Little Brain Logic
This is my favorite article of the last couple of days. It’s about baboons and and research into whether and how they think. But the study is flawed. Warning. It’s kind of cruel, involving particularly disturbing variety of animal abuse. NYT:
Royal is a cantankerous old male baboon whose troop of some 80 members lives in the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana. A perplexing event is about to disturb his day.
From the bushes to his right, he hears a staccato whoop, the distinctive call that female baboons always make after mating. He recognizes the voice as that of Jackalberry, the current consort of Cassius, a male who outranks Royal in the strict hierarchy of male baboons. No hope of sex today.
But then, surprisingly, he hears Cassius’s signature greeting grunt to his left. His puzzlement is plain on the video made of his reaction. You can almost see the wheels turn slowly in his head:
“Jackalberry here, but Cassius over there. Hmm, Jackalberry must be hooking up with some one else. But that means Cassius has left her unguarded. Say what — this is my big chance!”
The video shows him loping off in the direction of Jackalberry’s whoop. But all that he will find is the loudspeaker from which researchers have played Jackalberry’s recorded call.
The purpose of the experiment is not to ruin Royal’s day but to understand what goes on in a baboon’s mind, in this case how carefully the animals keep track of transient relationships.
OK, let’s stop rolling the cameras right there and back it up. What we have seen is not so much an example of how baboons think, but how they don’t. Royal is not using big brain, but little brain. Let me illustrate by taking the exact same set of circumstances and applying it to a human scenario.
Bill is a cantankerous old male human whose troop of some 300 million members lives in the United States of America. A perplexing event is about to disturb his day.
From the Rose Garden, he hears cheerleaders, the distinctive staccato whoops they make when they are ready to mate with the entire football team.
From the Oval Office, surprisingly, he hears the signature grunt he recognizes as that of President Hillary Clinton, the dominant alpha female. She has left Bill to his own devices while there are visiting cheerleaders on the grounds, because there is a crisis in Iraq, where genocide is underway and Iranian troops are moving in, and she is engaged in consultation with Secretary of State Jesse Jackson and Secretary of Defense Cynthia Sheehan.
Bill’s puzzlement is plain on the video made of his reaction. As he bites his lip, you can almost see the wheels turn slowly in his head:
“Cheerleaders here, but Hillary over there. Hmm, Hillary must not be paying attention. That means Bill has been left unguarded. Say what — this is my big chance!”
The video shows Bill loping off in the direction of the cheerleaders’ whoops. But all that he will find is the loudspeaker from which researchers have played the cheerleaders’ recorded call.
The purpose of the experiment is not to mess with Bill’s mind, but to understand what he could possibly be thinking.
Not recognizing that as a former president and now First Laddie, he is under intense press and public scrutiny at all times, and that in all likelihood he is the special responsibility of a Secret Service detail that places a dossier on his day’s activities on Hillary’s desk each morning, Bill is thinking with his little brain, which is to say, not at all. The same is true of Royal, the baboon, who if he used his big brain would realize that this Jackalberry setup was (A) entirely implausible and (B) if he heard Jackalberry’s post-coital whoops to his right and Cassius’ nearby grunts to his left, that means Cassius heard the whoops, too, and will be getting all alpha all over whoever he catches boffing his lady.
The more interesting mental-process study would be to measure, if there is a practical way to do so, what Hillary thinks the odds are Bill is not going to take a run at the interns and plant a big steaming sex scandal in the middle of her presidency.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:24 am on Thursday, October 11, 2007
3 Responses to “Little Brain Logic”
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October 11th, 2007 at 2:05 am
Heh.
October 11th, 2007 at 6:39 am
You paint a compelling picture. But in Bill’s case, I would be hard pressed to identify which is the big brain and which is the little brain.
October 11th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
RebeccaH,
big brain –> big toe, little brain –> viagra.