayumu, distinguished himself from the other chimps in mental ability. He was included in a second round of tests, which included him and 9 college students.
Five numbers were flashed on a screen for 7/10 of a second, before they became white squares. The participants were required to touch the squares in their correct numerical sequence. When the numbers were shown, Ayumu and the college students succeeded in guessing the correct sequence about 80 percent of the time."
"In a memory competition of man versus chimp, Japanese researchers found that chimpanzees performed better than humans.
"No one could imagine that chimpanzees -- young chimpanzees at the age of 5 -- have a better performance in a memory task than humans," Kyoto University researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa said in a statement.
In the first test, the chimps successfully counted sequentially from one to nine in return for a peanut or other tasty reward.
In the second test, researchers flashed just some of the nine numerals, then blocked them. The chimps remembered, with mixed success, where each numeral was -- in the right order, even though some were missing.
Though far from perfect, the results surprised the Japanese researchers, who reported their results in the journal Current Biology.
See a video here and here
One chimp, Ayumu, distinguished himself from the other chimps in mental ability. He was included in a second round of tests, which included him and 9 college students.
Five numbers were flashed on a screen for 7/10 of a second, before they became white squares. The participants were required to touch the squares in their correct numerical sequence. When the numbers were shown, Ayumu and the college students succeeded in guessing the correct sequence about 80 percent of the time."
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Chimpanzee Who Knew Sign Language Dies
"Washoe, a female chimpanzee believed to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died of natural causes at the research institute where she was kept.
Washoe, who first learned a bit of American Sign Language in a research project in Nevada, had been living on Central Washington University's Ellensburg campus since 1980. She had a vocabulary of about 250 words.
She died Tuesday night, according to Roger and Deborah Fouts, co-founders of The Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute on the campus. She was born in Africa about 1965.
She was taken to the veterinary hospital at Washington State University on Wednesday for a necropsy. Her memorial will be Nov. 12.
"Washoe was an emissary, bringing us a message of respect for nature," Dr. Mary Lee Jensvold, assistant director of the nonprofit institute, said Wednesday.
The Fouts went to Central Washington from Oklahoma in 1980 to create a home for Washoe and other chimps.
"The entire CWU community and the Ellensburg community are feeling the loss of our friend, Washoe, one of our daughters," said CWU President Jerilyn S. McIntyre.
Washoe also taught sign language to three younger chimps who remain at the institute, Central Washington spokeswoman Becky Watson said. They are Tatu, 31, Loulis, 29, and Dar, 31.
Washoe was the only chimpanzee at the institute born in Africa and was the matriarch of the chimpanzee family. She was named for Washoe County, Nev., where she lived with Drs. Allen and Beatrix Gardner of the University of Nevada, Reno, from 1966 to 1970.
Primate researcher Jane Goodall, in Roger Fouts' book "Next of Kin," noted the importance of the work with Washoe.
"Roger, through his ongoing conversations with Washoe and her extended family, has opened a window into the cognitive workings of a chimpanzee's mind that adds new dimension to our understanding," Goodall was quoted as saying.
In 1967, the Gardners established Project Washoe to teach the chimp ASL. Previous attempts to teach chimpanzees to imitate vocal languages had failed. Roger Fouts was a graduate student of the Gardners.
For Washoe to be considered "reliable" on a sign, it had to be seen by three different observers in three separate instances. Then it had to be seen 15 days in a row to be added to her sign list.
But there was controversy over whether the chimp was really using ASL. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has contended the notion that Washoe was the first non-human to acquire a human language was without scientific support."
Friends of Washoe
Washoe, who first learned a bit of American Sign Language in a research project in Nevada, had been living on Central Washington University's Ellensburg campus since 1980. She had a vocabulary of about 250 words.
She died Tuesday night, according to Roger and Deborah Fouts, co-founders of The Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute on the campus. She was born in Africa about 1965.
She was taken to the veterinary hospital at Washington State University on Wednesday for a necropsy. Her memorial will be Nov. 12.
"Washoe was an emissary, bringing us a message of respect for nature," Dr. Mary Lee Jensvold, assistant director of the nonprofit institute, said Wednesday.
The Fouts went to Central Washington from Oklahoma in 1980 to create a home for Washoe and other chimps.
"The entire CWU community and the Ellensburg community are feeling the loss of our friend, Washoe, one of our daughters," said CWU President Jerilyn S. McIntyre.
Washoe also taught sign language to three younger chimps who remain at the institute, Central Washington spokeswoman Becky Watson said. They are Tatu, 31, Loulis, 29, and Dar, 31.
Washoe was the only chimpanzee at the institute born in Africa and was the matriarch of the chimpanzee family. She was named for Washoe County, Nev., where she lived with Drs. Allen and Beatrix Gardner of the University of Nevada, Reno, from 1966 to 1970.
Primate researcher Jane Goodall, in Roger Fouts' book "Next of Kin," noted the importance of the work with Washoe.
"Roger, through his ongoing conversations with Washoe and her extended family, has opened a window into the cognitive workings of a chimpanzee's mind that adds new dimension to our understanding," Goodall was quoted as saying.
In 1967, the Gardners established Project Washoe to teach the chimp ASL. Previous attempts to teach chimpanzees to imitate vocal languages had failed. Roger Fouts was a graduate student of the Gardners.
