Chimpanzees Spontaneously Dance to Music
phys.org
phys.org
FTA:
"Many stereotypies can be induced by confinement; for example, cats pace in zoo cages.[11] Pregnant sows whose feed is restricted bite at their stalls' bars and chew without anything in their mouths.[12] In laboratory rats and mice, grooming is the most common activity other than sleep, and grooming stereotypies have been used to investigate several animal models of anxiety and depression.[13]
Examples of stereotypical behaviours include pacing, rocking, swimming in circles, excessive sleeping, self-mutilation (including feather picking and excessive grooming), and mouthing cage bars."
It’s baffling that any researcher was honestly thinking otherwise.
Some things aren't worth knowing, considering the suffering it would take to learn.
But dancing still seems to me to want a better explanation than just saying it's a fitness display, as that would seem to explain almost anything.
There's a lot of overlap, consider these factors that relate to dancing and hunting: timing aspect combined with shifting weight and body position, arm/leg coordination, underlying percussion track 60-140 bpm (the range of a heart beat), percussion generally broken down into 4 part segments corresponding with heart pumping.
So it seems like to be good at dancing (or long distance hunting) you have a good sense of timing over a long period, are aware of your heart beat, and most importantly no debilitating ankle, hip, knee, or foot injuries.
That should make a clear case for how dancing could have evolved culturally as a metric for hunting ability rather than genetically.
The issue I'd still raise is why we dance in time, several people organised with music, when dancing solo would seem plenty for such a display? That's what lots of animals do. But none of them synchronise it.
So, we have 7 chimps that responded to an unusual sound (we really don't want to call that danceable music) from a source unknown to them in 7 different ways, and we have n researchers that were set out to interpret that as dance? And these researchers can make a living out of that and get published?
p.s. I skimmed through the original article. It looks like science and this might even be a standard approach in this field (I don't know) but ... I cannot describe what I think of it.
The instances in which this type of tomfoolery becomes truly malignant are the ones in which it’s less obvious. I.e researchers have hidden or hashed the original data and then published something that we can’t unscramble.
I’m literally expecting to hear “everybody dance now” and end up hearing that charade instead. Lol.
My mother once lamented "How can they call that science? That isn't a valid way to test that statement." And I reminded her, publishing a paper isn't "science", forming a hypothesis and a set of experiments to prove or disprove that hypothesis, and then having others test your hypothesis in different ways and getting the same result. THAT is the scientific process. And after that happens you know something new and you can demonstrate it on demand, each time, every time, because you know what is going on.
One of them. I don't see anything wrong with it. Science works that way: you start with informal observation, if you see something curious enough, you move to formalizing observation. You search for operational definition of "dancing". After that you could watch a little more and to test your definition and to find other variables you need to control in an experiment. And only then you probably can stage an experiment, controlling everything that needs to be controlled, using "blind" observers having instructions on what to observe and how to measure, but not knowing goals of observation.
It is very important to know how to watch Nature, how to see something new and do not miss it. Your proposed idea "to avoid known words and to describe in terms of observed behavior" wouldn't work for this task. You would drown in describing words and you drown your readers. And probably no one would see few important observations in a heap of unimportant.
The funny thing -- scientists do not what dance is. Even in people we do not know what dance is. How we could call something "the dance" if we do not know what dance is? Should we believe a person when she says she was dancing? Or maybe we should believe our perception which has its ways to distinguish dance from not dance? I think, that it is the case when an informal perception based approach is the best. Just because we have no satisfying formal definition of a dance.
- They discuss an effect size related to gender based on the observation of n=7 chimpanzees. Unfortunately, the software didn't stop them from calculate t-tests etc. but this is simply ridiculous. At this point, we simply ignore the fact that the chimpanzees "participate in experiments on a voluntary basis". Self-selection bias is unheard of.
- Other statements are based on the observation of n=1 chimpanzee. Again, unfortunately the software didn't stop them from calculating an anova. At best, this is a case study. Don't get me wrong, case studies can be very useful and informative. I'm a big fan of good case studies. But you shouldn't disguise it as something else.
If you don't have data suitable for statistical analysis, forget about it. Do something else. Don't pretend you're a physicist.
BTW I don't question that animals respond to music. Why not. But just repeating piano samples doesn't make sound music -- not even techno. Don't ask animals to dance to sound no human would dance to.
I remember coming home from a noise concert with a friend one day, and going down in to the subway, where there was a construction worker hammering away with a jackhammer. My friend and I found ourselves really enjoying it, and appreciatively nodded our heads to the beat.
Lots of experimental and avant garde music is also frequently described as "noise" to people who aren't fans of it. Back at the dawn of the rock-and-roll genre and of jazz, people to whom these were new types of music also frequently characterized them as "just noise". I've heard the "that's not music" accusation being thrown at heavy metal and dissonant traditional Japanese music.
That's not to say that chimpanzees must be fans of what was played to them, but the realm of music is much wider than most people that listen only to mainstream music appreciate.
But, maybe that's not a sign of stress in chimps.
Yet, we are unable to train mice, birds or primates to tap out the beat to a song!
My theory is that all animals have extensive defense mechanisms to prevent motor entrainment to external stimuli, since that would make one very vulnerable. Therefore, they only exhibit entrainment during ritualized mating, etc.
Humans have evolved to let down our defenses, on occasion, to support social entrainment. Yet, it is still really hard to dance or appreciate music when we are uncomfortable or stressed.
One test of this theory would involve giving animals drugs like mdma to see if it helps them loosen up and appreciate the beat. It works with people, after all. But I suppose proposals like that would be taboo science. Or, perhaps it would be unethical to give chimps mdma?
