Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to The fundies loved it.

"The Naked Ape"
Robert — (archived)

As often happens, about a minute after I posted my rusty brain disgorged the connection. Laurie's correct, below, in mentioning my interest in primatology, though I haven't read "The Naked Ape", probably because it was published before I got interested. A really good recent work is Jared Diamond's "The Third Chimpanzee", in the same vein.

I'm fascinated by primatology because it provides so many insights into the deep, hardwired, psychology of humans. I'm hard pressed to find any aspect of modern humanity that can't be traced back to some primate behavior, though many human behaviors have become so elaborated and extended that it's sometimes hard to see the connection right away.

Just between you and me, I view the HabitableZone as an ongoing primatology lab. The medium filters behavior down to its essentials and represents it in a common format--words--that's very amenable to analysis. If you see an occasional reference to "feces-flinging" to describe a particularly nasty exchange, that's a shorthand reference to "howler monkeys shrieking, pounding their chests, and flinging feces". Yes indeed, you can find archetypical primate behavior at the HabitableZone, everywhere you look.

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