For Washoe to be considered "reliable" on a sign, it had to be seen by three different observers in three separate instances. Then it had to be seen 15 days in a row to be added to her sign list.
But there was controversy over whether the chimp was really using ASL. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has contended the notion that Washoe was the first non-human to acquire a human language was without scientific support."
Friends of Washoe
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Research shows chimps can be selfless
"Chimpanzees have shown they can help strangers at personal cost without apparent expectation of personal gain, a level of selfless behavior often claimed as unique to humans.
These new findings could shed light on the evolution of such altruism, researchers said.
Scientists think altruism evolved to help either kin or those willing and able of returning the favor — to help either one's genetic heritage or oneself. Humans, on the other hand, occasionally help strangers without apparent benefit for themselves, sometimes at great cost.
To investigate when chimpanzees might aid either humans or each other, researchers studied 36 chimps at Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda that were born in the wild. In experiments, each chimp watched a person they had never seen before unsuccessfully reach for a wooden stick that was within reach of the ape. The person had struggled over the stick beforehand, suggesting it was valued.
Scientists found the chimpanzees often handed the stick over, even when the apes had to climb eight feet out of their way to get the stick and regardless of whether or not any reward was given. A similar result with 36 human infants just 18 months old yielded comparable results.
"Chimpanzees and such young infants both show that some level of altruism may be innate and not just a factor of education," said developmental and comparative psychologist Felix Warneken at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, Germany. "People say we become altruistic because our parents teach us so, but that young children are originally selfish. This suggests maybe culture is not the only source of altruism."
Further testing
Still, humans at the sanctuary provide the chimpanzees food and shelter, so helping people out could simply be in their best interests. Experiments were then needed to see how willing the apes were to help out unrelated chimps.
The researchers set up closed rooms that each held a piece of banana or watermelon. The only way for a chimp to get in was if an unrelated spectator ape released a chain to open the room. Warneken and his colleagues found the spectators often altruistically helped the other chimps get the fruit, even if they got no reward themselves, findings detailed June 25 in the journal PLoS Biology.
These findings suggest the roots of human altruism go deeper than previously thought, reaching back as far as the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.
"There is a biological predisposition to altruistic tendencies that we share with our common ancestor, and culture cultivates rather than implants the roots of altruism in the human psyche from primordial forms to more mature ones," Warneken told LiveScience.
Primal differences
Primatologist Frans de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta noted he recorded hundreds of cases of altruism among chimpanzees, "but skeptics like to downplay the evidence by saying it is not based on controlled experiments." These new experiments "thus confirm what observers of chimpanzees had said all along."
Still, altruism is rarely seen in chimps in the wild, and past research from the Max Planck Institute and others actually suggested that chimpanzees were not capable of human-like altruism. For instance, when chimps had the option of pulling a bar to feed either just themselves or themselves and another at no cost, UCLA primatologist Joan Silk and her colleagues had found the apes were no more likely to choose either option.
"In that experiment, maybe they were so occupied for retrieving food for themselves that they had no attention to spare for others," Warneken said. "So one difference between humans and chimps might be the ability to read the intentions of others and discriminate whether help is needed or not. You might have to make it very obvious that there's a problem the other faces."
Also, if chimps feel there is little chance they can get food for themselves, "maybe altruistic tendencies collapse," Warneken added. "For humans and chimps, selfish and altruistic motives are in competition with each other, and it could be that with chimps, selfish motives have to be pushed far off to the side to make room for altruism. So what distinguishes humans and chimps is not whether or not chimps have altruism but how fragile altruism might be."
Silk noted future experiments could test "how much the chimps are really willing to give up for such altruism." She added the experiments Warneken and his colleagues performed could be conducted with her own chimps, to see whether the absence of altruism they saw before "was based off the task we had them perform, or perhaps the individuals themselves."
These new findings could shed light on the evolution of such altruism, researchers said.
Scientists think altruism evolved to help either kin or those willing and able of returning the favor — to help either one's genetic heritage or oneself. Humans, on the other hand, occasionally help strangers without apparent benefit for themselves, sometimes at great cost.
To investigate when chimpanzees might aid either humans or each other, researchers studied 36 chimps at Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda that were born in the wild. In experiments, each chimp watched a person they had never seen before unsuccessfully reach for a wooden stick that was within reach of the ape. The person had struggled over the stick beforehand, suggesting it was valued.
Scientists found the chimpanzees often handed the stick over, even when the apes had to climb eight feet out of their way to get the stick and regardless of whether or not any reward was given. A similar result with 36 human infants just 18 months old yielded comparable results.
"Chimpanzees and such young infants both show that some level of altruism may be innate and not just a factor of education," said developmental and comparative psychologist Felix Warneken at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, Germany. "People say we become altruistic because our parents teach us so, but that young children are originally selfish. This suggests maybe culture is not the only source of altruism."
Further testing
Still, humans at the sanctuary provide the chimpanzees food and shelter, so helping people out could simply be in their best interests. Experiments were then needed to see how willing the apes were to help out unrelated chimps.
