Primatology.net

I can’t believe it was in January when I shared the book on the evolution of religion by Barbara King. Time flies, and I’ll be another quarter closer to my Master’s.

Since then, Barbara King was invited by Marshal Zeringue ‘to speculate on what her new book might turn out like, as a movie,’ from Marshal’s blog:

“Were I feeling starstruck, Kanzi would be the obvious choice for the ape chapter’s lead actor. Here’s a bonobo with class, style, and linguistic skills. In his life with other apes and with humans, Kanzi has shown empathy and imagination in specific ways documented by scientists. These are key behaviors related to belongingness, the emotional mattering to others at the heart of my book Evolving God. Belongingness has deep evolutionary roots — and helps to explain, I believe, the origins of religious behavior in humans.

I think I’d cast, right alongside Kanzi the celebrity, a more “typical” ape or ape family. A theme of the book is that chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas express belongingness in fascinating ways under many conditions (both in captivity and the wild). What camera wouldn’t love the gorillas my students and I have studied for six years at the National Zoo in Washington DC, or the chimpanzees of a community studied by primatologists in Tanzania or the Ivory Coast?

For the human-evolution chapters, the same principle would be at work. Our australopithecine ancestors and our cousins the Neandertals would be portrayed not just as dramatic bipedal striders (in the former case) or spear-wielding cave-bear hunters (in the latter), but also as proto-people who felt deep attachments to their family members and social partners. Over time, as in a dynamic feedback relationship their child-rearing, nurturing tendencies became more complex and their brains expanded and changed, these prehistoric hominids began to wonder about life’s mysteries (and death’s mysteries too). The circle of belongingness gradually expanded. In Neandertals and early Homo sapiens, it almost certainly included the otherworldly and the sacred, expressed through incipient spiritual practices such as burial rituals and (in our species) art ceremonies.

Photogenic, empathetic apes … artistic prehistoric cavedwellers … take note, PBS documentary-makers, ‘Evolving God the Movie’ could become a reality after all!”

I like this kinda insight into the authors mind. It provides us with a more tangible idea of what the author was thinking and helps us by conveying the key points. I wish more authors would engage in these forms of discussion with their communities… I know some are busy but its helpful to engage people, help them understand what your message is… and sometimes it does that plus put a smile on one’s face. Can’t beat that!

National Geographic has a short story and video of a newly-discovered population of bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The large group may contain as many as 3,000 members, a welcome find for this dwindling population.

The science blogosphere has been buzzing about new published research that has focused studying the origins of a sexually transmitted disease, crabs which also known as pubic lice.

Before I talk about this paper I wanna thank Carl Zimmer, who opened up a public discussion with a question of the day: How Do You Get Crabs From A Gorilla? And that has been followed up with John Wilkins and Reed A. Cartwright throwing in some commentary. But that’s not it, some of the major news agencies like EurekAlert, Discovery Channel, and ScienceNOW Daily News have articles about this paper too.

The open access paper is titled, “Pair of lice lost or parasites regained: the evolutionary history of anthropoid primate lice,” and follows a simple premise, one that I’ve discussed about before. The authors basically take the concepts of genetic drift and integrate it into a study that reconstructs the evolutionary history of primate lice. They take this reconstruction and,

“infer the historical events that explain the current distribution of these lice on their primate hosts.”

Lice are a parasite that are limited in mobility. They do not have wings nor really effective bodies to move about. Their small legs are fit to latch onto a host and basically just stay put. Ultimately, the host becomes a village to these lice and a group of hosts become an island. Lice, therefore, begin to share the same evolutionary history as their hosts. For example, if a population of hosts splits into two and each of the isolated populations begins to evolve into separate species, then the parasites evolve too.

Two common types of lice are found on humans, head and pubic lice. Entomologists, or bug scientists, classified human head lice and human pubic lice in two separate genera because they are awfully different. Human head lice resemble chimpanzee head lice but human public lice resemble that of their gorilla counterpart.

This discontinuity between the two types of lice was curious to the authors of this paper. One would expect both types of lice to be more similar to chimpanzees since they are the closest evolutionary ancestor to us. So the authors of this paper, as Carl says it,

“set out to recover the evolutionary tree of pubic lice, just as they had done with head lice. They analyzed DNA from human head lice, human pubic lice, as well as other species from the same genera that live on chimpanzees and gorillas. They also analyzed DNA from lice that live on monkeys and on rodents so that they could get a better sense of how pubic lice had evolved from a common ancestor with other species. The scientists not only drew branches for each species, but also estimated when those branches split over the course of history.

Their conclusion… We did not get pubic lice from other hominids. We got them from the ancestors of gorillas.”

…Which is even more mind-boggling, this means gorillas and some hominid did the nasty. It seems that the authors took their curiosity and opened a Pandora’s box of disgusting-ness, but it shouldn’t be all too surprising.

