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”

  2. Two of my comments is still in the “You can’t say that” Word Press censor cue.

    The sensor judges have taken sides.

  3. It is difficult for even microbes to carry on communications with censors disrupting the messaging:

    The term ‘‘cognition’’ usually refers to human mental functions associated with capacities such as the use of semantic and pragmatic levels of language, perceiving self vs. non-self, association with group identity and perceiving individual and group goals. It is now realized that bacteria facilitate surprising collective functions. They can develop collective memory, use and generate common knowledge, develop group chemical identity, distinguish the chemical identity of other colonies in their environment or even higher organisms, learn from experience to improve their collective state and more.

    These are the bacteria faculties we refer to when using the term fundamental elements of cognition. We emphasize that these features should not be confused with the unique, human level of symbolic cognition. We do not imply that bacteria possess human capabilities but that fundamental elements of cognition can also be found in bacteria. From a practical perspective, this realization can shed light on the evolution of cognition and on the most basic requirement for its facilitation in all organisms.

    (Seeking the foundations of cognition in bacteria, E. Ben Jacob et al. / Physica A 359 (2006) 495–524).

  4. Dredd: Your belief in machine intelligence is noted … perhaps a machine religion is also evolving?

    Well, that is why you need to distinguish between “intelligence” and other cognitive functions like “belief” in a false model of reality.

    Which of course you are too lazy to do, all your fun is in conflating all these cognitive functions as being equivalent and monolithic; e.g. if “communication” is present then “cognition” is present, if “intelligence” is present then “consciousness” is present or “religion” is possible, etc. I think you are resistant to rigor because laziness lets you can come to false conclusions to entertain yourself, and which you think entertain others but really do not. Ultimately you are just a lazy hack hungry for attention without having to do any real work or produce anything more than some opinions. Too bad for you, not many give a crap about your opinions, because they are always just lazy work, and that is a field with much too much competition to stand out.

  5. Where’s lucky Larry’s comment….. I seemed to have missed it….. Was it really that offensive? He’s said more…..stuff which is really offensive…. But I did think that he was funny on the antifreeze thread….

  6. One of my comment is still in the “You can’t say that” Word Press censor cue.

    Will post it again later if it is “lost” in the censor space.

  7. Tony C. 1, December 6, 2013 at 4:43 pm

    Dredd: I believe in machine intelligence; … And bacteria are not even close.
    ==========================
    Can machines have sex and arranged marriages for sex like microbes (bacteria)?

    That is quite close isn’t it?

    Your belief in machine intelligence is noted … perhaps a machine religion is also evolving?

  8. Word Press Censors are preventing me from communicating.

    You know, their lack of understanding.

    They accepted my message to pdm but one is still in the naughty folder.

    Someone use the force on them again.

    And thanks, once again, to the Jedi who freed the other messages up-thread for me.

  9. pdm 1, December 6, 2013 at 8:17 pm

    GBloggers,

    Have you read luckylarry’s most recent post? (@ 4:04) Free speech and all that, but now he is writing sex scenes.
    …
    ==============================
    I have not read his comments, nor do I intend to.

    But be warned that if you are sensitive to microbial sex, the following is from the scientific paper I have been quoting from up-thread.

    It is only to show that Tony C is bereft of understanding modern science concerning microbial cognition, not to TTTitilate.

    The scientists use the word “conjugation” rather than you-know-what because their purpose, like me, is only to inform the uninformed:

    Frequently, such contextual information is directly transferred by conjugation following chemical courtship played by the potential partners: bacteria resistant to antibiotics emit chemical signals to announce this fact. Bacteria in need of that information, upon receiving the signal, emit pheromone-like peptides to declare their willingness to mate.

    Sometimes, the decision to mate is followed by exchange of competence factors (peptides). This pre-conjugation communication modifies the membrane of the partner cell into a penetrable state needed for conjugation.

