Posted: Oct 22, 2019 4:58 am
Jayjay4547 wrote:
Why can’t you keep a civil tongue in your mouth Felltoearth? And what are these monkeys doing on a beach? Revelling in a new environment, thanks to the creative step in culture building by their ancestor Imo? Not really. They are there because that’s where people have been feeding them. In terms of environment they might as well be in a parking lot.
I was economically demolishing your argument that creativity can happen on a small island, evidenced by the “culture” evolved by monkeys on the tiny Japanese island of Koshima. See Hirata and others (2001).
If you had actually set out to cite a self-demolishing example, you couldn’t have done better than Koshima because every single actor in the story came from a big place elsewhere. The scientists who fed the monkeys were created in Africa, the sweet potatoes they fed them came from the Americas, the monkeys themselves came from Eurasia or Africa. And the “environment” you claimed as pioneered by the monkey Imo was a strip of beach where the scientists fed the monkeys. Next time I see monkeys going through rubbish bins in a parking lot, I’ll remember your example.
There is an interesting story to be told here, but it’s about the sociology of science; the ability of a bunch of people to persuade each other that they are onto something, if there is a living to be made out of it. It involved calling what they were doing “provisioning” the monkeys instead of “feeding” them: something we all know is a really bad idea.