The researchers set up closed rooms that each held a piece of banana or watermelon. The only way for a chimp to get in was if an unrelated spectator ape released a chain to open the room. Warneken and his colleagues found the spectators often altruistically helped the other chimps get the fruit, even if they got no reward themselves, findings detailed June 25 in the journal PLoS Biology.
These findings suggest the roots of human altruism go deeper than previously thought, reaching back as far as the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.
"There is a biological predisposition to altruistic tendencies that we share with our common ancestor, and culture cultivates rather than implants the roots of altruism in the human psyche from primordial forms to more mature ones," Warneken told LiveScience.
Primal differences
Primatologist Frans de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta noted he recorded hundreds of cases of altruism among chimpanzees, "but skeptics like to downplay the evidence by saying it is not based on controlled experiments." These new experiments "thus confirm what observers of chimpanzees had said all along."
Still, altruism is rarely seen in chimps in the wild, and past research from the Max Planck Institute and others actually suggested that chimpanzees were not capable of human-like altruism. For instance, when chimps had the option of pulling a bar to feed either just themselves or themselves and another at no cost, UCLA primatologist Joan Silk and her colleagues had found the apes were no more likely to choose either option.
"In that experiment, maybe they were so occupied for retrieving food for themselves that they had no attention to spare for others," Warneken said. "So one difference between humans and chimps might be the ability to read the intentions of others and discriminate whether help is needed or not. You might have to make it very obvious that there's a problem the other faces."
Also, if chimps feel there is little chance they can get food for themselves, "maybe altruistic tendencies collapse," Warneken added. "For humans and chimps, selfish and altruistic motives are in competition with each other, and it could be that with chimps, selfish motives have to be pushed far off to the side to make room for altruism. So what distinguishes humans and chimps is not whether or not chimps have altruism but how fragile altruism might be."
Silk noted future experiments could test "how much the chimps are really willing to give up for such altruism." She added the experiments Warneken and his colleagues performed could be conducted with her own chimps, to see whether the absence of altruism they saw before "was based off the task we had them perform, or perhaps the individuals themselves."
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Chimps pass on gadget use like humans
"Chimpanzees readily learn and share techniques on how to fiddle with gadgets, new research shows, the best evidence yet that our closest living relatives pass on customs and culture just as humans do.
The new findings help shed light on the capabilities of last common ancestor of humans and chimps. And the research could also help develop better robots and artificial intelligences, the researchers say
In the wild, chimpanzee troops often are distinct from one another, possessing collections of up to 20 traditions or customary behaviors that altogether seem to form unique cultures. Such practices include various forms of tool use, including hammers and pestles; courtship rituals such as leaf-clipping, where leaves are clipped noisily with the teeth; social behaviors such as overhead hand-clasping during mutual grooming; and methods for eradicating parasites by either stabbing or squashing them.
While observing chimpanzees, evolutionary psychologist Antoine Spiteri at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland wanted to help settle the question of whether or not the apes learned such practices by watching others like humans do, as opposed to simply knowing how to perform such behaviors innately.
Spiteri and his colleagues investigated six groups of chimpanzees, each with eight to 11 apes, living in captivity in Bastrop, Texas. The researchers taught a lone chimpanzee from one group one technique for obtaining food from a complex gadget, such as stabbing food with a tool. They next taught one chimp from another group a different technique for extracting food from the same gadget, such as pushing it out down a ramp.
The extremely hot Texas weather made it hard for researchers to work, "and because participation by the chimpanzees in each of these studies has been completely voluntary, it sometimes means that we as experimenters have had to be extremely patient," Spiteri recalled. "Considering the insights we have gathered, it has been worth the sacrifice."
Over time, the researchers found each technique for tool use and food extraction spread within each group. In essence, these groups displayed their own unique culture and local traditions.
A number of these chimpanzee groups are next-door neighbors within eyeshot of each other, and researchers found traditions proved catching, with foraging practices spreading from one group to another, findings detailed in the June 19 issue of the journal Current Biology.
"The possibility that some primates may be able to learn from others has great implications on how we treat them and how we think about ourselves," Spiteri told LiveScience. "These results indicate to us that chimps have a capacity for cultural complexity, which was likely shared by our common ancestor going back around 5 million years ago."
This work is "particularly useful to robotic development and artificial intelligence," Spiteri added. 'Understanding how the mechanisms of imitation and social learning can help us develop artificial beings that can behave and evolve in the way that we do and ultimately it may help us create other brains.'"
The new findings help shed light on the capabilities of last common ancestor of humans and chimps. And the research could also help develop better robots and artificial intelligences, the researchers say
In the wild, chimpanzee troops often are distinct from one another, possessing collections of up to 20 traditions or customary behaviors that altogether seem to form unique cultures. Such practices include various forms of tool use, including hammers and pestles; courtship rituals such as leaf-clipping, where leaves are clipped noisily with the teeth; social behaviors such as overhead hand-clasping during mutual grooming; and methods for eradicating parasites by either stabbing or squashing them.
While observing chimpanzees, evolutionary psychologist Antoine Spiteri at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland wanted to help settle the question of whether or not the apes learned such practices by watching others like humans do, as opposed to simply knowing how to perform such behaviors innately.
