Animals, Society

Monkey Shows Man How To Crush Leaves

170px-Tokyo_monkey_statue There is something fascinating about this video where a monkey seems to be teaching a human (or at least uses a human) to crush leaves. The man should watch closely. We previously saw how monkeys have a much more efficient way to peel bananas.


The monkey could be playing or using the human for the task. Either way, it is rather riveting.

There is growing evidence of various species using tools – a task once thought to distinguish humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.

91 thoughts on “Monkey Shows Man How To Crush Leaves”

  1. Tony C. 1, December 6, 2013 at 2:37 pm

    Dredd: A Turning machine?

    Sounds like a new AI project for me. “Hello, I am your lathe. Shall we turn something today?”
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    Tony C wins by a typo.

    Another avoidance.

    Pity those who refuse to understand because of their insecurity.

  2. Dredd: A Turning machine?

    Sounds like a new AI project for me. “Hello, I am your lathe. Shall we turn something today?”

  3. Dredd says: Your word “understanding” is nowhere in my text or his.

    Look at your post of 7:01 pm; the fourth to last paragraph:

    Communication, as with the monkey->man, man->monkey, shows cognition.

    As Turing said that it “is absurd” to answer questions about cognition as if humanity was the only species to look for in determining whether machines (or anything else) can “think.”

    My response was to explain to you that communication, that does appear in your post as an implication of “cognition,” requires understanding which is a function of some advanced cognition, which in turn requires neurons.

    Earlier in that post you say: “that evolution apparently views this lifestyle quite favorably.” Why wouldn’t such cognition be favorable to evolution?

    By which you are purposely implying that “mutualism” is some form of cognition, which it is NOT. Mutualism arises from mindless evolutionary processes as a more survivable lifestyle than predatory parasitism. I happen to know some of it can arise from adaptations to secretions. It does not arise from communications and is not a form of cognition.

  4. My only use of understanding applied to “our understanding”, which is as far as I can tell, a reference to humans, not anything else.

    Unless you are a Turning machine that is.

  5. Tony C. 1, December 6, 2013 at 8:34 am

    Dredd: Communication implies understanding, and there is no evidence of whatsoever of “understanding” in microbes.
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    “Communication implies understanding …” oh if you say so.

    Do you always make things up as you go along, kicking over the traces of the case, the experiment, the text, and the reality?

    Don’t misrepresent what Turing said or what I said.

    Your word “understanding” is nowhere in my text or his.

    It is absurd for you to engage in denialist fabrication because you are wrong on an issue.

    Machine intelligence, machine communication, machine language, and machine hermeneutics come to mind.

    As does artificial intelligence.

    Your “understanding” is lacking.

  6. Oro Lee, thanks for the shoe lace links, I also have spent most of my life wrongly tying my shoe laces.

  7. Dredd: Communication implies understanding, and there is no evidence of whatsoever of “understanding” in microbes. Microbes secrete chemicals in response to stimuli; without intent; and no different than a human secreting sweat in response to a warm temperature. Other microbes detect the secretion and involuntary, without cognition, respond like machines to that stimuli.

    Your premise is drivel; there is no “cognition” without neurons. Microbes cannot anticipate the future and make a choice or a bet on outcomes. They do not see or understand each other.

    Dredd says: As Turing said that it “is absurd” to answer questions about cognition as if humanity was the only species to look for in determining whether machines (or anything else) can “think.”

    Turing is right, it would be absurd to consider humans the only thing capable of cognition. But your invocation of Turing “proves too much,” using your logic one could conclude that a rock can think; and that is also absurd, and not Turing’s intent.

    Cognition depends upon brains and neurons. Microbes don’t have them. Microbes don’t think.

  9. Word Press is getting hungry … eating comments.

    I have to continue to endure a winter storm.

    Cheers to all.

  10. Some microbes change from pathogenic/parasitic lifestyles into symbiotic, mutualistic lifestyles:

    Like pretty much all multi-cellular organisms, humans enjoy the benefits of helpful bacteria. (As you may have heard, there are more bacteria in the human body than cells.) These mutualistic microbes live within the body of a larger organism, and, like any good long-term houseguest, help out their hosts, while making a successful life for themselves. It’s a win-win situation for both parties.

    Scientists still don’t understand exactly how these relationships began, however. To find out, a team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside, used protein markers to create a detailed phylogenic tree of life for 405 taxa from the Proteobacteria phylum—a diverse group that includes pathogens such as salmonella as well as both mutualistic and free-living species.

    Those analyses revealed that mutualism in Proteobacteria independently evolved between 34 to 39 times, the researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.The team was a bit surprised to find that this happened so frequently, inferring that evolution apparently views this lifestyle quite favorably.

    Their results also show that mutualism most often arises in species that were originally parasites and pathogens.

    (Microbial Languages: Rehabilitation of the Unseen–2). A very recent paper indicates this is something “that evolution apparently views this lifestyle quite favorably.”

    Why wouldn’t such cognition be favorable to evolution?

    They are not anti-science, ant-machine Luddites after all like way too many humans on board:

    I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms “machine” and “think.” The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words “machine” and “think” are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, “Can machines think?” is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

    (Turing, A.M. (1950). “Computing Machinery and Intelligence“, Mind, 59, 433-460). Dr. Bassler and her team have shown that microbes communicate with their own species, as well as with other microbial species.