    [page 507]

    (Seeking the foundations of cognition in bacteria, E. Ben Jacob et al. / Physica A 359 (2006) 495–524, emphasis added). There is little wonder that Tony C intimated that he had no qualms at all about destroying these microbes.

    They are so filthy with all that sex stuff they do … I mean they have arraigned marriages for heaven sake just to have sex.

    Nasty.

    Kill ’em all Tony is gonna get you mangy waskals.

  10. Word Press Censors are preventing me from communicating.

    You know, their lack of understanding.

    Someone use the force on them again.

    And thanks to the Jedi who freed the other messages up-thread for me.

  12. More on the cognition of microbes from the paper I cited up-thread:

    Collectively, bacteria can glean relevant latent information from the complex environment and from other organisms, interpret the information in an existential ‘‘meaningful’’ way, develop common knowledge, and learn from past experience.

    For that each bacterium has intricate intra-cellular signaling mechanisms involving signal transduction networks [27] and genetic language [28]. These mechanisms are part of the intra-cellular functional complexity which is used to generate intrinsic meaning for contextual interpretations of the chemical messages and for formulating appropriate complex responses.

    Biochemical messages are also used in bacterial cell–cell talk to exchange meaningful information across colonies of different species, and also with other organisms [38].
    …
    This ability to form cooperative collectives is an evolutionary novelty: New functional features that support the foundation of cognition appear at every level of colonial self-organization—from the internal cellular gel to the growth of the colony as a whole—thus facilitating a high level of functional complexity. To form such multi-cellular super-organisms, the respective units (the individual bacteria) assume newly co-generated traits and faculties that are not explicitly stored in the genetic information of the individuals. For example, bacteria cannot genetically store all the relevant information required for creating the colonial patterns. In the new scenario, they need not, since the required contextual information is cooperatively generated by using internally stored information and information gleaned from the environment. Thus, the bacteria only require genetically stored information on how to produce perceptive faculties and how these capabilities along with the guidelines for using them may be employed to generate new knowledge as required. The bacteria use their intra-cellular flexibility, involving signal transduction networks and genomic plasticity, to collectively create the colony and maintain its integrity by sharing interpretations of chemical cues and exchanging meaning-bearing chemical messages. The ensuing dialogues are nothing less than meaning-based communication [4,7,13,39–46], which allows the colony purposeful alteration of structure and decision-making. These features represent primordial social intelligence and fundamental (primitive) elements of cognition [47–56].

    [pages 506-507]

    (Seeking the foundations of cognition in bacteria, E. Ben Jacob et al. / Physica A 359 (2006) 495–524).

  13. GBloggers,

    Have you read luckylarry’s most recent post? (@ 4:04) Free speech and all that, but now he is writing sex scenes. Please get this guy outta here.

  15. Hey TTT, more stuff for the Word Press tards:

    In light of these novel findings and their plausible interpretation, Schrodinger’s ontogenetic dilemma is revisited. We propose that, unlike the widely accepted view, the current dogma in biology does not provide a satisfactory answer to the ontogenetic dilemma. The rapid progress in the micro-level studies in biology seems to lead to the false perception that a comprehensive understanding of genomic function is available and that only minor details are missing. But from the perspective of physics, basic genomic principles seem missing. Biology lacks a theory of non-equilibrium, which might explain self-organization in open systems. Indeed, contemporary physics calculates the efficiency of a thermodynamic machine if it functions infinitely slowly, but not when it operates at a given finite rate. But we have no idea even how to describe the dynamics of an open system whose composition changes according to internal information, let alone the underlying principles involved.
    …
    The lac case simply serves to illustrate what we mean by internal information processing and to justify the notion of ‘‘sniffing’’ food as a cognitive act. A similar sniffing mechanism is used in other cases of bacterial taxis. For example, photosynthesizing bacteria ‘‘sniff’’ light and assess its level to perform phototaxis towards higher intensity. In short, bacteria continuously sense their milieu and store the relevant information and thus exhibit ‘‘cognition’’ by their ability to process information and responding accordingly. From those fundamental sensing faculties, bacterial information processing has evolved communication capabilities that allow the creation of cooperative structures among individuals to form super-organisms [4–15]. An illuminating example of collective sensing is provided by the Myxobacteria that can send foraging parties of advantageous bacteria who can move ahead of the colony. Upon detection of food source they send back the information to the colony, which then expands towards the newly detected food source [9,13].