Actually, in the last hundred years ago or so, humans transmitted what is now HIV from our chimpanzee counterparts, probably from some sort of sexual contact or blood exchange… And why that even happens in modern days opens a whole new discussion on gene flow and species concepts one that Wilkins addresses,

“Cross-species sex is a widespread phenomenon in vertebrate biology. We have been misled by our “intuitions”, based on the one hand on an over-strict application of reproductive isolation concepts of sex, and on the other of projection of moral standards.

Alan Templeton’s classic paper on species concepts has a section entitled “Too much sex”. It’s worth reading just for that.

Templeton, Alan R. 1989. The meaning of species and speciation: A genetic perspective. In Speciation and its consequences, edited by D. Otte and J. Endler. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.”

If you are as easily amused as I am, then you should get a good chuckle out of watching this video of Vervet monkeys crashing some bars in St. Kitts. I feel kinda guilty laughing at the drunk monkeys.

If you also feel a bit guilty about this video, you can balance out your karma by reading what I had to say about a new paper on human evolution featuring a chimpanzee-human comparison of polymorphisms and other fun genome features over at Anthropology.net.

Since we’re kinda on this whole primate cognition and primatology conference kick, especially with  two recent posts about those subjects, I wanted to share with you what seems will be an awesome conference on chimpanzee cognition.

The conference is called ‘The Mind of the Chimpanzee‘ and is hosted by the Lincoln Zoo. It will start in about two weeks time, on March 22nd 2007, and last for several days.

From what I can tell this conference has been hush-hush but its packing big names in the primatology field. Some of the guest speakers that you may recognize are Drs. Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal, Crickette Sanz, Duane Rumbaugh, Katie Slocombe, Michael Tomasello, and I could go on and on. Not only do they have an outstanding lineup of guest speakers but I’m extremely partial to this subject matter.

So the whole purpose of me posting this, aside from spreading the news about this already exclusive conference, is that if there are any readers out there who are attending please share with us your thoughts after you attend. If you have an pictures or videos please put them up.

I really want to know more about what was discussed, but unfortunately even if there wasn’t a massive waitlist to attend, I’ll be neck deep in finals week then and can’t attend. Sucks how things work out that way. I hope the press picks up some pieces about this conference.

Last year, Nick Matzke of the ever informative evolutionary biology blog “The Panda’s Thumb” posted a neat little graph where he made a comparison of hominin brain sizes in relation to body sizes.

His post, “Fun with hominin brain size as a percentage of body mass” touches on one of my favorite topics in primatology, the evolution of primate brain evolution. One of the general characteristics that make primates unique are the larger brain sizes compared to body sizes in relation to other organism. His graph is limited in that it shows only the comparison of brain to body sizes of a tribe, within the family Hominidae, under a much larger taxonomic organization, the order Primates. This image (to your right) from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. is a much illustrative but only depicts brain size evolution as a function of time.

This leads me to open a discussion on a fairly recent publication Evolutionary Anthropology, where Robert A. Barton, Director of the Evolutionary Anthropology Research Group at the University of Durham, U.K. addresses a much larger question,

“How did such variation evolve and why, and what are its cognitive implications?”

Robert Barton uses phylogenetic comparative methods to study the evolution of primate brains and behavior. His recent work has examined the evolution of neocortex size, the role of visual specialization in brain evolution, and ecological correlates of neural system evolution.

In the paper that I am talking about,”Primate brain evolution: Integrating comparative, neurophysiological, and ethological data,” Barton argues that people must be careful in using,

“comparative methods and in finding multiple converging strands of comparative evidence as opposed to making speculative interpretations of single correlations. In particular, recent work demonstrates the value of examining how evolutionary changes at different anatomical levels interrelate.”

What is of interest to primatologists out there, is that Barton tackles the adaptive significance of brain size in primates. He addresses a prominant assumption most people make about primates, that they are (and I’ve bolded what I consider important conclusions),

“distinguished from most other mammals by superior cognitive abilities. Large relative brain size is the most obvious justification for this view. Why did large brains evolve and what is it that they enable primates to do?

One way to tackle these questions is to examine which brain systems, with what functional properties, are associated with increased brain size. As noted, the neocortex is disproportionately expanded in primates compared with at least some other mammals, and anthropoid primates have larger neocortices than do lemurs and lorises. The fact that within primates variation in neocortex size relative to the rest of the brain is highly correlated with encephalization emphasizes the role of “neocorticalization” in primate brain expansion.