Spiteri and his colleagues investigated six groups of chimpanzees, each with eight to 11 apes, living in captivity in Bastrop, Texas. The researchers taught a lone chimpanzee from one group one technique for obtaining food from a complex gadget, such as stabbing food with a tool. They next taught one chimp from another group a different technique for extracting food from the same gadget, such as pushing it out down a ramp.
The extremely hot Texas weather made it hard for researchers to work, "and because participation by the chimpanzees in each of these studies has been completely voluntary, it sometimes means that we as experimenters have had to be extremely patient," Spiteri recalled. "Considering the insights we have gathered, it has been worth the sacrifice."
Over time, the researchers found each technique for tool use and food extraction spread within each group. In essence, these groups displayed their own unique culture and local traditions.
A number of these chimpanzee groups are next-door neighbors within eyeshot of each other, and researchers found traditions proved catching, with foraging practices spreading from one group to another, findings detailed in the June 19 issue of the journal Current Biology.
"The possibility that some primates may be able to learn from others has great implications on how we treat them and how we think about ourselves," Spiteri told LiveScience. "These results indicate to us that chimps have a capacity for cultural complexity, which was likely shared by our common ancestor going back around 5 million years ago."
This work is "particularly useful to robotic development and artificial intelligence," Spiteri added. 'Understanding how the mechanisms of imitation and social learning can help us develop artificial beings that can behave and evolve in the way that we do and ultimately it may help us create other brains.'"
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Activists Want Chimp Declared a 'Person'
"VIENNA, Austria (AP) - In some ways, Hiasl is like any other Viennese: He indulges a weakness for pastry, likes to paint and enjoys chilling out watching TV. But he doesn't care for coffee, and he isn't actually a person - at least not yet.
In a case that could set a global legal precedent for granting basic rights to apes, animal rights advocates are seeking to get the 26-year-old male chimpanzee legally declared a "person."
Hiasl's supporters argue he needs that status to become a legal entity that can receive donations and get a guardian to look out for his interests.
"Our main argument is that Hiasl is a person and has basic legal rights," said Eberhart Theuer, a lawyer leading the challenge on behalf of the Association Against Animal Factories, a Vienna animal rights group.
"We mean the right to life, the right to not be tortured, the right to freedom under certain conditions," Theuer said.
"We're not talking about the right to vote here."
The campaign began after the animal sanctuary where Hiasl (pronounced HEE-zul) and another chimp, Rosi, have lived for 25 years went bankrupt.
Activists want to ensure the apes don't wind up homeless if the shelter closes. Both have already suffered: They were captured as babies in Sierra Leone in 1982 and smuggled in a crate to Austria for use in pharmaceutical experiments. Customs officers intercepted the shipment and turned the chimps over to the shelter.
Their food and veterinary bills run about $6,800 a month. Donors have offered to help, but there's a catch: Under Austrian law, only a person can receive personal donations.
Organizers could set up a foundation to collect cash for Hiasl, whose life expectancy in captivity is about 60 years. But without basic rights, they contend, he could be sold to someone outside Austria, where the chimp is protected by strict animal cruelty laws.
"If we can get Hiasl declared a person, he would have the right to own property. Then, if people wanted to donate something to him, he'd have the right to receive it," said Theuer, who has vowed to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.
Austria isn't the only country where primate rights are being debated. Spain's parliament is considering a bill that would endorse the Great Ape Project, a Seattle-based international initiative to extend "fundamental moral and legal protections" to apes.
If Hiasl gets a guardian, "it will be the first time the species barrier will have been crossed for legal 'personhood,'" said Jan Creamer, chief executive of Animal Defenders International, which is working to end the use of primates in research.
Paula Stibbe, a Briton who teaches English in Vienna, petitioned a district court to be Hiasl's legal trustee. On April 24, Judge Barbara Bart rejected her request, ruling Hiasl didn't meet two key tests: He is neither mentally impaired nor in an emergency.
Although Bart expressed concern that awarding Hiasl a guardian could create the impression that animals enjoy the same legal status as humans, she didn't rule that he could never be considered a person.
Martin Balluch, who heads the Association Against Animal Factories, has asked a federal court for a ruling on the guardianship issue.
"Chimps share 99.4 percent of their DNA with humans," he said. "OK, they're not homo sapiens. But they're obviously also not things - the only other option the law provides."
Not all Austrian animal rights activists back the legal challenge. Michael Antolini, president of the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said he thinks it's absurd.
"I'm not about to make myself look like a fool" by getting involved, said Antolini, who worries that chimpanzees could gain broader rights, such as copyright protections on their photographs.
But Stibbe, who brings Hiasl sweets and yogurt and watches him draw and clown around by dressing up in knee-high rubber boots, insists he deserves more legal rights "than bricks or apples or potatoes."
"He can be very playful but also thoughtful," she said. "Being with him is like playing with someone who can't talk."
A date for the appeal hasn't been set, but Hiasl's legal team has lined up expert witnesses, including Jane Goodall, the world's foremost observer of chimpanzee behavior.
"When you see Hiasl, he really comes across as a person," Theuer said.
'He has a real personality. It strikes you immediately: This is an individual. You just have to look him in the eye to see that.'"
Visit the Great Ape Project website here.
In a case that could set a global legal precedent for granting basic rights to apes, animal rights advocates are seeking to get the 26-year-old male chimpanzee legally declared a "person."
