When I read the headline in the New York Times 'Some Monkeys Use Stone Tools for Pleasure, Study Suggests' I came to a quick realisation about the way I think about the monkeys. Firstly, I thought 'how can the monkeys enjoy anything with the world the way it is?' and then I realised, 'the monkeys don't know how the world is', and then I thought 'well, I know how the world is, and I can still enjoy things' although not stone tools, but that extra element of the reality just occurred to me. Nevertheless I think somehow the monkeys might be smarter than me - assuming they would not enjoy things if they knew how the world was.
The article continues:
Scientists had previously observed that these macaques frequently handle stones, with what appears to be no obvious purpose. The monkeys might clack the stones together in their hands, for instance, or pick them up and drop them over and over again.
“It’s some sort of playful manipulation, in which there doesn’t seem to be an apparent function...”
I wish 'we' didn't continue to regard monkeys as providing some key to 'our' behaviour. It's as dim as that life on other planets thing. We find out about 'ourselves' by looking to ourselves and what we do, not by looking at species we are related to but which are obviously just as likely to have developed beyond our common ancestor as we have. Anyway, the NYT article is getting off on the idea that the macaques were masturbating with the stone tools (I have to say, they draw a long bow with this) and to me (paradoxically, given what I just said above) the fact that a major newspaper thinks that's news says more about the human race than any macaque. The article goes on to suggest that the macaques being studied in this case were fed by humans all day and didn't have to do much else with their hands anyway, implying that they were somehow decadent. No-one at the NYT seemed to correlate this scenario with the reality of NYT readers' interest in masturbatory habits of macaques.
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