Relative expansion of the neocortex, however, reveals comparatively little about which functional systems are involved, and hence what is the adaptive significance of overall brain size. As described, the functional systems of the brain cut across the major subdivisions. No known cognitive process is mediated exclusively by the neocortex. Complex cognitive processes are mediated by networks that link the neocortex with many other structures. Furthermore, the neocortex is a highly heterogenous organ, processing information from all the senses and being involved in many different aspects of sensory, motor, and cognitive processing. Hence, the neocortex is necessary for many cognitive functions but sufficient for none. It is therefore misleading to view the neocortex as the “cognitive” part of the brain. As with overall brain size, we still need to identify the specific systems in which selective expansion accounts for the increase in overall neocortex size and hence, in brain size. “

Barton goes on to show how other fields have made premature conclusions. Since we know so little about the function of the brain, he wraps up his paper with an argument that we need a greater understanding of brain evolution, one which

“depends on studying and interrelating evolutionary change at a variety of levels, from microscopic to macroscopic anatomy and from neural systems to behavioral ecology. While it has been fashionable in some circles to denigrate brain size as a crude measure of cognitive abilities, to an evolutionary biologist the manifest variation in brain size is intrinsically interesting and demanding of an explanation. Yet, in order to explain variation in brain size we need to understand which systems, with what functional properties, contribute to it, and what constraints act on it. Conversely, cognitive neuroscience may learn valuable lessons from phylogenetic comparative studies.”

I completely side with this advice Barton has given, however I don’t know how that will stop or prevent people from making conclusions in general. Many evolutionary biologists like Lewontin, Gould, etc. have argued (in the 70′s!) that we should not make ‘adaptionist’ stories to justify why we see certain adaptations… but it is still prevalent to this day.

Also, let me personally interject on Barton’s advice by adding that in order to understand primate brain evolution we also need to decipher a larger understanding of comparative and functional genomics between primates. We need to understand what genes are facilitating the development of primate brains, and how they have changed throughout evolutionary time.

If you’ve been following Paulin Ngobobo’s (senior warden with the Congolese wildlife authorities) blog Gorilla Protection, you’ve already seen this great pictures… but I can’t help but spread the good news. A newborn mountain gorilla was born on February 17th, 2007 in the Mikeno sector in the Congo.

Here are the great pictures and info from Paulin’s website:

“The newborn has been named Ndeze (pronounced Deze), after a local tribal chief who died just two days before the birth. These photos were taken when Ndeze was just 4 days old.”

“Mother and baby are doing well, and are being protected by the Silverback Rugendo. The mother, Safari (which means Travel in Swahili), is closely guarded by Rugendo so we were very lucky to be able to take these photos and cause no disturbance whatsoever.”

“Here you can see Safari, Ndeze and Rugendo… he stays close at all times.”

“More great news on the horizon… the adult female Mburanumwe of the same family is also pregnant and due to give birth soon!”

Julia Hoy, from University of Queenlands’s School of Animal Studies, has been organizing a conference for the 25th annual meeting of the Australasian Primate Society this March. It will be starting next week on Friday March 9th and going on to the 11th.

Before I jump into the details of the conference, I passed the University of Queenland’s press release about this to Betsy today and she mentioned she has meet Julia at another conference two years ago! What a small world primatology operates in, no? Maybe some of other readers have met Julia before. If you need a photo to refresh your memory, here’s one of her and some squirrel monkeys:

Anyways back to the interesting stuff. Julia has managed to get Jon Coe, a ‘renowned international zoo designer,’ as one of the keynote speaker. He will be discussing a very creative and proactive form of animal care where,

“primate facilities [will give] animals more choice, independence and creativity through individualized care.”

What he means by this is effectively giving primates the freedom to manage their own lives, as they do in the wild. This is an intriguing concept, one that I side with completely. In this manner, humans are not imposing complete constraints of captivity upon the animals.

I also believe this concept is an interesting progression in the changes we have been seeing in zoos. Zoos have been breaking down their cages and creating habitats that better match the natural ecosystems the wild counterparts live in. With this step they also break down the psychological ‘cages’ upon which a human caregiver/zoo keeper exhibits a form of dominance over the animal. Jon sees it similarly. He,

“believe[s] this will lead to more confident, self-assured and motivated animals, which will not only reduce stress and improve animal well-being, but will create more active, interesting and informative displays.”

If you wanna see Jon Coe speak and you’re in Queenland, Jon’s free public lecture on Friday, March 9 from 6.30pm-7.30pm in the Lecture Theatre S304, Social Sciences Building (no. 24) at UQ St Lucia. And yet that’s just one of the topics that will be discussed. Other conference topics included animal health to self-recognition, diet, behavior and reasoning. Some of the other speakers will be:

• UQ psychology researchers Professor Thomas Suddendorf, Dr Emma Collier-Baker, Dr Mark Nielsen and PhD student Andrew Hill
• UQ School of Animal Studies students Amanda Fernie, Kris Descovich and Sunny Sanderson from UQ’s School of Integrative Biology.

For more conference information visit: http://www.primates.on.net/apsconf.htm