Hiasl's supporters argue he needs that status to become a legal entity that can receive donations and get a guardian to look out for his interests.
"Our main argument is that Hiasl is a person and has basic legal rights," said Eberhart Theuer, a lawyer leading the challenge on behalf of the Association Against Animal Factories, a Vienna animal rights group.
"We mean the right to life, the right to not be tortured, the right to freedom under certain conditions," Theuer said.
"We're not talking about the right to vote here."
The campaign began after the animal sanctuary where Hiasl (pronounced HEE-zul) and another chimp, Rosi, have lived for 25 years went bankrupt.
Activists want to ensure the apes don't wind up homeless if the shelter closes. Both have already suffered: They were captured as babies in Sierra Leone in 1982 and smuggled in a crate to Austria for use in pharmaceutical experiments. Customs officers intercepted the shipment and turned the chimps over to the shelter.
Their food and veterinary bills run about $6,800 a month. Donors have offered to help, but there's a catch: Under Austrian law, only a person can receive personal donations.
Organizers could set up a foundation to collect cash for Hiasl, whose life expectancy in captivity is about 60 years. But without basic rights, they contend, he could be sold to someone outside Austria, where the chimp is protected by strict animal cruelty laws.
"If we can get Hiasl declared a person, he would have the right to own property. Then, if people wanted to donate something to him, he'd have the right to receive it," said Theuer, who has vowed to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.
Austria isn't the only country where primate rights are being debated. Spain's parliament is considering a bill that would endorse the Great Ape Project, a Seattle-based international initiative to extend "fundamental moral and legal protections" to apes.
If Hiasl gets a guardian, "it will be the first time the species barrier will have been crossed for legal 'personhood,'" said Jan Creamer, chief executive of Animal Defenders International, which is working to end the use of primates in research.
Paula Stibbe, a Briton who teaches English in Vienna, petitioned a district court to be Hiasl's legal trustee. On April 24, Judge Barbara Bart rejected her request, ruling Hiasl didn't meet two key tests: He is neither mentally impaired nor in an emergency.
Although Bart expressed concern that awarding Hiasl a guardian could create the impression that animals enjoy the same legal status as humans, she didn't rule that he could never be considered a person.
Martin Balluch, who heads the Association Against Animal Factories, has asked a federal court for a ruling on the guardianship issue.
"Chimps share 99.4 percent of their DNA with humans," he said. "OK, they're not homo sapiens. But they're obviously also not things - the only other option the law provides."
Not all Austrian animal rights activists back the legal challenge. Michael Antolini, president of the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said he thinks it's absurd.
"I'm not about to make myself look like a fool" by getting involved, said Antolini, who worries that chimpanzees could gain broader rights, such as copyright protections on their photographs.
But Stibbe, who brings Hiasl sweets and yogurt and watches him draw and clown around by dressing up in knee-high rubber boots, insists he deserves more legal rights "than bricks or apples or potatoes."
"He can be very playful but also thoughtful," she said. "Being with him is like playing with someone who can't talk."
A date for the appeal hasn't been set, but Hiasl's legal team has lined up expert witnesses, including Jane Goodall, the world's foremost observer of chimpanzee behavior.
"When you see Hiasl, he really comes across as a person," Theuer said.
'He has a real personality. It strikes you immediately: This is an individual. You just have to look him in the eye to see that.'"
Visit the Great Ape Project website here.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Chimps more evolved than humans
"Since the human-chimp split about 6 million years ago, chimpanzee genes can be said to have evolved more than human genes, a new study suggests.
The results, detailed online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradict the conventional wisdom that humans are the result of a high degree of genetic selection, evidenced by our relatively large brains, cognitive abilities and bipedalism.
Jianzhi Zhang of the University of Michigan and his colleagues analyzed strings of DNA from nearly 14,000 protein-coding genes shared by chimps and humans. They looked for differences gene by gene and whether they caused changes in the generated proteins.
Genes act as instructions that organisms use to make proteins and thus are integral to carrying out biological functions, such as transporting oxygen to the body’s cells. Different versions of the same gene are called alleles.
Changes in DNA that affect the making of proteins are considered functional changes, while “silent” changes do not affect the proteins. “If we see an excess of functional changes (compared to silent changes) the inference is these functional changes occurred because they were positively selected, because they were useful in some way to the organism,” said study team member Margaret Bakewell, also of UM.
Bakewell, Zhang and a colleague found that substantially more genes in chimps evolved in ways that were beneficial than was the case with human genes.
The results could be due to the fact that over the long term humans have had a smaller effective population size compared with chimps.
“Although there are now many more humans than chimps, in the past, human populations were much smaller, and may have been fragmented into even smaller groups,” Bakewell told LiveScience. So random events would play a more dominant role than natural selection in humans.
Here is why: Under the process of natural selection, gene variants that are beneficial get selected for and become more common in a population over time. But genetic drift, a random process in which chance “decides” which alleles survive, also occurs. In smaller populations, a fortuitous break for one or two alleles can have a disproportionately greater impact on the overall genes of that population compared with a larger one.
Chance events could also explain why the scientists found more gene variants that were either neutral and had no functional impact or negative changes that are involved in diseases.
