Young Gorillas Observed Dismantling Poacher Snares

Re:Young Gorillas Observed Dismantling Poacher Snares by dmitriy_ko on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @02:43AM (#4284622)

Exactly. We and gorillas share much more behavior than most realize. Everything from desire for friendship and love to desire for social status and achievement work pretty much EXACTLY the same. A book which made me realize this is "Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World". Title seems a bit unrelated to this topic, but this book basically shows that pretty much all our motivations are inherited from our great ape ancestors (and are shared by chimps – out closest living specie in terms of behavior).

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Re:Young Gorillas Observed Dismantling Poacher Snares by rimantas on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @08:29AM (#4285360)

  > Everything from desire for friendship and love to desire
  > for social status and achievement work pretty much
  > EXACTLY the same

And you know this how? Some gorilla told you?

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Re:Young Gorillas Observed Dismantling Poacher Snares by krschultz on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @10:03AM (#4285699)

Maybe if you read the book he mentioned you would find out the answer to your question.

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Re:Young Gorillas Observed Dismantling Poacher Snares by a_bonobo on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @07:08PM (#4288540)

These are just hints to similar behaviour, _no definite proof_ is available and impossible to obtain.

Which is why behavioural biologists don't even go down that path of "humanizing" animals - all they do is link certain behaviour to certain actions (famous example: anal-sniffing as sexual behaviour in guinea-pigs or dogs). Looking at animals through the "human glass" can lead to some insights, but can certainly lead to terribly wrong results, too:

It's like overfitting a statistical model, you'll get noise where you expect results.

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