I've seen monkey madness before. In the middle of New York City. It was not a pretty sight.
A cool fall or spring day, about 1955, at the Central Park Zoo. Billy Chase, my fifth-grade classmate representing the Humans (the decided favorite--a fit and aggressive ten years of age--to defeat the mere Chimpanezee representative he mocked, trapped inside an iron-barred cage).
I had just spotted the small glint of meanness, or at least of mischief, in Billy's eye, as his lucky gaze dropped to the perfect weapon..... Just as quickly, he bent to retrieve it, performing a characteristic twist known well by those deft at capitalizing on a teacher's momentary distraction--particularly likely on a class trip (even with a group of class-mothers in tow.)
All was clear. Shhh!!! Billy's gaze, complete with the requisite lear, returned to the monkey-in-the-cage (with imaginary bullseye superimposed) in what had now become, in Billy's mind I am sure, a firing range. I didn't really want to see the result. It was too mean....With a momentary double-check from the corner of his eye, his missile was stealthily launched at his unspecting prey. Was a head shot out of the question? A body-blow, anything to make him hop!!!! Near his feet, even!!!! Bring him to his knees!!!Expertly launched, the projectile sailed quietly between the bars, without interference, towards the helpless "Menkey" (pronunciation preferred by Peter Sellers) trapped within the vertical black bars.....
On that day, though, the monkey was more than he appeared to be--in either Billy's mind or mine. He saw it coming! Was not supposed to be that way! Omnisciently, and quietly, the little figure dodged deftly to his left, catching the assault from the corner of his eye, and in fact calmly blocking the incoming banana-piece with his large hand, letting if fall harmlessly to the cage floor, skin intact. It should have ended there....
A disappointed Billy could do no more than check again for teacher glances, and stare about for another stray loaded banana-shell with which to spoil this creature's witless day. Billy thought no further than that....
It happened so fast! Billy, at that micro-second of a moment, was far closer to a banana than the realized. At precisely the moment that Billy's eyes furtively glanced now in the direction of his trapped quarry--at precisely a milli-second after Billy's eyes, instead of spying the helpless monkey, may have vaguely recognized a large moving yellow blob catapulting through the bars--Billy's young cranium experienced a shock wave unlike any I had seen before, radiating outward from a spot exactly between Billy's eyes, sufficient to split the banana and release its mother-load onto the furthest locations of Billy's face. It was the speed and absolute accuracy, at 20 paces, that was so convincing. In the parlance of the gridiron, this was no Y.A.Title wobbly pass, or Norm Van Brocklin looping bomb; this was a Johnny Unitas bullet straight to its target. One thing to get it between the bars at that distance, another thing to achieve a perfectly timed end-over-end hit at that range. I knew in a moment it was not an accident. Absolute accuracy never is. Nor was the evident glee of the monkey-now-turned-adversary, wildly jumping behind his protective bars, eyes and lips bulging at young Billy, in triumph and derision..... I knew, then, the monkey was not what I previously thought he was.
To complete the perfect justice of this divine moment, which only I saw, Billy's lividly-angry retrieval and preparations for final relaunch of the spent banana fragment had, this time, caught the eyes of the teacher herself. "Don't you dare!!!!!!" I looked at the monkey quickly, and saw what I saw.... He knew!!! He planned it all....in an instant! It was his world laughing at us!!! I will never forget that moment....
Billy, for his part, could barely fumble for a few words that could explain even approximately that the little guy behind the cage bars was far more devious than he appeared. "Billy! Really! You're such a story-teller!" the teacher, Miss Arp, huffed in disdain; not a chimp but a little ____..... Well, Billy never got to those words. He was hauled off to the front of the line, which the girls seemed to prefer, to experience New York City at the teacher's side for the rest of the day, and probably remembering throughout the back-flips and gestures of the little guy in the cage. This is not what I had seen in the home movies, or even the Tarzan movies!!!