There is still much to learn, the scientists say, about human and chimp evolution. “There are possibly a lot of differences between human and chimps that we don’t know about, [perhaps] because there are differences in chimps that nobody has studied; a lot of studies tend to focus on humans,” Bakewell said."
The results, detailed online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradict the conventional wisdom that humans are the result of a high degree of genetic selection, evidenced by our relatively large brains, cognitive abilities and bipedalism.
Jianzhi Zhang of the University of Michigan and his colleagues analyzed strings of DNA from nearly 14,000 protein-coding genes shared by chimps and humans. They looked for differences gene by gene and whether they caused changes in the generated proteins.
Genes act as instructions that organisms use to make proteins and thus are integral to carrying out biological functions, such as transporting oxygen to the body’s cells. Different versions of the same gene are called alleles.
Changes in DNA that affect the making of proteins are considered functional changes, while “silent” changes do not affect the proteins. “If we see an excess of functional changes (compared to silent changes) the inference is these functional changes occurred because they were positively selected, because they were useful in some way to the organism,” said study team member Margaret Bakewell, also of UM.
Bakewell, Zhang and a colleague found that substantially more genes in chimps evolved in ways that were beneficial than was the case with human genes.
The results could be due to the fact that over the long term humans have had a smaller effective population size compared with chimps.
“Although there are now many more humans than chimps, in the past, human populations were much smaller, and may have been fragmented into even smaller groups,” Bakewell told LiveScience. So random events would play a more dominant role than natural selection in humans.
Here is why: Under the process of natural selection, gene variants that are beneficial get selected for and become more common in a population over time. But genetic drift, a random process in which chance “decides” which alleles survive, also occurs. In smaller populations, a fortuitous break for one or two alleles can have a disproportionately greater impact on the overall genes of that population compared with a larger one.
Chance events could also explain why the scientists found more gene variants that were either neutral and had no functional impact or negative changes that are involved in diseases.
There is still much to learn, the scientists say, about human and chimp evolution. “There are possibly a lot of differences between human and chimps that we don’t know about, [perhaps] because there are differences in chimps that nobody has studied; a lot of studies tend to focus on humans,” Bakewell said."
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Meeting to address how Chimpanzees think
"Jane Goodall, the world's best-known observer of chimpanzee behavior, watched the chimps at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo on Saturday while a crowd of zoo-goers gathered to watch her.
"She's very important," one woman told two 6-year-old girls she'd brought to the zoo. "She did a lot of very exciting things."
Goodall, 72, is in Chicago for a three-day conference billed as the first scientific meeting on how chimpanzees think - not just how they behave. Goodall, who revolutionized research on primates during the 1960s when she studied them at close range in Tanzania, is scheduled to give a sold-out lecture Sunday at Navy Pier.
At the meeting, which ends Sunday, 30 researchers are presenting their work on chimps' apparent mental capacity for empathy, cooperative problem-solving and even deception. All the presenters have cited Goodall's trailblazing work, said conference co-chair Elizabeth Lonsdorf, director of the Fisher Center.
The current "Mind of the Chimpanzee" meeting has drawn 300 of the world's leading primatologists to the zoo's Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes. It takes place against a backdrop of logging of forest habitat in Africa and growing international pressure to save chimpanzees and other apes, Goodall said.
"When I began in 1960 there must have been at least a million chimpanzees across Africa in 25 countries," Goodall said. "We don't think there are more than 150,000 now spread over 21 countries, many of them in tiny groups that, unless we can do something to help them, will become extinct."
Goodall's research documented tool use, emotions and war in the chimpanzee groups she observed, and her books and TV specials about her work at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve sparked the world's curiosity about apes. She drew criticism from her peers for giving names to the animals she studied, but the public fell in love with her approach.
Goodall said a similar 1986 Chicago conference and its presentations on habitat destruction, illegal trade in chimpanzees for meat and treatment of chimps in medical research prompted her to switch from research to advocacy.
Later, at the zoo's chimpanzee enclosure, Goodall saw how 7-year-old Kipper followed 16-year-old Hank, the leader of the group, through the tree branches of their outdoor enclosure.
"It's his hero. Hero-worshipping," Goodall said. "At Gombe (in Tanzania), they do the same. They pick on one male - it doesn't have to be the alpha - and just follow that person around."
She seemed unaware of the flock of followers she herself had collected as she walked around the zoo."
On the Net:
The Mind of the Chimpanzee
"She's very important," one woman told two 6-year-old girls she'd brought to the zoo. "She did a lot of very exciting things."
Goodall, 72, is in Chicago for a three-day conference billed as the first scientific meeting on how chimpanzees think - not just how they behave. Goodall, who revolutionized research on primates during the 1960s when she studied them at close range in Tanzania, is scheduled to give a sold-out lecture Sunday at Navy Pier.
At the meeting, which ends Sunday, 30 researchers are presenting their work on chimps' apparent mental capacity for empathy, cooperative problem-solving and even deception. All the presenters have cited Goodall's trailblazing work, said conference co-chair Elizabeth Lonsdorf, director of the Fisher Center.
The current "Mind of the Chimpanzee" meeting has drawn 300 of the world's leading primatologists to the zoo's Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes. It takes place against a backdrop of logging of forest habitat in Africa and growing international pressure to save chimpanzees and other apes, Goodall said.
