Orangutans plan their future route and communicate it to others
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
It's easy to fall in to the trap of worshipping the hyper-specificity of the western scientific rationalist tradition. However, just because something doesn't exist as a documented and 'peer-reviewed' (despite the recent revelations on how many scientific publications actually lack any significant integrity) piece of categorized research doesn't mean it isn't there, and in many cases important philosophical perspectives from alternative traditions of inquiry have been impressively validated by modern science.
Nature is pretty amazing, and experience is richer than we can ever render it with our petty scribbles.
(Something along these lines is perhaps what lies at the heart of many of the world's other, arguably more experientially grounded philosophies and religions, particularly various naturalistic traditions disparagingly grouped as 'Animism', Daoism, Islam and many of the philosophies of India - Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, etc.)
There is nothing controversial in what you are saying and most scientists are likely to agree that, at times, modern science does verify what has already been stated based on non-scientific grounds. But at least to me (and I think plenty of others) this is not a problem in the first place. Science is an approximation of the truth, our best current understanding of the world and we know that there are things that we simply don't know (heck, the world would be quite boring otherwise).
Science is instead about making small gradual improvements to that approximation and this is where my view on things clashes (I think) with yours. The idea that some philosophies/religions sometimes get close to our scientific understanding reminds me of a person that claimed to have dreams depicting future events. This person would make a crude drawing of what he saw, then march down to the local bank that had a clock with year, date and time and take a photo in-front of that clock. Later on, after for example 9/11, he would go back to these dreams and perhaps find something similar to this event. But this is the lure of post-hoc reasoning, what he initially had was a crude drawing and the meaning and connection to New York, Al-Qaeda, etc. came after the fact. To me, the connection that you describe works in a similar fashion. There is a lot of strange things that you get with your package of beliefs but I do think that any claim to being more in-line with modern science is mostly due to cherry-picking and cheer luck and that we are better of picking our philosophies/religion based on some fuzzy idea of "morals" rather than their relation to our current scientific understanding.
I don't envy these researchers, having to eliminate all the "stupid" ways to achieve something in order to figure out how much high-level planning animals do.
Edit: also, your mention that comments like this are "notably missing from this thread" makes little sense when there's currently only one other root comment against the post.
in other words, feminists aren't robots that detect syntactic patterns and automatically complain about them. rather, there's actual reasoning and experience behind the objections.
If this is true, then it involves truths that I am quite sure you would not want to hear about.
Our closest living relative is the chimpanzee. The average adult male chimp has sex an average of once per hour. The only difference between a mating display and a threat display is the erection. Females object an average of 1% of the time in which case it becomes clear that the similarity between mating displays and threat displays goes further than a superficial visual similarity. (Do keep in mind that any healthy adult chimp - of either gender - is stronger than any human weightlifter.) Rape in chimpanzees is neither uncommon nor frowned upon.
This behavior starts young. In fact while males are not grown enough to be unable to subdue adult females on their own, their mothers will assist them in subduing low ranking females of their choice. Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like.
There may indeed be low level social similarities between chimps and humans. But if so, they are not similarities that we would feel comfortable admitting to.
If the topic interests you, for further reading I would suggest Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan. Among other things it is the source of the facts that I just quoted for you. And as a final thought, one of strongest cross-primate similarities is a connection between sex and dominance. The phrase, "Fuck you!" has echoes far and wide among our relatives.
If it makes you feel better, wild female orangutan mothers are capable of teaching their children over 180 food sources during a nurturing period lasting over 10 years. Impressive stuff.
False, and wow. If they observed human males yelling in the direction of their travel, their voices amplified by massive cheeks that females lacked, why would they not make the same conclusions?
It's not sexist to reject the absurd premise that behavior is unaltered by testosterone and estrogen. It is sexist to exclude people because of their gender or shame people because their behavior doesn't fit their gender role. It's nowhere near sexist to write observations about animal's mating behaviors.
Next you'll be objecting to nature documentaries that focus on male rams fighting while the females wait patiently to mate with the winner.