Letters to the Editor

This letter is associated with the following article:
Read other letters about this article
God and gorillas
Anthropologist Barbara J. King explains what our distant cousins can tell us about religion and why it's OK for scientists to believe in God.
By Steve Paulson [2007-01-31]

  • Faults with ape research

    I admit that I'm not an expert in primatology, but from my limited, outsider POV, there seems to be two main pitfalls that researchers get into:

    1) Personifying their subjects. Projecting human emotions and intentions onto animal behavior when there is no direct evidence of such.

    2) Mistaking higher-level intelligence for Pavlovian behavior. I recently watched a documentary (can't remember the name) where a researcher was giving a gorilla a specific number of treats and teaching it to touch the corresponding number on a key pad. You might think that the gorilla was learning how to count. But the gorilla could see the researcher, and it may have been simply responding to the researcher's positive and negative expressions--directing it like a parent saying "hot or cold" directs a child to an Easter egg.

    Similarly, the gorilla in the article may have simply associated "bad" with a negative reaction from the humans, rather than making some profound conclusion about its own behavior.

    -- psamet
    [Read psamet's other letters]
    Tuesday, January 30, 2007 08:03 PM
Read other letters about this article

Letters Help