    (ibid, E. Ben Jacob et al. / Physica A 359 (2006) 495–524). This heresy of these Defendants, as opined by the plaintiff Tony C in his complaint, could be easily countermanded if they would only accept the plaintiffs opinions.

  16. Word Press Censors are preventing me from communicating.

    You know, their lack of understanding.

    Someone use the force on them.

  17. Anyone else want to join the plaintiff Tony C?

    You have to add your name and sign, not wimp out by talking to the ethos.

    The Defendant Modern Scientists are preparing their Answer.

    It will be composed of, among other things, research science such as:

    We then propose that by acting together, bacteria can perform this most elementary cognitive function more efficiently as can be illustrated by their cooperative behavior (colonial or inter-cellular self-organization). As a member of a complex superorganism — the colony — each unit (bacteria) must possess the ability to sense and communicate with the other units comprising the collective and perform its task within a distribution of tasks. Bacterial communication thus entails collective sensing and cooperativity. The fundamental (primitive) elements of cognition in such systems include interpretation of (chemical) messages, distinction between internal and external information, and some self vs., non-self distinction (peers and cheaters).

    (Seeking the foundations of cognition in bacteria, emphasis added). These guys (Eshel Ben Jacoba,b,c,Ã, Yoash Shapiraa, Alfred I. Tauberd, School of Physics and Astronomy, Raymond & Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel Max-Planck-Institute fur, Physik Komplexer Systema, Nothenitzer Strase 38, Dresden 01187, Germany The Center for Theoretical and Biological Physics, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA, Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA) will fully respond to accusations of their lack of reading comprehension, etc.

    Step up or sit down, don’t monkey around.

    Any genes attempting to worm in will be litigated in motion practice.

  18. Dredd: I believe in machine intelligence; I’ve actually done work in that arena, and have more in progress. I have done University presentations to groups of medical researchers and neurologists on the use of genetic algorithms.

    But you have to be careful about words here; the definitions are still loose, but there is a valid distinction between “intelligence,” “consciousness”, “understanding,” and even “thought.”

    Generalized learning algorithms can find patterns in empirical data, and make better-than-chance predictions on outcomes and much other stuff. Heck, they can invent new stuff that works. But intelligence is not “consciousness,” and it is hard to describe what they do as “thought” or “understanding.”

    Not to say they couldn’t have “thought” or “understanding” or be conscious; I just do not think such algorithms have been devised that are worthy of those designations. It isn’t, thus far, cognition, in my view. And bacteria are not even close.

  20. Machine Intelligence Research Institute

    In The Court of Pubic Opinion
    =================================
    Tony C.

    vs.

    All Scientists
    Who Deign to
    Disagree With
    My Science
    =================================

    COMES NOW Tony C, a.k.a. Tonie Da Tigah, and alleges and avers as follows:

    1) Modern Scientists are beginning to disagree with my august and sovereign opinion about intelligence, understanding, communication, and other things related to the cognition, understanding, and thinking of non-human entities.

    2) I am superior to them because I believe with my whole heart.

    3) They are violating what I learned in TBSOE (the best schools on Earth).

    4) Wherefore, I beg PRAY like no body’s business as follows:

    a) The court grant me a much needed victory,
    b) the court sanction scientists who disagree with my sacred opinion,
    c) the court make them stop calling me opinionated.

    PRAYERFULLY submitted this EVERYDAY, EVERYMONTH, 1602.

    TTT (Tonie Thee Tig)

    /s/
    ———————————–
    TTT

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