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-016-1013-x
Wow, seems very reasonable! It made mi think about it in a bit different way: as other animals are thought as "following instinct" and "closer to nature" maybe this inhibition systems are way more advanced in humans than in other animals. It would make explaining dance harder, but would fit great to big literary topos "men vs nature".
Is it completely your theory or was it inspired by something that you could recommend?
Possibly. I can't find the write-up of this, but there's a nice idea that this may have another purpose: Dancing as a group might be a way to fool savannah predators that your tribe is one large animal, not individual hairless tasty meals.
Sitting with a fully-grown chimp on your lap with her face inches from yours while she grooms your beard is a very, very special experience. It's impossible to spent more than 10 minutes with them and not clearly see they are us and we are them. Their facial expressions, they happiness, their playfulness, their grief. Everything about them is like looking in a mirror, or watching a ~5 year old child play.
Absolutely amazing.
I have no doubt they would dance to music, and do a lot more things that show intelligence and higher thinking.
Whether they are us is a more complicated question. What are their language and reasoning abilities? Apparently no animals ask questions, even after being “asked”. Seems that questioning and reasoning is what makes us human (sapient).
I’m pointing this out because most people would say that it’s the emotions and feelings that distinguish us. That’s not the case.
I might misunderstood your statement here, but e.g. dogs can understand a lot of things people say, not just purely pre-learned "commands" but the context of what is going on. They also ask (simple) questions all the time, but they use their body language for that. Most of the time it's some form of "what's going on", but pretty much every dog lover knows the specific "are you taking me with you" pose & look when you dress up to go out, and they're unsure if you'll take them too. Now, obviously it's nothing nearly as complex as "Why do we exists" which are uniquely human type of questions to ask, but IMHO very comparable to the level of my kid when he was 1-2 years old.
I see no reason to doubt it. The question boils down to whether animals have a sense of self and experience a ‘first person’ view of the world. Experimental evidence suggests that several species, including primates do have a sense of self and there’s so evidence they also have a theory of mind [0].
It has been argued that a first person experience of the world is not required for advanced reasoning, language, etc in discussions of AI. That may be the case. In which case our first person experience may be independent of and pre-date our advanced reasoning skills. Even if it is required for reasoning ability that’s also consistent with us having it first. I just don’t see any reason to see them as necessary for each other either way.
Finally, if the experience of the world and the basis of our responses to stimulus did undergo such a dramatic shift at some point, that seems like an extremely dangerous transition. An awful lot could go wrong with that, and in fact everything about such a shift would have to go extraordinarily well or the result would be catastrophic failure. All evolutionary transitions have to progress through stages that are each viable at every step. Huge leaps don’t happen, because the odds of success are impossibly low. It seems more likely to me that our emotional responses are similar to closely related species, because the neurological basis for them, and mental experience of them are also similar. Otherwise we need to figure out why a radically different mental experience evolved, and why, and how come it leads to no appreciable difference in emotional behaviour.
[0] https://www.discoverwildlife.com/news/theory-of-mind-demonst...
I'm going to check out your book. as the hardcore road trip thing is something I was really close to doing at one point in my life. Although in terms of pure perspective I'd probably take less of a 'chimps are just like us' view of it, which is just my more skeptical scientific but also cynical nature - but also because I've found this is a common tendency in humans to find such patterns which don't really fit as cleanly as they seem (upon closer analysis).
But I haven't played with chimps in person so I should probably not talk without experiencing it.
Then after that I worked again as a developer for 4 years to save up for the Africa trip.
I'm toying with the idea of going back to a desk job now to pay for the next adventure that is in the planning stages.
I'm usually a skeptical scientist on most topics. Playing with a chimp face to face is a different thing.
I want to do a US road trip with the wifey at some point, mostly down east coast from where I live in Toronto down to Texas. With a lot of stops in the north east because I’m a history nerd and really into early US founding history and there’s lots of small towns with history on the coastal areas.
I spent a lot of time exploring the US this summer and had a great time!
You see the similarities even more clearly in bonobos.
I would have loved to visit them, but on this particular trip around Africa I wasn't geared up to drive into the heart of the DRC, which as I understand is the only place on earth they live in the wild.
One day I'll go back and drive right across it.
If I were to make this claim, I'd show a chimpanzee at rest in the video, without any music, then start the music. And actual music, not this loud machinery that would make me sway left and right due to stress.
Edit: not saying that chimps don't dance. Just that this is a very unusual setting.
And in another light, how valuable is this kind of research where an extremely intelligent animal is out in solitary confinement and is given tests? There is so much information lost in the process due to interpretation and external factors. Let alone the hilariously low N size.
Also horses, elephants and a large swath or other animals have been shown to appreciate music. I don't even get why this party got funded to study an even higher echelon animal of which it is very reasonable to assume it is able to dance.
But I have to say the article description:
> He was subjected to periods of piano music with a repetitive bass note for 24 days.
combined with the choice of music in the videos is just asking for the internet outrage machine to react.
I wouldn't be surprised if they used the same tracks in Guantanamo...
Sure, I am curious about animals and music, but this just seems to misrepresent both.
Someone please explan how I am wrong and overreacting, since that is usually my rally cry in comments.
Also, your argument assumes a lot of things: 1.) animal experimentation is being disrupted, 2.) playing music for chimps is clearly detrimental to them, and 3.) the resources that went into this study (these particular chimps, these researchers, and their funding) could have gone into some specific but unidentified better study which did have an pre-observable value. If all of those things are true, which has definitely not been established, than I would grant that science is likely not being conducted in a way that is maximally efficient, but unless there's some hugely valuable experiment that is being overlooked for this, I don't see why you're disturbed.
What if dancing helps improve the lives of animals held for scientific experimentation?