Academic literature on the topic 'Chimpanzees, fiction'

People empathize with fictional displays of behaviour, including those of cartoons and computer animations, even though the stimuli are obviously artificial. However, the extent to which other animals also may respond empathetically to animations has yet to be determined. Animations provide a potentially useful tool for exploring non-human behaviour, cognition and empathy because computer-generated stimuli offer complete control over variables and the ability to program stimuli that could not be captured on video. Establishing computer animations as a viable tool requires that non-human subjects identify with and respond to animations in a way similar to the way they do to images of actual conspecifics. Contagious yawning has been linked to empathy and poses a good test of involuntary identification and motor mimicry. We presented 24 chimpanzees with three-dimensional computer-animated chimpanzees yawning or displaying control mouth movements. The apes yawned significantly more in response to the yawn animations than to the controls, implying identification with the animations. These results support the phenomenon of contagious yawning in chimpanzees and suggest an empathic response to animations. Understanding how chimpanzees connect with animations, to both empathize and imitate, may help us to understand how humans do the same.

During the 1920s, French surgeon Serge Voronoff became an international sensation for his technique of grafting chimpanzee testicular matter into human testicles. Félicien Champsaur’s 1929 popular speculative fiction novel, Nora, la guenon devenue femme (Nora, the Ape-Woman), imagines the possibilities of human-ape ontological and erotic proximity suggested by Voronoff’s practice of gland xenotransplantation, or transspecies transplantation. This article puts Nora and the early twentiethcentury science of ductless glands (ovaries, testicles, thyroid, thalamus, etc.) into conversation with trans* new materialist science studies around their shared investment in plasticity. In so doing, it contributes to the burgeoning inquiry into transsex, tranimal, and transspecies plasticity— which the author terms, jointly, trans* plasticity—while interrogating the affirmative and even utopian valance of such inquiry. Trans* plasticity describes the capacity of organic matter to transform itself in ways that transgress ontological divides among sex, race, and species. Building on Eva Hayward and Che Gossett’s claim that “the Human/Animal divide is a racial and colonial divide,” this article zeroes in on the historical process by which race and animality were produced in relation to each other. Ultimately, the author argues that gland xenotransplantation was a use of trans* plasticity that generated rather than troubled the ontobiological concepts of sexual, racial, and species difference.

This paper explores the implications of storytelling as an essential complimentary concept to collective learning for labeling human emergence within the Big History thresholds framework. It proposes that the distinctively human cognitive capability for communicating explanatory descriptive narration (i.e., storytelling) was a foundational adaptive behavior and central driving force that launched humans into a unique evolutionary pathway as collective learners whose increasing knowledge has transformed the world. Storytelling provides a theorem for why human language skills and brain capacity increased so dramatically since our common ancestor with chimpanzees, and how our storytelling brain models our world through narratives that undergird human belief systems and facilitate complex social coordination. The paper outlines the symbiotic role that storytelling played in turning the cultural “ratchet” of collective learning throughout prehistoric times and its corresponding influence on prehistorical milestones. It goes on to explore the benefits of teaching storytelling as a complement to Big History threshold (6) collective learning and concludes with a look at the vulnerability of the human storytelling brain regarding its ability to unite or divide people through the power of narratives, whether they are factual or fictional. The paper invites the Big History community to consider embracing the emerging transdiscipline of storytelling within the Big History tent as synergistic complement to collective learning, that pulls together many Big History threads and which can help improve the effectiveness of telling Big History as a common human origin story for navigating the precarious prospects of the Anthropocene.

