Parlez-vous gorille?

A first lesson in gorilla here.

Back story here and here.


image from Beautiful Rwanda

Humbling, but also enhancing

Observing that other species can outperform us on tasks that we assume we excel at is a bit humbling. Rather than taking such findings as a rare example or a fluke, we should incorporate this knowledge into a mindset that acknowledges that chimpanzees, and probably other species, share aspects of what we think of as uniquely human intelligence.

-- Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University, Ames quoted in Chimps outperform students in a memory game.

Reading

Hidden colony of orang-utans is discovered in the forests of Borneo - to read alongside Bog Barons mentioned in previous post.

Also interesting: Fred Pearce's report that Stephen Pacala has shown that half of all the world's emissions of carbon dioxide came from just 500 million people, just over 7% of the world's population.

And since I'm on a reading list for today, add Paul Krugman on Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on The shadowy role of Labour Friends of Israel, The cruellest voyage by Nick Davies, and Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts.

Things can only get bitterer

All the surviving members of the twenty five most endangered primate species combined "would fit in a single football stadium" (BBC, IPS).

More widely, "there are no major issues raised in Our Common Future for which the foreseeable trends are favourable" (as quoted from GEO4).

Nasty, brutish and very long

In Conservation alone 'is not enough', Richard Leakey (about whom I have previously blogged here) makes a good case that the recent 'execution' of gorillas in eastern Kivu in the Democratic Republic Congo is "fundamentally a human tragedy, with very human solutions". He recommends a "focused global initiative to end the conflict, introduce alternative sources of household fuel, and create alternative livelihoods".

Certainly, Leakey cannot be accused of underestimating the scale of the challenge, noting that the gorillas live "at the epicentre of the bloodiest conflict since the Second World War". But what are the prospects for solving it?

Congo is a textbook example of a country caught in three of the four traps that impede development identified Paul Collier in The Bottom Billion: the 'conflict trap'; the 'natural resource trap'; and 'landlocked with bad neighbours' (the DRC is not literally landlocked, but its littoral is small and inaccessible from most of the country). And it half meets the criteria for Collier's fourth trap, having bad governance. Extreme violence and exploitation have characterised the country for much of the last 120 years, with growing consequences as the population grows.

In his latest commentary on Iraq, Planning for defeat (which is worth reading for several reasons), George Packer notes that Things Fall Apart, an influential examination of the history of civil wars around the world, concludes that "[civil wars] usually last a long time, spill over into other countries, and end only through the military victory of one side, or through massive external intervention."

Given that a military stalemate looks likely in Congo, a solution will probably require outside intervention -- vastly more than the 'international community' (the rich Western powers, at best hobbled by lack of domestic political will, and self-regarding in their tokenism) -- has shown to date. From where might the determination to get serious come, given the profitability of the status quo to vested interests and the few near term benefits for most external players with capacity to act of doing so (be it 'the West', some of the more developed African nations or other players such as the Chinese)? If Tony Blair had been serious about his Commission for Africa would he not be flying around the world on its behalf rather than the Middle East Quartet? Global public opinion? How long are we talking about?

Meanwhile, the prospects for gorillas look grim and they remain among the one in four mammals under threat. Still, surprising things can happen. There may be more bounce in a 'dead species walking' than the evidence sometimes seems to indicate, as this report about tigers India apparently suggests.

Hope or death

The birth of a gorilla in the 'wild' is celebrated. Are we looking at a hope for the future or a ghost from the past?

Apes, spite and sympathy

I was dubious about reports of research said to show that 'spite is a uniquely human emotion'. But I haven't really thought my doubts through. It looks as if Neil Fairweather articulates one quite well in a letter to New Scientist:

Chimpanzees are incapable of spite, it seems...but researchers are having difficulty reconciling this with the idea that chimps do exhibit altruism. I suggest a simple explanation: spite is not the "evil twin that cannot be separated" from altruism, as researcher Keith Jensen puts it. Altruism is the tendency to do things that benefit others, at your own expense. Its opposite is miserliness. Spite is the tendency to attempt to harm those who have benefited in your stead. Surely its opposite is the tendency to attempt to help those who have suffered while you have gained. Is this not sympathy? If chimps show sympathy towards individuals who have been deprived for their benefit, but not spite towards those who have benefited from their loss, then there might be some explaining to do.

[For textbook nastyness, see reports of mass "execution" of gorillas in Congo.]

Old man of the forests

It's a proposition I will defend: 'the future of humanity depends on how we value the rest of life and on our learning to be more humane. An important dimension will be whether we can protect our closest relatives, the great apes, in the habitats of which they are a part'.

There are few better advocates for this position than Richard Leakey, who spoke for GRASP, the Orangutan Foundation and Wildlife Direct and others at the RGS last night. His key points (including a sharp dig at eco-tourism) are well summarised in this article from David Adam. But one of the things I most enjoyed in his presentation was as a humorous aside regarding the origin of orangs.

The evidence suggested orangs migrated from East Africa all the way to South East Asia something like 12 to 8 million (?) years ago. Orangs do not walk on the ground (although as an aside see this) so that means, said Leakey, that there was once gallery forest all the way from Africa to Indonesia. The thought of orangs gradually crossing it keeps him 'endlessly amused', he said, as he sometimes lies awake late at night

It is indeed a very pleasant thought, though of course informed by pain given what we know of current rates of destruction, with hundreds (out about 50,000 remaining individuals said Leakey; I think I've read fewer than 30,000) burning to death every year.

And it is an imaginative thought, capable of informing humanity grounded in the reality of this world (as distinct from metaphysical musings), where -- for example -- wildlife rangers protecting mountain gorillas in the Congo have seen some 150 of their colleagues murdered by poachers and in some cases have not been paid in three or four years: a situation that Leakey described as 'really quite demoralising, you know'.

Above: young man of the forest