It's interesting to me just how alienated from male chimps that she never mated with any of them. My impression was that female chimps are much less selective or resistant to sex.
While it seems patently obvious to us now, in the 21st century, that raising a chimpanzee apart from other chimpanzees is a bad idea, I don't think it was as obvious in the 1970's as the article makes out. Lucy had already been separated from her mother at a young age before the researchers ever met her, so it's not like a "natural" situation was even possible at that point. Now we have people who know what is possible and what is not, in regards to chimpanzee rehabilitation, but I think it was not so clear at the time.
This project, and others like it, strike me as an extraordinary waste of time.
Think of how remarkable it would be if Chimpanzees in captivity began to speak. This would mean chimpanzees have the language capacity but, in every observed chimp, it simply never occurred to them to use it?
It’s about as likely as finding a flightless bird somewhere and teaching it to fly.
Who believes that? It beggars belief that there would be evolutionary pressure to develop the machinery for speech if intermediate steps were not being put to progressively better uses.
This depends on your definition of speech I guess. Many animals have vocal capabilities to create complex enough sounds that they could conceivably construct perceptible human phonetics (not least parrots), but they don't do so naturally in the wild. They do however all communicate with each other in some form, much of it vocal; does that constitute "speech"?
Great piece, but I was struck with a thought about the researcher’s name.
Maurice Temerlin - that last name is so close to “Tamerlane”, the mongol ruler that I wonder if there’s any correlation at all or would it just be a coincidence that the names seem similar?
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] threadhttps://www.thisamericanlife.org/401/transcript
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91706-lucy
It's interesting to me just how alienated from male chimps that she never mated with any of them. My impression was that female chimps are much less selective or resistant to sex.
You must have read a very different article from the one I just read or skipped at least half of the second to last paragraph.
Or... this was just some unobvious sarcasm with questionable purpose.
Can't blame her
Think of how remarkable it would be if Chimpanzees in captivity began to speak. This would mean chimpanzees have the language capacity but, in every observed chimp, it simply never occurred to them to use it?
It’s about as likely as finding a flightless bird somewhere and teaching it to fly.
Maurice Temerlin - that last name is so close to “Tamerlane”, the mongol ruler that I wonder if there’s any correlation at all or would it just be a coincidence that the names seem similar?