"When I began in 1960 there must have been at least a million chimpanzees across Africa in 25 countries," Goodall said. "We don't think there are more than 150,000 now spread over 21 countries, many of them in tiny groups that, unless we can do something to help them, will become extinct."
Goodall's research documented tool use, emotions and war in the chimpanzee groups she observed, and her books and TV specials about her work at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve sparked the world's curiosity about apes. She drew criticism from her peers for giving names to the animals she studied, but the public fell in love with her approach.
Goodall said a similar 1986 Chicago conference and its presentations on habitat destruction, illegal trade in chimpanzees for meat and treatment of chimps in medical research prompted her to switch from research to advocacy.
Later, at the zoo's chimpanzee enclosure, Goodall saw how 7-year-old Kipper followed 16-year-old Hank, the leader of the group, through the tree branches of their outdoor enclosure.
"It's his hero. Hero-worshipping," Goodall said. "At Gombe (in Tanzania), they do the same. They pick on one male - it doesn't have to be the alpha - and just follow that person around."
She seemed unaware of the flock of followers she herself had collected as she walked around the zoo."
On the Net:
The Mind of the Chimpanzee
Friday, February 23, 2007
Chimps Use Spears to Hunt Bushbabies
"Researchers have witnessed a chimpanzee skewering a lemur-like creature for supper, but it's unclear whether the spectacle was a bit of luck or an indication that chimps have a more advanced ability to hunt than was thought.
A team led by Iowa State University anthropology professor Jill Pruetz witnessed the spearing of a bushbaby in Fongoli, Senegal, during an observation of chimpanzees from March 2005 to July 2006. In a study being released Thursday in the online version of the journal Current Biology, Pruetz documents 22 cases of chimps using spear-like tools to hunt bushbabies - a small primate that lives in hollow branches or tree trunks.
"It's not uncommon to have chimps use tools. But to use them in the context of hunting" is nearly unheard of, she said.
Pruetz said the practice is most common among adolescent females, ages 10 to 13, which must compete against physically superior males.
"It's a way of accessing protein or meat that is a creative solution to this problem," she said.
Pruetz said the chimpanzees stripped leaves from tree branches and modified the tip with their incisors, "effectively making a point." Then the chimpanzees jabbed the tool into a cavity to snag a bushbaby.
Only once did researchers observe a chimpanzee extracting a bushbaby by using a spear, and that has some scientists questioning whether the chimp was actually hunting. Chimpanzees commonly use sticks to fish for food, such as termites, said Ian Gilby, a postdoctoral fellow who studies chimpanzee hunting at Harvard University.
"You frequently see chimps sticking sticks into holes or trees, so they can make the hole bigger so they can put their arm in," said Gilby, who hadn't read the study.
Gilby said he's seen this tactic used to get honey and small birds from holes in his work in Gombe, Tanzania.
"If it's clear they're making a point" on a branch tip, he said, then that "does appear to be slightly different from what we see at other sites."
David DeGusta, an assistant professor of anthropological sciences at Stanford University, lauded Pruetz's work because of the rarity of studying chimpanzees outside Gombe, where renowned researcher Jane Goodall did her work. It's hard to get animals accustomed to human presence and willing to carry on naturally, DeGusta said.
"The more populations that are studied, the more we learn about how their behavior can vary," said DeGusta, who also hadn't read the study.
Pruetz's study was funded by Iowa State University and the National Geographic Society.
Her Iowa State graduate students continue to observe other emerging patterns among chimpanzees in Senegal.
"In a million years I never would've predicted that I would've seen (hunting)," she said. 'I'm going to plug along and see what unfolds.'"
A team led by Iowa State University anthropology professor Jill Pruetz witnessed the spearing of a bushbaby in Fongoli, Senegal, during an observation of chimpanzees from March 2005 to July 2006. In a study being released Thursday in the online version of the journal Current Biology, Pruetz documents 22 cases of chimps using spear-like tools to hunt bushbabies - a small primate that lives in hollow branches or tree trunks.
"It's not uncommon to have chimps use tools. But to use them in the context of hunting" is nearly unheard of, she said.
Pruetz said the practice is most common among adolescent females, ages 10 to 13, which must compete against physically superior males.
"It's a way of accessing protein or meat that is a creative solution to this problem," she said.
Pruetz said the chimpanzees stripped leaves from tree branches and modified the tip with their incisors, "effectively making a point." Then the chimpanzees jabbed the tool into a cavity to snag a bushbaby.
Only once did researchers observe a chimpanzee extracting a bushbaby by using a spear, and that has some scientists questioning whether the chimp was actually hunting. Chimpanzees commonly use sticks to fish for food, such as termites, said Ian Gilby, a postdoctoral fellow who studies chimpanzee hunting at Harvard University.
"You frequently see chimps sticking sticks into holes or trees, so they can make the hole bigger so they can put their arm in," said Gilby, who hadn't read the study.
Gilby said he's seen this tactic used to get honey and small birds from holes in his work in Gombe, Tanzania.
"If it's clear they're making a point" on a branch tip, he said, then that "does appear to be slightly different from what we see at other sites."
David DeGusta, an assistant professor of anthropological sciences at Stanford University, lauded Pruetz's work because of the rarity of studying chimpanzees outside Gombe, where renowned researcher Jane Goodall did her work. It's hard to get animals accustomed to human presence and willing to carry on naturally, DeGusta said.