I have never forgotten Billy, nor his adversarial monkey-turned-hood. Billy lurched still meaner in a few years, and maybe the showdown in Central Park had a little something to do with that. It is like sharing a secret no one else knows. Billy seemed made to persecute the benign; that the benign should suddenly erupt into something else could turn someone's world upside down. They are not what they appear to be. Not the same as the stereotyped, gummy-toothed cut-ups ambling peacefully across the screens of countless short movies in the 1940s and 1950's.
Recently, though, a more realistic image has been emerging! Primarily from a couple of seriously murderous chimpanzee gang attacks on clueless humans.
Secondarily, though, the boys (and girls) at Harvard University have gotten into it, conducting an elaborate study into the basis of cognition and morality in the mind of the monkey. At least Dr. Marc Hauser has, according to the NYT (August 21). He even wrote a "well-received" book from his work in 2006, "Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong." Apparently, some of his students along the way thought a little too much was attributed to the timing of a monkeys continuing stare at a display despite the audible assault of a suddenly-emitted sound. Is that necessarily reflection? Thought? And now a Harvard faculty committee has shared similar concerns with the public, theirs mainly about "data acquisition, data analysis, data retention" and some other things. Data not gonna be the last of the news for the study either. Seems the United States attorney's office for the District of Massachusetts, according to the Dean of the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences, has taken an interest in several (8) instances of suspected scientific misconduct in the case.
Now, I know better, of course, because I still remember that little gremlin in Central Park. I still know these guys are a lot different than we think they are, and that they have a lot more going on upstairs. Maybe the bars are there because they want them there.... I'm just not sure you can find that out in a lab, attributing great things to zoned-in or zoned-out moments. Besides, the whole episode reminds me of a few other instances of purported applied-scientfic misconduct.
The first instance reaches back to a 1929 book by a famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Somoa. Turns out, according to the accounts of more than one investigator, Ms. Mead faked her entire account of promiscuous but very happy young women growing up in Somoa, in order to successfully convince society that traditional sexual mores were counterproductive. (See especially, http://jewishphilosopher.blogspot.com/2010/08/evolutionary-morality.html) Her effort proved quite successful, to judge by the behavior of succeeding American generations, Harvard not excluded according to recent reports. Turns out the nymphets of Somoa were anything but that, sharing in the values of chastity followed by the Western World at that time.
And then we have the global warming scientific scandal, in which Scandinavian scientists, at the heart of the global warming interpretation, exchanged emails that essentially admitted to a desire to smother contrary evidence. Even in the last few days, the New York Times published an article that summarized the general feeling of the scientific community that both the extreme heat of this summer AND the deep snows of this past winter can be explained by global warming--due to the added moisture absorbed by a warm atmosphere. (The article, and apparently the scientists, neglected to explain the extremely low temperatures of the past winter, AND neglected to mention the story from other sources this spring predicting several summers of very hot weather until 2014 based on increased sun flare activity just starting up!)
None of this should be any surprise. It is difficult to get the diverse data and experience of this life to fit into theories, and one alternative is to ignore or lose some of the data. Richard Hofstadter (The Age of Reform; The American Political Tradition), a highly thought-provoking historian in his day, was well-known for the sloppiness and inaccuracy of some of his footnotes, as I recall. Another, maybe Margaret Mead's choice, is to just make most of it up.....Not to say that either of those happened at Harvard. But one would think that there might be a little more scrutiny of study design and methodology at the outset, and, if I could say it, a little more respect for Monkey capabilities. It seems a little stilted to attribute great meaning to the unperturbed staring of monkeys focused on displays, when they seem capable of so much more observable behavior. (Those who stare the longest could, afterall, just be the most spaced-out.) Better to look for something more obvious and real-world. Look for a few Monkey-world ring-leaders capable of leading a pack, or at least exacting sweet revenge between-the-eyes at 25 paces.
My guess is that Dr. Marc Hauser is wise to all this. He knows that there's more there (or thinks he does) than we realize. Knows in his heart that they are just like us. But like Billy Chase, he's a little at a loss for the methods to convince everyone else of what he already knows....! Let's remember that Billy had a great reputation for storytelling to impress a target audience, and it would be a real shame if Dr. Hauser becomes famous for the same skill...
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