Bustos, Eduardo and Lucho Rodríguez. Going Ape! Toronto: Tundra Books, 2012. Print.There are many playful stories about monkeys available for young children, so it’s an asset to have this non-fiction picture book for the same age group where the primates are depicted as they are in nature rather than as characters in a narrative. This is an English translation of a Spanish book originally published in 2004.In two to three sentences, author Eduardo Bustos highlights a couple of unique points of interest for each of ten ape species. While jumping so quickly from one ape to another makes the text seem a little disjointed, the short length is appropriate for young readers. I appreciated that the work includes not just the commonly known apes like chimpanzees and gorillas, but also lesser known species like the Allen’s Swamp Monkey that has webbed feet! The text on the last page breaks from the format used previously; the full page highlights the variation that can be witnessed among the many ape species in the world in terms of size, coloring, and diet. Since the style already diverges significantly and seems aimed at a slightly older age group, I was left wanting more elaboration. For instance, following the statement, “It is interesting to learn about their habits,” I would have liked further details.The illustrations are the best feature of the book. The stylized images capture the recognizable looks of the various species. Each is represented by a full-page illustration of the ape’s face, as well as a smaller image of the full ape in its natural habitat on the opposing page with the text. There are over 200 species of primates in the world. The title page depicts twelve different types of apes, so I was disappointed that descriptions of only ten were included. Overall, though, it provides a nicely illustrated introduction to the world of primates.Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Trish ChatterleyTrish is a Public Services Librarian for the John W. Scott Health Sciences Library at the University of Alberta. In her free time she enjoys dancing, gardening, and reading books of all types.

Abstract The large building is made up of a number of rooms, each divided into pens by concrete walls that rise to waist or shoulder height. When not wandering about on the stone floors, the pigs are generally eating and drinking from the food and water containers fixed along the walls. There are about 50 pigs altogether, and they look and sound like any other pigs with always a few grunting and squealing. But ifwe could look inside them, we would see something very strange, indeed: human proteins on the surface of the cells that line the blood vessels throughout their entire body, in all of their organs. These are “humanized” pigs-until recently a science fiction dream, but now firmly part of real-life science and medicine. The pig is considered by many surgeons as the most likely answer to the donor organ shortage-maybe not necessarily “humanized” pigs, although it is likely they will play a major role. Why the pig? Wouldn’t chimpanzees or baboons be preferable? After all, they are the closest relatives of man, much closer on the evolutionary tree than the pig, and, as we have seen, experimental data show that using organs from animals genetically more similar to us reduces the problem of rejection.

The idea that humans could be ‘self-domesticated’ is certainly rather strange and unlikely sounding, perhaps not entirely out of keeping with something we might expect to find in a science fiction novel. However, there is good evidence that changes in emotional tendencies and capacities in recent human evolution (after 300,000 years ago) followed some similar pathways to those seen in domesticated species. Furthermore, these changes are not necessarily limited to animals that have been deliberately domesticated by humans, with some of these developments also seen in bonobos, which, alongside chimpanzees, are our nearest living relatives. Though questions and debates remain about why and how these changes might have occurred, genetic and anatomical evidence, alongside changes in the archaeological record, support the notion that changes similar to domestication were occurring in humans. The concept that the evolution of human emotional tendencies and capacities may have followed similar changes in increasing tolerance seen in domestic animals is a challenging one. Rather than elevating modern humans above other animals, it would imply that some of the most crucial adaptations in our recent evolutionary past are shared with many other species. Moreover, with many traits changing under simple and single selection pressures, it contradicts any notion that human capacities are necessarily ‘adaptive’. Many of our social traits may simply be emerging alongside key changes but have no adaptive role, or even be a disadvantage. There are also added complexities. Increasing tolerance associated with self-domestication has largely been viewed as an entirely progressive development in the recent human past, opening up possibilities for more tolerant and connected communities to emerge and, in turn, enabling communities to become more resilient to resource shortfalls. However, there are costs and disadvantages to these changes in emotions, particularly at the individual level, which are rarely considered. Heightened sensitivities to social and cultural context, and hypersociability, bring increased vulnerabilities to disrupted emotional well-being in unsupportive contexts, as well as the types of challenges we associate with a certain eagerness to please. The emotional challenges that self-domestication brought may have been part of processes leading to compensatory mechanisms, such as attachment fluidity and tendencies to be driven to find additional emotional support and comfort outside of human relationships (discussed in Chapters 6 and 7).