I was very surprised by the infanticide part of the film, and more so than just the imagery, just the fact of it happening so that females will come into heat is intense in its own right. Because primates are closely related to us I think it’s very easy to somewhat personify them and give them human emotions and ideals that they probably don’t have. This happens with more than just primates. It can feel especially easy with animals we’re close to like pets. The scene in the film was a very harsh reminder that as similar as we may seem to primates, we are still very different beings.
As someone who is interested in cognition it made me think about how humans have evolved more than just physically. The way we think and feel is vastly different from even our closest relatives. For most of us, we feel guilt, and maybe horror, at the idea of infanticide. People who commit those kinds of acts are outliers. We obviously still have aggression and war as human beings, it was talked about in one of the articles, but as humans we have the capacity to think through our actions, think about consequences, and feel empathy for other people.
It also makes me think about the end of the film where the narrator implies that a mother chimpanzee is bidding it’s child farewell with human emotion and sadness. It’s somewhat hard to imagine this after the brutal infanticide earlier in the film. Are the emotions the narrator is attributing to the mother real? Or are they simply what we as humans want to imagine the mother is feeling?
I believe that we should separate our own expectations of our primate relatives from what they are truly capable of. I think it’s easy to fall into giving primates more human qualities than they actually possess.
That being said, I do believe in bettering today by learning from the past. I want to go into evolutionary linguistics so I can appreciate learning from the beginning. I think studying how primates interact with each other, and how different groups have adapted to their own socialization and environment can be incredibly beneficial to figuring out more about where we came from as homo sapiens. In learning about our own history we can learn more about how we came to be where we are today.
For me personally I am very interested in the development of cognition. I would love for the field of primatology to find answers to the beginnings of complex thoughts and the theory of mind. I know there are some primatologists who believe that some primates have theory of mind (like Kanzi), but I find myself more in on the skeptical side and I doubt that any animal has actual theory of mind. I hope that someday it’s proven they do, however.
Hey Courtney! I think the perspectives you share in your blog post are really interesting! I felt very similar watching the part about the infanticide and the fact that males use that to induce ovulation in the female chimpanzees. While in theory, it makes sense (in maybe their perspective, but not from ours where we have decided that murder is horrific crime that is unforgivable) why they want to induce this to stabilize their position for power dynamics, it is outrageous to think of this, as humans especially, to commit such a heinous act. This reminds me of the part of lecture where we discussed the costs of reproduction, for males and females and how it is costlier for the females to reproduce and that is part of why males try to speed up the process. Your discussion of how humans (usually) tend to think about the consequences we have for our actions was also intriguing because, naturally, we do not exactly know what goes on in the minds of chimpanzees. Communicating (outside maybe teaching sign language) is very difficult between our two species and there is no sure-fire way to know how they feel in regard to violence. This, and your section on whether we are attributing emotions to chimpanzees that they may not actually even possess offered me a new way to view our understanding on the species and the way science (primarily, primatology) acts in regard to this topic.
I was also surprised to learn that apes commit infanticide. Logically it makes some sense due to males needing no time after mating to mate again. However, as mentioned in the lecture notes apes are k-selected species so they invest significantly more time and resources to developing and taking care of their children. For a species like this I would think they would take extra precautions to protect their babies because of how costly it is to have one. It also makes me wonder about humans’ animal instincts and how similar they are to apes. Like you mentioned there are people who commit infanticide, but these are extreme outliers. It makes me think though if humans didn’t have a sense of morality how similar would we act to apes and what is the biggest separator when it comes to human and chimp behavior.
Hi Courtney. You bring up a really interesting topic to this discussion that I hadn’t given much thought to, when it comes to emotions. I think to a certain extent it’s safe to say that they probably don’t have as much emotion since our brains are more complex, however it has been proven that they do feel things to a certain degree. I think emotion also depends on the situation and need for survival. And who knows, maybe females feel more emotion than males, especially since they are the one who give birth. Males have a need to breed, and if they aren’t able, it’s natures way of making sure that they can. It’s brutal, but it is indeed nature. That doesn’t mean that some animals don’t feel anything at all.