"The more populations that are studied, the more we learn about how their behavior can vary," said DeGusta, who also hadn't read the study.
Pruetz's study was funded by Iowa State University and the National Geographic Society.
Her Iowa State graduate students continue to observe other emerging patterns among chimpanzees in Senegal.
"In a million years I never would've predicted that I would've seen (hunting)," she said. 'I'm going to plug along and see what unfolds.'"
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Chimps more like humans than apes - LiveScience - MSNBC.com
"While you might think of yourself as smarter than the average ape, beware: Those distant relatives of ours have a knack for evolving more quickly than we do. And by revealing this through DNA analysis, scientists have provided support for a controversial hypothesis that chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than to other species of great apes with which they're currently classified.
The findings were announced today in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers generally agree that humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor about 5 million to 7 million years ago.
Chimps are lumped with gorillas and orangutans in the same family, Pongidae, whereas humans are in the family Hominidae.
But a study in 2003 found that 99.4 percent of important DNA sites are the same in chimps and humans. Other researchers have since concluded that there are crucial differences in the genetic software of the two species, however. Only a few months ago was the full chimp DNA sequence unraveled.
Chimps evolving faster
In the new study, scientists examined how quickly each species evolves. The figure they work with is called a molecular clock. It involves the rate at which DNA base pairs match up incorrectly, creating genetic errors called substitutions. These are the mutations that cause changes in a species over time.
Our clock began to slow down about 1 million years ago, and today it is 3 percent slower than that of the chimp and 11 percent slower than in the gorilla, concludes the study, led by Soojin Yi, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The upshot: There seem to be fewer changes to the software of life in humans over time than in chimpanzees, and even fewer still than in the other apes.
This slower clock correlates with a longer time needed to reach sexual maturity — almost twice as long for humans as gorillas. Scientists call this "generation time." In order for mutations to cause lasting change in a species, they must pass on to the next generation.
Since well before modern times, humans have taken almost twice as long to reach sexual maturity as other apes, Yi said.
"A long generation time is an important trait that separates humans from their evolutionary relatives," said Navin Elango, a graduate student working with Yi. "We used to think that apes shared one generation time, but that's not true. There's a lot more variation."
"I think we can say that this study provides further support for the hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees should be in one genus, rather than two different genus' because we not only share extremely similar genomes, we share similar generation time," Yi said.
Humans slow but smart
Given our evolutionary snail's pace, you might be wondering why, in just a few million years, we got so smart while chimps lagged.
"Even though mutations per se may arise in fewer numbers in humans than in chimpanzees, those that matter will quickly spread," Yi told LiveScience. "Mutations that are advantageous to the human, such as intelligence, probably are under strong natural selection," meaning individuals either latch on to the good stuff or perish.
However, Yi and her colleagues looked only at mutations in non-functional regions of DNA, changes that don't affect evolution. "If we looked at only those mutations that are selected, it is possible we may see different results," she said."
The findings were announced today in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers generally agree that humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor about 5 million to 7 million years ago.
Chimps are lumped with gorillas and orangutans in the same family, Pongidae, whereas humans are in the family Hominidae.
But a study in 2003 found that 99.4 percent of important DNA sites are the same in chimps and humans. Other researchers have since concluded that there are crucial differences in the genetic software of the two species, however. Only a few months ago was the full chimp DNA sequence unraveled.
Chimps evolving faster
In the new study, scientists examined how quickly each species evolves. The figure they work with is called a molecular clock. It involves the rate at which DNA base pairs match up incorrectly, creating genetic errors called substitutions. These are the mutations that cause changes in a species over time.
Our clock began to slow down about 1 million years ago, and today it is 3 percent slower than that of the chimp and 11 percent slower than in the gorilla, concludes the study, led by Soojin Yi, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The upshot: There seem to be fewer changes to the software of life in humans over time than in chimpanzees, and even fewer still than in the other apes.
This slower clock correlates with a longer time needed to reach sexual maturity — almost twice as long for humans as gorillas. Scientists call this "generation time." In order for mutations to cause lasting change in a species, they must pass on to the next generation.
Since well before modern times, humans have taken almost twice as long to reach sexual maturity as other apes, Yi said.
"A long generation time is an important trait that separates humans from their evolutionary relatives," said Navin Elango, a graduate student working with Yi. "We used to think that apes shared one generation time, but that's not true. There's a lot more variation."
"I think we can say that this study provides further support for the hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees should be in one genus, rather than two different genus' because we not only share extremely similar genomes, we share similar generation time," Yi said.
Humans slow but smart
Given our evolutionary snail's pace, you might be wondering why, in just a few million years, we got so smart while chimps lagged.
"Even though mutations per se may arise in fewer numbers in humans than in chimpanzees, those that matter will quickly spread," Yi told LiveScience. "Mutations that are advantageous to the human, such as intelligence, probably are under strong natural selection," meaning individuals either latch on to the good stuff or perish.
However, Yi and her colleagues looked only at mutations in non-functional regions of DNA, changes that don't affect evolution. "If we looked at only those mutations that are selected, it is possible we may see different results," she said."
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