    Communication, as with the monkey->man, man->monkey, shows cognition.

    As Turing said that it “is absurd” to answer questions about cognition as if humanity was the only species to look for in determining whether machines (or anything else) can “think.”

    It is not yet known whether the molecular machines within microbes think independently, or whether it requires a networking arrangement to do so.

    But it is so.

  11. Dredd says: Like Tony C said, a lot of our understanding about the world is in need of repair when it comes to destroying them because of our lingering ignorance or our fears.

    Do not misrepresent what I have said; I have no qualms whatsoever with killing microbes or any single celled animals, mechanisms or anything else.

    100% of our cognition is neuron based, and microbes have none. Zero cognition. They have, at best, randomized responses to stimuli that, like evolution itself (also zero cognition), can stumble into solutions of problems, which are not recognized as problems, but are just a lack of resources (like food) that are mechanically converted into stimuli.

    I was talking about conscious, thinking, self-aware animals. Microbes do not qualify. Even ants, fleas, flies, and cockroaches do not qualify. There is no moral imperative in my book to not kill such things, and in fact a moral imperative to kill some of them before they cause harm — to a conscious, thinking, self-aware animal.

  14. “There is growing evidence of various species using tools – a task once thought to distinguish humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.” – JT

    Indeed, even at the microbe level where at some point in some contexts it is difficult to tell plant from animal.

    An interesting paper came out recently explaining how a team had discovered that pathogens and parasites, the ones that cause disease and/or death, convert from that lifestyle into symbiotic, mutualistic lifestyle that helps their host in various ways.

    Like Tony C said, a lot of our understanding about the world is in need of repair when it comes to destroying them because of our lingering ignorance or our fears.

    Microbial scientists are using the words “molecular machine” to describe a lot of things we once thought were “alive”, like DNA and “organelles” which are now called, as I said machines.

    So even the smallest life forms use “tools” but that is not to say there is any sort of “consciousness” involved.

    About 98% of human cognition is unconscious, 2% is conscious (Dr. George Lakoff, et. al.), so we might be accurate to say the smallest life forms have “cognition” but not conscious cognition:, in the sense that the use “molecular machines” to do genetic processing, etc: 

    The ribosome … is a large and complex molecular machine, found within all living cells, that serves as the primary site of biological protein synthesis (translation).
    …
    “We took this approach because so many RNAs are rapidly destroyed soon after they are made, and this makes them hard to detect,” Pugh said. “So rather than look for the RNA product of transcription we looked for the ‘initiation machine‘ that makes the RNA. This machine assembles RNA polymerase, which goes on to make RNA, which goes on to make a protein.” Pugh added that he and Venters were stunned to find 160,000 of these “initiation machines,” because humans only have about 30,000 genes. “This finding is even more remarkable, given that fewer than 10,000 of these machines actually were found right at the site of genes. Since most genes are turned off in cells, it is understandable why they are typically devoid of the initiation machinery.”

    The remaining 150,000 initiation machines — those Pugh and Venters did not find right at genes — remained somewhat mysterious.
    …
    Dr Clarke said: “There are a lot of fundamental questions about the origins of life and many people think they are questions about biology. But for life to have evolved, you have to have a moment when non-living things become living – everything up to that point is chemistry.”
    …
    “Our cells, and the cells of all organisms, are composed of molecular machines. These machines are built of component parts, each of which contributes a partial function or structural element to the machine. How such sophisticated, multi-component machines could evolve has been somewhat mysterious, and highly controversial.” Professor Lithgow said.
    …
    Many cellular processes are carried out by molecular ‘machines’ — assemblies of multiple differentiated proteins that physically interact to execute biological functions … Our experiments show that increased complexity in an essential molecular machine evolved because of simple, high-probability evolutionary processes, without the apparent evolution of novel functions. They point to a plausible mechanism for the evolution of complexity in other multi-paralogue protein complexes.
    …
    The most complex molecular machines are found within cells.
    …
    Writing in the journal PLoS Pathogens, the team from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences show how they studied the molecular machine known as the ‘type II bacterial secretion system’, which is responsible for delivering potent toxins from bacteria such as enterotoxigenic E. coli and Vibrio cholerae into an infected individual.

    Professor Richard Pickersgill, who led the research, said: “Bacterial secretion systems deliver disease causing toxins into host tissue. If we can understand how these machines work, then we can work out how it they might be stopped.”

    (Putting A Face On Machine Mutation – 4). Very interesting stuff.

  15. Monkeys are darn near human. Or vice versa. The best demonstration was the monkey show at the Saint Louis Zoo.

  19. I think if we saw a two-year old human doing that, we wouldn’t hesitate to characterize it as “teaching” behavior or “command” behavior (crush these leaves! No, that’s a crappy job, do it right!).

    Pre-conceived and false assumptions about the mental capabilities of conscious, thinking, self-aware animals is a form of propaganda that helps perpetuate cruel mistreatment of them, on the grounds they aren’t like us when it comes to fear, pain, depression, anxiety, or happiness, friendship, caring and love of others.

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